Your name: Sumana Roy
You are: an aunt to Tuku and Tuki; writes occasionally.
You can be found at: https://sumanaroy.co.in/ (This was last updated around the time I was born, or learnt to crawl.)
Your rituals: Every morning I wake up not wanting to wake up. Sleep is a quilt – it arranges itself around me, taking my shape. The day is too tight-fitting – I long to come out of it. During the teaching semesters I am dragged out of bed by nervousness – there must be something I have not done, something I haven’t managed to finish on time. Anxiety is a Pied Piper on teaching days – things piled on top of the other, disorderly, the head and hair and the bed a mess.
There are also other days – they are few, but they exist, when I can wake up late, later than everyone around me: the family, the birds and earthworms, and also my phone, which auto-starts after 10 am. On such a day, I wake up and text my friend: ‘I just woke up’. He perhaps hears it in the tone of an achievement, and his reply often is – ‘Well done!’ Then the rest follows: brushing, breakfasting, chatting about nothing, and then an urgent feeling of uselessness. The day’s half-gone, but here I am.
Sweet lime juice and a book on Indian art – the morning climbs over the wall. It is noon. I must write, I must write – not because it’s a religion, but because I must put the thoughts collected through the night somewhere. I am a collector. And so I begin writing. If I’m in Sonipat, where I teach and live during the semester, I get up from writing and cook myself a quick lunch. It is always a rice dish – with dal and vegetables, or leftover rice turned into fried rice with vegetables and egg, occasionally with some shrimps. I often eat in bed, reading on my laptop or writing as I read. If I’m in Siliguri, which is where I always want to be, Sapna Didi will cook lunch for us and call me – ‘The food is getting cold. Hurry up, get into the bathroom …’
I try to continue writing after lunch, often giving it up for reading. I mostly read poems and essays. I speak to my friend if we are both free to talk. We mostly talk nonsense, though we say it in the most grown-up and serious manner. I will, in between writing something, inevitably open a new document and begin writing something unrelated there. It is perhaps a version of taking a break from the work at hand. That is why I am writing more than one thing at any given point of time. And so with books that I read.
It is evening and the plants need to be watered. This takes nearly an hour, and before we eat an evening snack, I take a shower. Then I climb to the room on the second floor, close to the terrace. This is where I spend my evenings when I’m at home. I try to write, though in between I will walk to the fridge and hunt for a piece of old chocolate. I will also fill my water bottle even though I will forget to drink from it. Before the dinner of rice and fish curry, I speak to my mother on the phone, and to my nephew and niece.
I visit them every few days, and those are the days when I do nothing. I watch them play and eat and bathe and I feel alive again. Though I do not write a word on my laptop or notebook, it is possible that I write the most on those days.
I never forget to look at the sky. Like it, my life is the same every day, even though its colour might look different from the outside.