Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan's Blog, page 2

The Internet Personified: Missing

Dearest Mighty Microorganisms,

I left Berlin a few weeks ago around the same time the girl went missing. She had been gone for 48 hours, her friends said, it was very unlike her, especially since she had left her apartment unlocked and her belongings inside. This was on a Facebook group I’d joined but never participated in. The only reason I’m still on Facebook any more is the groups, I belong to so many, and as Twitter and Instagram get more and more boring, the only source of internet drama I have is Facebook Groups, people generally tend to mock and berate more than they help. A recent example:

“Hey, can anyone give me a ride to the airport, I have four bags?”

Followed by: “why can’t you take a taxi?”

“Take the airport train, I’ve done it loads of times carrying my entire house with me.”

And so on. It seems that the lure of FB groups is if you can’t answer a question with yes or no, you must offer unsolicited advice.

So, the missing girl’s poster was posted on the group with a plea from her friend, “We’re worried about her!” the friend said. You see missing posters all over the city, mostly for dogs and cats but sometimes people. It’s surprisingly easy to vanish in this city, especially if you’re young and not used to having complete and absolute freedom with a thriving club subculture and drugs and alcohol available freely. It’s so easy to slip between the cracks. That’s what most people come to the city for—to party their nights away, to stand in line for Berghain and go to fetish clubs and hook up and dance to dirty techno and postpone sleep forever until you haven’t sat down since Friday evening and it’s early Monday morning now, the bored employees are ushering you out and cleaning up around you. A friend visiting told us about how early in the morning he and a few straggling clubbers all spied one sofa placed outside this club for people to rest before they left, and they all clocked it at the same time and each made a rush for it, but they were so shattered after their revelry that they could only move in slow motion, and someone else made it there first.

And so said the comments on the Facebook post. “She’s probably just out partying,” said many people dismissively, “She forgot her phone at home and won’t make contact with you until Wednesday when the drugs wear off.” People on the internet assume they know a lot more about the situation than you do, but friends, if I ever go missing in Berlin over the weekend, please do not assume I am at a club and will emerge on Wednesday, chastened and tired.

We took our flight to Turkey that week, it was Thursday, the girl had been missing for close to a week. By now, the family flew over, the girl was an immigrant (or an expat? She came from a poorer country but as a Very Aggressive Mansplainer told me recently (re: myself) if you have the privilege to come abroad, and—what were his words?— “not work at a job like cooking at an Indian restaurant” then you’re by default an expat. I know. I tried. And then I got mad, and then I left) and the Embassy put out a plea (which of course didn’t play out well in the Facebook groups, because all the other people from the girl’s home country living here said, “Oh now the embassy is active.”)

Turkey is slightly screwed. Cost of living has risen so much that the price of bread changes every day (source: a friend of a friend, but also have a look at this and this.) We were flying into Izmir, from where we would spend the weekend at a nearby beach before joining friends in Istanbul for a landmark birthday celebration. On the way to the hotel, in Izmir’s centre, we asked directions from a woman who stopped to smoke a cigarette and one of the first sentences out of her mouth was, “Turkey is so fucked.” She was Turkish herself, holidaying in Izmir for a few days with a friend. There were local tourists everywhere, rich local tourists, plenty of lip fillers and boob jobs, but underneath it all, an almost uneasy acceptance of the fluctuating prices. And those people spoke Turkish. For me and K, it was fill-in-the-blanks as the menus so often didn’t have a listed price. They looked at our faces and made up a figure and we only learned not to order and then ask after a few times of this. But who wants to spend their holiday anxiously enquiring how much everything costs—even people a little budget-strapped like us? No, it took away some of the magic of being in Alaçati, which is a gorgeous town with deep, deep blue seas and the most litter I’ve ever seen on any beach, including Baga. One section has the old town, showing Grecian influences, all winding roads and uphill, full of bars and people walking back and forth. (What did I eat in this idyllic place? Chicken wings, if you can believe it. Have been craving wings in Buffalo sauce, and you can’t get them here in Berlin—well, maybe you can, but it would be a hunt, and I feel silly hunting for something so basic—and there was one “American style” bar so I tried my luck and wow, did the wait pay off.) Where we were staying was a hop and a skip from the crowded little beach so we didn’t even bother to take a towel or anything, just ran from the hotel to the sand in our shorts and t-shirts with bathing suits underneath. Close by, there were huge bungalows, gated and apparently empty except for one which was where the owners were having a small party, sitting on the patio and watching all of us plebs go by. The vibes were very much Real Housewives of Istanbul on one of their mandated “holidays,” the cats were strays but the little dogs stayed on their leashes and close to their owner’s augmented faces.

