Yesterday I felt it. It’s gone today, but didn’t you feel it too? Now I’m working the buttons on my long coat, winding my scarf, cursing the fact that I always must pull my hair out of my scarf, disarraying my brushwork. Do I have what I need? Gloves are primary; then phone, keys, wallet. No purse for groceries—it’s too heavy. Yanking open the door, my shoulders reactively hunch in the cold air. I bend my neck and stamp along the sidewalk, the chill instantly penetrating my limbs. My bones struggle to pull their flesh in closer, but it has nowhere to go. My vertebrae climb to desperate heights. My coat is scant protection against the shivers that originate within.

In the fish shop I peel off my suede gloves, stuff them into my pockets. The dead eyes on ice don’t warm me. I leave with my bag of filets; do I put my gloves back on? I can’t. Text messages to answer. On the pavement, I make typing mistakes with frigid fingers. Thankful to put the phone away and gloves back on, then supreme irritation as a reply beeps. Why am I still walking? Albert Heijn is only two blocks down, but winter cruelly lengthens the sidewalk. I march in line with equally overclad fellow humans. At least my coat isn’t dark like theirs. Inside the market, gloves off, loosen scarf, shrug shoulders to release the tightened muscles. Grocery list? Somewhere in my pocket, past the gloves, past the wallet. Did I bring my keys? Other pocket. Shopping done, I dread reentering the dreary grayness. My skin’s surface had no time to relax away the goosebumps, but it’s the only way home. I cower into the cold again, this time carrying twenty kilos to numb my arms. But yesterday? It was there. I know because it always arrives with a powerful wind. And yesterday, everything was blowing in a patternless frenzy. Yesterday I opened the door, hunched and ready, but immediately straightened my neck. I lifted my chin and looked. It was bright. Not the terrifying, bitter brightness of mid-January. Nay, it is March. The light had a different tone. It reached over the tops of the rowhouses. The wind buffeted my exposed cheeks, but I didn’t hide. Rather I inhaled, permitting the sunshine and the wind to feel their way into my lungs. I untied my scarf. It whipped into the air. My long hair flew with it, tangling and blinding me, a mass of knots, sticking to my lips, my nose, snaring my earrings. And I smiled. Because that wind carried every hope on Earth. It had chlorophyll, and mist, and dirt, and the rumors of birds. I thrust off my gloves, my hands trembling in caution. I strolled down the street, in the energy of the coming spring.

The problem with insomnia is that if I get decent sleep for a month or so, I always begin to believe that I’ve gotten over it. I contentedly close my book and toss it on the floor next to the bed. It thuds. I toss away my reading pillow, and push my five-year-old over. The children share my bed when my husband travels; otherwise the king-sizer is a vast wasteland. I extend my arm to its limit; my fingers grasp the swinging chain of the Tiffany lamp, and I lie back in the darkness. It’s below freezing outside, but here on the top floor, a dry, fuzzy radiator heat gathers into a thick nebula. At the same time, the nearby balcony door sucks in a wrenching chill. Ideal conditions for sleep.

 I stretch my legs, pointing my toes into arrows. I position my arm perfectly, my elbow a right angle, my hand draped on the pillow, pillow tucked between chin and shoulder. Ready to drift into dreams. A mild irritation arises. There’s too much weight on one shoulder, one hip. My legs feel stiff. Plus my kid’s foot is poking me. I thrust away the stray limb and with a silent groan turn my body to the other side. I’m facing the window. Good, there’s more air here anyway. The blanket nest is oppressive so I kick out a foot; cool relief. A new, better arm position, and now I’m comfortable, ready to sleep.

 It took four or five more turns before I realized it, when the slow mental mechanism knocked into the proper slot. It was the realization that I’d been mundanely thinking about everything I did that day, and everything I have to do tomorrow, for at least half an hour. Shit. I should have fallen asleep by now. Insomnia. It’s not a painful condition, that is until you discover it. But this was infuriatingly familiar. Recent. I had insomnia the night before. Now the futility of all my repositioning and comfort-seeking crashes down on me. No amount of blanket-adjustment can ameliorate this. I release my eyelids; they fall on black space, but for narrow streetlight cracks hiding behind the heavy curtain.

 I prop up my knees, gently push the child who has again crept closer, and fume against this injustice. Two nights in a row, while half the world has phased into oblivion. Oh, I know I’ll sleep eventually, enough to squeak out three hours, four if I’m lucky. But it doesn’t matter. There is nothing I can do now to feel good tomorrow. And I’ll still have to bring kids to school, finish a presentation, lead a group of kindergarten Cub Scouts. I will animate my corpse-like exterior with three layers of under-eye concealer and present a smile to all I meet. I know what to do. But suffering doesn’t lessen with precognition.

