The Internet Personified: My slam book!!

BFF 4EVA (and maybe the only newsletter you'll read today not about the US election.)

EDITOR’S NOTE: I wrote the subtitle to this not realising that Trump had already almost won (and perhaps will have by the time you read this), and a few words here of sympathy for citizens of the United States but also for the rest of us. What a world we’re in, eh? What a world. The only way out is through.

I wanted to dash off a quick thing before I go off tomorrow today (I keep doing this) on my European vacation with my mother. (Rome, Vienna.) An autumn holiday seems so indulgent somehow, everyone back at work, the skies are grey, the fog rolls in and there you (we) are, wandering around the Colosseum. However, maybe it’s not as indulgent as I think, after all, Diwali was last week so the Indians are out and about, over here in Germany, schools had an autumn break so the kids have been free for two weeks. November is the new July, when no one wants to go to Rome because it’s too hot. (“No one” meaning the Northern Europeans, amongst whom I live, like a mynah bird in a Banbury goose enclosure.) But the problem with fall holidays is that it’s very hard to pack appropriately when you have planned for two different cities with two different climates. I read about this thing called the 5-4-3-2-1 method of packing, have you heard of it? Basically, you do 5 tops, 4 pants, 3 dresses and so on, tweaking as you see fit. I’ve found it very useful in the decision making process, so if I’m saying five tops, I don’t have to stress about also taking a cute little velvet blazer or a fringed cardigan. Actually, I’m being very minimalist this entire holiday and will probably be sick of my own wardrobe by the time I return but I’m also counting on going to second hand shops so probably not that minimalist on my return. Another light packing thing I’m doing is not carrying my laptop which is why this quick letter today, but also because I have a bunch of new subscribers (hiiiii, welcome to my weird thing!) and I had no ideas so I thought I’d do a slam book page.

Do you remember slam books? They were huge in the schools I went to, first at age 13 and then a revival at age 17. Basically, you had these pretty books with empty pages (Archie’s Gallery used to make them and Archie’s Gallery deserves a whole newsletter of its own, but till I write it, here’s a small essay I did on 90s music which sort of covers it), lines with categories like “favourite song” or “what I did last summer.” You got your friends to fill it in, and in return, you filled in theirs. Like autograph albums, which also we had briefly. Then at age 17, people started doing it again (different school though), but this time they had homemade books, and for some reason, everyone seemed to include “what I think about you” as a category, as in what you, the writer, thought about the person whose book it was. A dangerous little game, if you ask me, but everyone was very nice and polite, and I only have glowing reviews in my own slam book at the time.

So here’s a self slam book, filled out and redone for the benefit of new readers, yes, but also maybe some (un)pressing questions you might have had about me.

EVEN THE WAKEFIELD TWINS were doing it, so not so dorky.

Where I Was Born: Look, I have a Wikipedia page which is filled with terrible information and the problem with this is that I can’t personally correct it because apparently that’s bad practise so I’m only including this category so whoever does that sort of thing can fix it. (It’s not nice because people keep quoting this page at literary festivals and I can hear it coming a mile off. “Her first book, a semi-autobiographical attempt” NO. My first book was You Are Here. It is FICTION. As are ALL my books.)

ANYWAY. I was born in Hyderabad. Apparently it took so long for me to emerge into this world and after all this work I was a daughter (and my parents’ first) (and last), that they didn’t tell either parent what gender I was till much later. My dad had been telegrammed, when he called, they said cautiously that “mother and baby” were well, my mother kept asking after me but they’d just say “it’s fine, lie back, it’s going to be okay” and other alarming things like that, so naturally, she thought there was something terribly wrong with me (apart from my gender, of course) so by the time we were introduced, I was extremely anticipated. (I know, but people were weird about daughters in the early 80s and still, to some extent, now. They didn’t want my mother to do herself an injury or my father to be extremely disappointed. As luck would have it, they totally wanted a girl so I never grew up thinking of myself as anything less than.)