In Istanbul, we stayed on the side of a hill. It went up and up ending in a tower before going downhill again. You understood that if you walked downhill at all, you’d have to walk up again. It was raging heat, our clothes stuck to us like skin. After a day of this, we had to spend another just sitting in the hotel room, decompressing while the AC blew at us. In Berlin, it felt like summer was ending. Long spells of rain made the temperatures plummet, it was cold enough for jackets and tights, put away optimistically till October, now yanked out of cupboards and drawers again. The girl’s family organised a sit-in, they wanted answers. No one said she might still be partying. A woman was raped in a park beloved of both local residents and weed dealers. Her boyfriend was assaulted and made to watch. The culprits were immigrants—not expats—and so the centre-right government took it up as a battle cry. Just a few weeks ago, we’d all been laughing about the news about a wild lionness running loose in the suburbs. We thought it was so funny that someone took a video of an animal and just assumed it was a lion. We rooted for the lion, may they never find her we said.

The lion turned out to be a wild boar. The rape meant the police could close the gates of the park after ten pm. Police here are armed, guns on the side of their hips, so young, overwhelmingly so white. They often look bored when I see them, standing against barriers for protest marches, cruising lazily in their cars. Across the road from our flat is a falafel place, the police car on duty often stops for dinner. It’s hard not to be distracted by their bullet proof vests, how they never seem to laugh or smile.

In Istanbul, our group was ten people, which meant a lot of coordinating meals and meeting spots. I’d never been on a group holiday except with family, and I was surprised at how friendly everyone was, how even on hot angry days, there was no drama. Our family holidays are full of drama, and I equated that with travelling in a large group. Turns out it’s just family. K and I were on a tighter budget than the rest, and also we’d just been to Istanbul for a few weeks the year before, so we splintered off, did our own thing during the day and joined everyone else in the evening. One day, all ten of us made our way to a small island off the city, connected by ferry. That was glorious, but it was sad for me because I left behind my beloved beach cover-up that K bought me from a second hand shop in Poland several years ago, and also a sun visor I’d just bought in Alaçati. It had a black straw brim with daisies embroidered on it. I know you shouldn’t get so attached to things, but I was very sad anyway when I discovered their loss. I’m trying to be zen about my stuff, but I grow so fond of them that it’s like losing a friend even when I drop a coffee cup by accident. They feel like a symbol, like if I’ve lost my things then I’m losing control of everything. Maybe I need even more therapy. Maybe it’s growing up without siblings. I really liked that cover up, it was stylish, light and dried very fast.

On the ferry, on the way back to the mainland as I was mourning my things, a Greek student who struck up conversation with us, asked K, quite out of the blue, “Do you like Hitler?” That made us laugh. K said, “Do you?” and he replied, “No, but my mother does.” Those family holidays must be full of tension. K says when most people talk to him about Germany they mention the Autobahn, Oktoberfest and usually, Hitler comes up. It’s mostly Indian Uncles who do this, so we were both surprised to get it from a Greek student.