  My brain isn’t tired. It doesn’t seem to know that it should leave the waking world. It continues telling me its inane list: salient conversations from the day, interspersed with moments from previous days, occasionally switching to reminders about upcoming tasks. I’ve arrived at the last resort. It will mean ending all pretense of sleep, because this next action will rouse me as much as any alarm. I sigh, reach out, and yank the lamp chain. I sit up and check the hour, a perfunctory act. I open my book and try a paragraph. Nothing of interest here. I face the next step with even more reluctance. The last resort’s last resort. I step into my Crocs and drag my stiff skeleton down the twisting stairs, turning on every light as I go. An insult to nighttime. The kitchen pantry is pathetically unappetizing. I’m not even hungry. Any old pack of crackers will do, so I grab them and retreat, snapping off lights to please the eager ghosts in my trail.

 Food, water, book. I rearrange my weary limbs and pull the lamp chain again. I lie in the darkness berating my brain. Then the alarm is ripping me from a sleep only just begun. Morning is here.

As someone who travels a lot, I have frequently noticed a phenomenon, that when I return home, my house does not seem like my house. Everything is where it should be—or rather, where I left it in the now-unremembered hurry out the door—yet nothing feels how it should.

 The most striking change is the home’s transformation in size. ‘Smaller’ is not enough to describe it. The walls and ceiling appear to press inward, my giant strides overtaking each room in mere moments. And the longer one is away, the smaller the house becomes. Have you ever visited a childhood home after a period of several decades? It is nothing more than microscopic, with barely room to stand. Of course you will tell yourself that as a child, you were small, thus making the home artificially spacious, but then you must stop and wonder how your large parents managed, constantly knocking their heads on the ceiling.

 Besides appearing small, my house after a journey also looks bare. And anyone who has entered my home knows it is not in the least bare—the walls are covered in artwork, and every available surface contains statuettes, pottery, plants. Yet after an absence, the walls bark at me with harsh whiteness; the wooden floors yawn, pale and scuffed; the high, curving stairs are a tower of desolation.

 There is another quality about a long-empty house that is visceral more than visual. It is not alive. When the family leaves, it enters a state of dormancy. Lights don’t blink on and off; fires don’t flash in the kitchen; toys don’t scurry happily from their baskets to the floor. There is no shutting of doors nor flowing of water, or music on the radio, or all the atmospheric vibrations initiated by human voices. Of course no heat. A dormant house is always cold, no matter the season. Perhaps the mice stir up a royal gala when we are away, but they never tell.  A dormant house does not allow the homecomer, no matter how weary or transportation-crazed, to find immediate rest in its chilly arms. First it must be resurrected. That’s why I can’t sit down upon entering. The mail has to be gathered from the floor, the suitcases dragged halfway to the bedroom, and the curtains opened. Each room must be visually inspected, including turning on lights, because only by such confirmation can the rooms be reinitiated into existence. I stomp through the halls in my boots (You can’t wear only socks in a dormant house), shattering the building’s repose with my tread. I may turn on the kettle for a cup of tea, or stand (never sit) at the dining table, flipping through the bills. None such activities are essential; they merely fill the time while the house recognizes my presence and eases into wakefulness. Once I’ve made enough bustle and body heat to ensure the home’s living state, I can finally pull off my tight boots, allow my legs to weaken on their way to bed, crawl partially under the blanket, set the alarm for some meaningless future hour, and spin into the comfort of home.

One of the most pleasant things that I find I can do is to sit upon a veranda—well, one veranda in particular. I’ve never actually held claim to my own veranda; I’ve never lived in a house that included one. And believe it or not, I’ve lived for various amounts of time, counting those places in which I resided for at least a couple of months, in nineteen different homes. What matters nevertheless, is that there is a veranda in my life, and though I have only visited this particular veranda-equipped home on three separate excursions, it has become the only place in which, according to the current state of my memory, I have experienced a full suffusion of peace. This veranda is located in the city of Thiruvananthapuram, in the state of Kerala, in the southwest corner of India. It is owned by, and attached to the house of, my parents-in-law, and I stayed in that house on the occasion of my marriage, which was followed by two subsequent visits, one with my first child, and now with both children. But the circumstances of my visits are of no account. It is the architectural and atmospheric surroundings of the veranda which make it the ideal setting for that much sought-after state of tranquility.

             Its inner structure is very much like the house itself, with a tile floor, and white-painted walls and ceiling. But the front of the veranda, ah, there lies its special qualities, for it is railed with a narrow granite counter, at which awaits a row of bare cane chairs, angled backward and high enough to allow one to rest the head, creating exact anatomical conditions to project one’s toes, feet, or the indeed the entire legs onto the granite bar without even one muscle being pulled into an uncomfortable stretch. Ironically, the cane chairs are hard enough, and with the canes spaced out, such that they often press painfully into certain body parts, like my shoulder blades, but without actually impacting the pleasures offered by the veranda. Of course, one could easily retrieve some sort of cushion for the chair, but one of the points of the veranda is that it instills utter bodily laziness, so nothing will impel me to get up for any cushion.