Where I Grew Up: Delhi, the winter I made my way into this world, was extremely cold and I, a fragile, three-week old infant took one sniff of that smoggy, smokey air and became initiated into the long list of people “from” Delhi. I don’t miss it, but it still makes me indignant when people make faces about the city. Like sure, it’s polluted and there’s crime and so on, but it’s also where I grew up, and while I accept the shitty things about the city, it made me this person I am today. It’s easy for me to live in any large city around the world, I think, because of my Delhi training. (OK, sometimes I miss it.)

Star, Moon, Rising: Look, I don’t believe in any of this except when I’m feeling very unsure of myself and/or my circumstances and since I’ve never been a believer in god/s or any sort of religion, I guess I could be zodiac agnostic. (Of COURSE I wrote a whole thing about my adolescent experiments with the strange and unknown.)

Anyway, should you believe in all of this and should it reveal more about me as is the point of this exercise, I am Sagittarius sun, Cancer moon and Libra rising. (Astroheads have told me there’s a lot of contradiction in there, but to quote Walt Whitman:

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

My Writing Practice: This is probably not a slam book category, but people ask and so I’m here to break the news that I have no set practice. There’s no magic hour or a ritual I can tell you like “I get up at the same time every morning and eat a hardboiled egg and then work till it’s lunch time.” I wish I did. Instead, I think about my book almost all the time. Things strike me, one-off ideas or little nuggets I’m gathering and in thinking about it, my characters grow more real until they’re almost breathing down my neck in their hurry to emerge and yet, the plot is slow and painstaking and takes me ages to come up with. Characters are easy for me, you see, and plotting is hard. I aim for a certain amount of words a day (1000 at the moment) and I have a deadline I’m working towards but conditions have to be right so I won’t be writing on holiday for instance, but when I return. Meanwhile I keep thinking about my main character and he keeps becoming realer and realer, so we are not very far away from each other, you see, even if I don’t extend his story for a few more weeks.

Favourite Colour: Have you ever noticed that people stop asking you your favourite colour around the time you’re ten or eleven? I mean, one day it’s the most important question in the world, kingdoms will topple if you don’t immediately know your favourite colour within ten seconds. [This being said, one of the questions the German embassy in Delhi asked me to test my German was “what is your favourite colour?” and I picked green.]

When I was a child, we had a rhyme for the primary colours:

Yellow yellow, dirty fellow.

Red, red, susu*¹ in the bed.

Blue, blue, I love you.

Choosing one of these colours marked you as a person who either was a dirty fellow (ew), or wet your bed (ditto) and you didn’t want sappy blue because who wanted to be an “I love you”? So I picked purple, a lovely royal colour that nothing rhymes with. I continue to think of purple as my favourite colour, but when it boils down to it, perhaps its red (the colour I buy most when I’m shopping), or orange (a lovely autumnal glow which looks so nice against brown skin) or green (who doesn’t love green tiles and mugs and a cool pond-like house wherever you look?)

Later when I was in boarding school, we were divided into houses (yes, very much like Hogwarts) and as luck would have it, my house colour was purple! So it stayed in my mind as my favourite colour through my teens and early adulthood.

Ugh I am running out of time and so can’t finish this as detailed as I would like. Rapid fire then:

The thing I like most about living in Berlin: How it seems to be a city full of people who don’t fit in and who somehow find community amongst each other.

The thing I like least about living in Berlin: Sometimes it’s very dark and people are mean because it’s dark and they can’t seem to find any inner resources which annoys me.

This is also a great place to add a favourite poem.

On that note, I must go wash my hair. Please add your own slam book entries under mine, maybe we can make this a thing! (Things I enjoy: creating small trends.)

Have a great two weeks and see you after I’m back with some travel reports. (Ooooh, exciting!)

xx

m

Who are you? Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan, writer of internet words (and other things) author of eight books (support me by buying a book!) and general city-potter-er.

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1. Pee. Susu is a Hindi word for piss.