Berlin is still really safe. No one else is jumpy, women even leave their headphones on as they walk home alone in the middle of the night. I’m jumpy, but I have Delhi PTSD, I tell people. I cross the road when I see groups of men standing around. I take my key out two blocks before I come back to our street. There’s this one bridge, a beautiful one, which is a shortcut between our neighbourhood and another, and once meeting friends for dinner, I crossed underneath it, rushing along, gripping my bag and a man jumped out at me from behind a pillar and all he said was, “Are you okay?” but I think I screamed a little and I scampered as fast as I could go. My heart was still beating hard when I sat down. The friends we were meeting looked bemused but I laughed and said it was my cardio exercise for the day. I still call it the Scary Bridge, which is terrible because it’s one of the prettiest spots close by. You should also know about me that I’m a dreamy walker, very much not aware of my surroundings, very much drifting along from lane to lane. Many times I’ve almost stepped into the path of a bike or oncoming e-scooter. K has to steer me away from more purposeful walkers coming behind me. I love walking, I love thinking when I walk, and looking at all the little things—a backyard of wild flowers, someone’s dropped earring, interesting stickers, sparrows eating leftover bread off a table—lalala just strolling along, looking up at the sky occasionally. Now I’ve been here close to two years, some routes have become automatic, so I don’t even have to look at my maps. It means I startle very easily though, because I’m so in my own head, that my reaction time has to be immediate and animalistic

The day before we were flying back home, the police found the girl in a canal near her home. She may have jumped in voluntarily. There’s not much more information. One article quotes the mother as saying, “She was very homesick.” She was very young. It must be hard to be young on your own so far away. So many of my friends left India to study abroad after school, it must have been hard for them as well. And I stayed and stayed, until the end of my thirties, and still, it was an adjustment. I wouldn’t give up this life for the one I left behind but I do miss certain luxuries of living in a country of which you are a native citizen. Even though I’m taking up space here, I’m carving my own little hole in which I sit, it’ll always be about learning. Learning is great—how do you stay alive if you’re stagnant—but coming home from an exhausting trip and having to speak a foreign language you’re not very good at as soon as you land? It’s a process.

Thank you for reading The Internet: Personified . This post is public so feel free to share it.

Share

My mum is coming for a month-long visit today and I’m really excited to show her around and our lives. I’ve also got some plans for this space so please help me by voting in these polls. I’d like to make this newsletter more regular, because I have so much to say, so I’ve been considering certain levels of a paid tier? Check out the options below and please vote! I have an editorial plan and everything!

And the second question:

THANK YOU SO MUCH.

You can also buy me a coffee if you liked this or other editions of the newsletter.

Or go ahead and buy yourself one of my books—the latest one is my current favourite.

Currently reading:

Needful Things by Stephen King who I normally love, but I don’t know, this one is feeling hackneyed and formulaic. Not really that deep bone-chilling horror I usually get from King, so I’m struggling to finish. Maybe I’m just distracted though.

Subscribe now

Onward to the links!

With the new Made In Heaven out, a really good time to re-up my newsletter about season one.

Rethinking weekend plans.

Lovely long read (tw: missing children): who walks always beside you.

Great profile of Umar Khalid who is still in jail.

It’s summer, so not a lot of great links. Perhaps you’re even reading this the day after I send it to you because it’s a holiday. Wherever you are—have a good week!

xx

m

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

Follow me on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. (Plus my book recommendation Instagram!)

Forward to your friends if you liked this and to people who never vote in polls if you didn’t.

Also, write back to me! I love to hear from you.

The Internet Personified: Everybody poops sometimes

Dearest fields of dreams,

Hello and welcome from another scorching hot day in Berlin. (I love it so much.) I have my standing fan on in my little study and after I write this I am going to travel in the (sweaty) U Bahn to the library and maybe meet K after. Summer evenings are the best.

Thanks for reading The Internet: Personified ! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Before we get to the meat (hee) of this thing, a little reminder to buy Soft Animal! Buy two copies and give one to your local library or reading cafe. THANK YOU! KISSES!

Buy Soft Animal today!

As everyone from a certain part of the world knows, the moment you set foot in the other part of the world, one big question starts to form in your mind (and your body): how on earth do I poop here? Hundreds of years ago, certain Western countries decided the best way to clean their bums post shit was to wipe a piece of dry paper across it and call it a day. This became upheld as the golden standard of hygiene, to this day I hear about foreigners going to countries with bidets and saying, “Gross!” So much so that toilet paper has become standard: you’ll hear people complaining that loos have no TP, but not a mention if they lack a potty shower.

