It's the Small Things | Sundays
I hate Sundays, even though I’m always waiting for them. A Sunday is like the beginning of an end. Like sunsets. The Sundays that are particularly beautiful – like today – are particularly poignant. Like a dream of something lost that’s arrived to remind us it could be there, but it will never last. I managed to get a 20-minute walk before a message from a colleague to meet for work. It burst my bubble. It reminded me about the illusions of Sunday. The whole day is a longing for leisure, a postponement of things to be done while we bask in the sun, daydream about trivia, knowing well that straw hats and brunches are only a temporary suspension of life.
Don’t get me wrong. I wait for this day to wallow in its grace. In the US once, when I worked in a design store, they told me I couldn’t have Saturday off. Sundays were anyway off. I could pick any day like Thursday as my second day off. They told me I’d soon find out how useful it was to get a day off in the middle of the week. A holiday when everyone else was bustling about was when I could get things done. It felt unseasonal. Like going to pick strawberries with no one else in the field.
That’s it. No one does much on a Sunday if they can help it. It’s as if God gave us permission to actually do nothing except hear the wind in the trees and feel the sun on our backs. My uneasiness grows. I hear crows cawing. The streets are empty. Music plays from a distance. The potti kadai tiffin shops are shut. The yellow dog rolls in the grass. My cat chases squirrels and mynahs. It gets more and more unreal.
My walk, yes. There are some parts of the shola that are still the native forest. I see creepers strung across branches, weaving a verdant tapestry. There are many reasons for the name of my hilltown. Kodaikanal could come from Kodi meaning creeper and kaanal which means forest, together meaning “forest of creepers”. Kaanal also means mirage and Kodai also refers to summer. Summer mirage. The forest doesn’t have Sundays.
NID designer and Art Institute of Chicago grad Sujatha Shankar Kumar turned to writing and looked back only to write about design, the arts and environment.
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