             The view from the veranda is integral to its effects. It is fronted by a row of potted bamboo plants, each one thick and bushy, thereby dually generating a screen, behind which to partially hide, and a lush obstruction of the view, which provides the benefit of not forcing one to visually consume the entirety of the foreground scenery, but rather allow one to peek at the activities on the patio and the road when and as one will. Then there is a further barrier, that between the patio and the road, which adds an additional layer of both personal privacy and circumscription of the view, which, contrary to what one might expect, actually heightens the pleasures of the visual space and its other accompanying stimuli.

             This wall is of grey and pale yellow stone, and topped by a black metal railing, overall encompassing a rich terracotta brick courtyard, all colors that neither soothe nor excite, but, combined with plenty of potted flowers, lend a simple sense of aliveness to the scene. Emerging from the top of the wall, but in actuality growing across the road, one perceives numerous stems of the ubiquitous coconut trees, creating a never-ending, receding mass that vanquishes any notion of a horizon and graces the land of Kerala with its name. The eye further absorbs plenty of other interspersing greenery, from all the other nearly countless fruiting plants and trees: custard apple, papaya, tapioca, black pepper, clove, mango, lychee, and similar spices and tropical eatables that the world values so much. The fronds of the coconuts hang down just into the field of vision, an uneven curtain that breaks through the alternating sun and rain clouds of the warm winter sky.

             Being a relatively quiet neighborhood, the stream of traffic is not constant, but is intermittent enough that each vehicle—whether car, auto-rickshaw, or motorbike—provides its own individuated noise: a quick rumble, a spurting engine, several essential high-pitched horn blasts; although the view of these machines is almost entirely hidden by the wall. At longer intervals of ten minutes or more, a person passes on foot, usually looking straight ahead, moving at the urge of some definite business. At times the pedestrians glance through the railings of either the driving gate or the wall, noticing and marking with surprise my foreign looks, so I offer a smile.

             But what truly gives the veranda its capacity for seemingly unlimited contentment and comfort is the way it builds a sphere of silence and motionlessness, even though one is existing in the very midst of chaotic, energetic, noisy human activity. Outside the gate, the busy life of Keralite people goes on, and I observe it while being largely unobserved. Behind me, between a row of closed and curtained windows, beyond a tightly-fitting screen door, is the house full of family members. At my time of writing, it contains eleven inhabitants, four of which are young, often irascible, boys. The discussions, shouts, and constant movements in the house, while noted, do not touch me, because of some unspoken custom which does not include a lone veranda-person in the fray. Or perhaps, since I am not easily visible through the screen door, my existence is momentarily forgotten.

             The best part about the veranda is that you can do whatever you like out here without explaining it to anyone. You can read. You can write vignettes about verandas. Did I mention you always have a cup of tea? You can jerk around on social media. You can lean back and stare in front of you, with no notion of time nor task, perhaps allowing your eyes to fall closed, while the warm air populates your skin with tiny, detoxifying dots of sweat, and the hum of the ceiling fan, the immeasurable tweeting of birds, and the variegated urban sounds lull you into a stupor. And when it rains? Oh, when it rains! Then the veranda truly becomes a holy ground. Broad sheets of monsoon torrents cover the tropical earth, but you, with your cup of strong tea, become an otherworldly entity, safe and isolated, an ancient animal peering from its cave during some mass extinction event, yet it does not touch you because of some strange, unanalyzed magic. Rain intensifies every aspect of veranda life, from the colors of the flowers in the forecourt, to the all-encompassing silence. At night, the veranda takes on a new, separate vitality. It transforms into a place to which one, along with a select few cheerful relations, once the dinner plates are cleared, escapes, in search of the cool, dark breezes and plenty of alcoholic concoctions. During such episodes, the only endeavor upon which one may focus the attention is the gruesome dissection of the day’s politics. But that’s another story altogether.

I write so I don’t have to feel. Some authors use the page to express or confront their emotions–not me. I always admired people like Stoics, Vulcans, robots, my husband: those for whom an unpleasant feeling is no more than a mere ant crawling on their shoulders, to be quickly dispatched by a careless flick. But I am not so lucky. As the desert seer foretold at my birth, my self would be characterized by sensitivity and intensity–rather inconvenient I think. Yet in writing, I find I can relentlessly load all those feelings onto the backs of my characters. If they suffer through heavy emotions, then I don’t have to. And fictional people are so incredibly good at it. They bear mental and physical discomforts without measure, never even creaking. Now where was I? Oh yes, my poor Queen Roxane is still stuck in the monsoon…