That’s what I call this thing, by the way. A potty shower.

It is the number one thing I miss about India, that, and how it’s standard to give people glasses of water at restaurants and bars without them having to request it specially.

Potty showers are known by all sorts of different names. I have heard:

Bum jets

Hygiene spray

Loo guns

Bum guns

But one thing all of us know is that toilet paper countries will not have them. Some friends who have been in Berlin long enough to purchase a flat decided that since it was their own property, goddammit, they were going to have a comfortable and convenient way to clean their asses. So they brought in a bidet attachment and asked the plumber who was renovating the bathroom to fix it near the toilet. This man, being German, did not understand what exactly the thing was going to be used for and connected it to the mains instead of a side flow. “So you see,” said my friend, when I went to visit his home some summers ago, “It gives you an enema each time you use it.”

I tried it myself, not on myself thankfully, since I had been warned and water came whooshing out like a pressure hose.

Most people have learned to make do. Some use wet wipes, others a little mug by the side of the loo. The toilets in new build houses in Berlin are generally windowless and cramped, small and damp. I have another friend who has a really beautiful pre-war apartment in an attic. Slanting windows let in light into her bathroom which has the vastness of a sanctuary. Ours is a tiny little afterthought, placed between bedrooms, large enough for a washing machine to be tucked into one corner, not large enough to have a separate shower and tub. Instead we stand inside the tub and use the shower, adjusted to our respective heights. At least we have a tub, it is my joy and delight to soak in it after a tiring week, but because of similar space issues, the drying laundry flutters on the rack just above my head. I’ve never had a vast bathroom, so I always admire them in other people’s homes. When you have a big space you can decorate, have a theme even, some decor. One of my friends in Delhi had a little rug by the long sink and counter, the shower was so far away that no splash would ever come near it. Our neighbour next door has the same tiny loo we do, but she has made it into a sanctuary. When you turn on the light, there’s a little machine with bird sounds that comes on. Sweet smelling things are everywhere. In contrast, ours is basic, not even a mirror on the wall to lighten things up. (Often in Germany, houses come completely unfurnished so it’s not rare for tenants to buy things for themselves and then remove them completely when they leave. In our case, the previous tenants were an old woman and her hired caretaker, so they left us a fully intact kitchen including cups and plates but took things like light fixtures and bathroom mirrors.)

I had a dream the other night about a bathroom. It could’ve been because I really had to pee and my brain starts throwing up images of loos in a desperate attempt to make me wake up and use it. It wasn’t a very nice dream, in fact, it was a nightmare, it ended with an old man cornering me against the hot water pipes, after which I woke up, heart pounding (and went to the loo after all, so well done, brain, scare me awake) but the bathroom itself was so beautiful. It was all tiled in sunny yellow, the ceilings were high, with windows placed close to it so shafts of sunlight danced through the room. There were plenty of plants and a low long tub in the corner. “It was a really nice bathroom,” I told my therapist later, we often discuss my dreams, “It was almost like a church.”

Pretty bathrooms are supposed to distract from the most important thing you do there. Which is: poop. Which is a time of day you sit still and focus, perhaps you have your phone or a book with you, but really you’re listening to your body. And we know pooping is important. Think of how uncomfortable you feel when you haven’t gone in a couple of days because you’re on holiday and your schedule is off. (Me.) Or when you have a bad tummy and how sick and weak you feel because you can’t do this one simple thing you have been doing since you came out of the womb. I have a strong stomach and good gut health, but one week of overdoing the partying and everything is off, wobbling sideways, ominous noises from my belly, a general sense of unease and malaise.

(And you’re supposed to be sick with toilet paper? Ew.)

Anyway, it’s hard to live in Germany with only TP, unless you train yourself to go just before you have a shower. (The Italians are very civilised and have bidets.) We have a portable plastic bidet now called the Happy Po, which we carry along whenever we have to travel and which has changed our lives considerably for the better. It was given to us by a friend whose then-wife was a gynaecologist and received a few samples at work, for women to clean themselves after giving birth, since there’s a lot of post-partum blood and so on. (Imagine doing that with toilet paper.) We love ours so much that when it came out at our local drug store we bought them as presents for (Indian) friends who also delight in it. (But are a little shy about discussing how amazing it is, people should really talk about poop logistics more freely.) From my window I can see customers at the supermarket across the road coming and going, and on Monday, after the shops have been closed on Sunday, they’re often coming out with bundles of toilet paper, stacks of it, like there’s going to be an apocalypse.

Everyone, especially us geriatric millennials, is used to pooping a certain way, I suppose. I have a little stool I put in front of the toilet because it’s slightly high, not so high as you would notice, but it’s more comfortable if my feet are up and my knees bent in front of my hips. I probably can’t convince anyone else to use a stool or a bidet for that matter, if you’re used to TP, but honestly, try one, it could change your life.

Thank you for reading The Internet: Personified . This post is public so feel free to share it.

Share

Currently watching: EVERYTHING on our new SECOND HAND TV! It’s a 42” Phillips brand and our Chromecast fits into it and it just makes me SO HAPPY to have a television again after 20 years. (The Smart TV features, while a bonus, weren’t really needed, which is good, because this TV is about 9 years old and the smart part of it has become sort of slow and outdated.)

Currently reading: VS Naipaul’s An Area of Darkness which is his really personal, really intense India book, listening to My Friend Anna, a memoir about a woman who was friends with Anna Delvey, the con artist. It’s narrated by the author who is really annoying, or has a really annoying voice, so you could call it a hate-listen, I guess, because I keep snorting and rolling my eyes.

I borrowed two books from the library I’d never heard of and completely loved. I like that discovery feeling, it’s been so long since I just looked at the back of a book and thought, “Huh, might give this a go” without ever having heard of it before. And then the joy of knowing there are no stakes, you can just give it back if you don’t like it. (I borrowed and did not finish Kamila Shamsie’s Best Of Friends, because it was not for me, for example). Anyway these two were: Sabrina by Nick Drnaso (a graphic novel that was nominated for a Booker prize) and Patsy by Nicole Dennis-Benn about a Jamaican immigrant to the US. I suggest you read both of them blind like I did, and just feel the sense of a good book unfolding in front of you. It’s so satisfying.

Here are some good online reads I enjoyed recently:

Would you dare to meet your doppelganger?

Yahoo boys in Nigeria are romance scammers and one man set out in search of them.

Yay, new Zadie Smith novel!

It’s really sad that Victoria Ammelina, a Ukrainian novelist, just died in a shelling, because this piece was the first of hers I’d read and it just struck me as so insightful and moving. The world’s loss.

Meals for one.

And:

ASK MOLLYBirthdayPresencia Inquietante (1959) by Remedios Varo It’s my birthday so I’m celebrating by sitting around feeling sorry for myself. It’s not about my age, who cares about that? I’m Age-Is-Just-A-Number years old. What’s upsetting is that I need every single tiny thing to go perfectly on my birthday. Even though I am not five or fifteen or twenty-five, I still …Read morea month ago · 189 likes · 16 comments · Heather Havrilesky

That’s all I’ve got! Go enjoy yourself, I command it.

xx

m

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

Follow me on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. (Plus my book recommendation Instagram!)

Forward to your friends if you liked this and to toilet paper hoarders if you didn’t.

Also, write back to me! I love to hear from you.

Thanks for reading The Internet: Personified ! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

The Internet Personified: The second hand unwinds

Dearest whiskers on kittens,

Have you read Soft Animal yet? I hope so. It’s been a bit quiet since it launched so I’m getting slightly despair-y sitting here in Berlin. This self promotion really kills any sense of achievement you have in publishing a book in the first place. I don’t know what it takes to sell fiction in India, but here I am, asking you to buy a copy of my book for yourself, and if you have one already, maybe for your friends? Here’s a link. It’s very good.

Buy Soft Animal online

It wasn’t supposed to rain today, my weather app—called, somewhat misleadingly Accuweather—showed a fine but cloudy day. Now, with the rain coming down softly outside my window, Accuweather has changed its prediction but I’m beginning to not trust it very much. I rely on weather apps these days, a summer’s day can go from blazing to chilly with no warning, and often I set out on the weekend in the day time, only to return after sunset (10 pm these days), so I have to know what to carry in my bag. The other day, my local library had a clothes swap party, where you took (up to) ten items of clothing, all washed and in good nick, and exchanged for other people’s. I had some dresses from Delhi I had fondly brought to Berlin assuming I would drop weight around my chest eventually (it just doesn’t happen so I’m giving up) so when I was unpacking my summer clothes, I added them to a bag and took them across.

I love the large American Memorial Library because of its vast selection of English books (divided helpfully by continent, including one shelf for us) but my local, which is called Pablo Neruda Bibliothek has a special place in my heart. It’s a gorgeous building (see photo) with extremely friendly staff.

Behind this is a small park with sun loungers where you can sit and read your book as well.

Friendly staff is important for a library because increasingly, it’s less about books and more about the community services they offer. During the summer, there’s all sorts of children’s workshops and readings, they also have a little “library of things” where you can borrow household tools, a print and photocopy machine, art for your walls, a special music section and a decent English language selection. Enough to keep me going back. I’ve signed up for their newsletter which is how I found out about the clothes swap and on the day, I went armed with my things and was shown how to hang them on racks, each labelled with category of clothes. Having ditched all my Delhi things, I walked around and picked up a selection (mostly H&M, which is a brand that’s following me around, more on that in a bit) including one grey Adidas hoodie. This I took to the back room, where the clever library staff had set up a free screen printing and upcycling studio, where you could have anything you took altered or repaired or add a funky design. I put a white leopard at the back of my hoodie (and was so pleased with the results, I added a white angler fish to a blue H&M dress, that now looks so special, I’m waiting for the right opportunity to wear it) and this is the hoodie that now scrunches up into my bag or I wear wrapped around my waist for the moment the sun sets, the city is cold again.

About two years ago, my mum gave me a pre-loaded cash card for my birthday with euros on it that I could spend here. That card is set to expire soon and I still haven’t spent all the money on it. Not because it was so much money (it was but you know, I can shop) but because it seemed like every time I desired something it appeared to me second hand or free. Sure, it’s expensive to live in Berlin, but a lot of stuff just happens to be there for the taking. Our house is decorated almost entirely second hand—right now just on my desk (a hand-me-down from K’s parents) there’s a laptop stand (found outside a slightly fancy building on the street) and a massive DDR-era globe (K found it when he went out to run errands the other day, I looked it up and it’s worth like 100-250 euros itself, but someone has drawn a face on one side (Berlin) so thankfully, I don’t have to give it up.) Around me are plants, most are gifts from my friend next door who has to keep repotting her massive collection, two I bought (a chilli plant that is flowering like crazy but isn’t giving me any fruit and a monstera deliciosa which is growing to befit its name) and two are free: a rose bush someone threw out (which is probably dying says someone on r/plantclinic) (but hah, just this morning I looked and a bud is blooming!) and a small set of seedlings I grew from the seeds of the Thai chillis I buy at our local Asian shop, which is growing in a free ceramic pot K found downstairs. What else? Past the furniture (second hand and off eBay or more hand-me-downs), there’s a glass terrarium on the dining table (found in a box someone was getting rid of), and I just found two old ceramic jugs with pretty designs on them that I’m going to use as vases. On top of the bookshelf is an ambitious project, two massive rolled up canvases we have to frame, oil paintings of people leaning out of Berlin balconies to look at fireworks, a passed on present from a friend who went to an art residency with the artist of these two who wanted to throw them out, and my friend rescued them and gave them to me. (Ambitious because we have to DIY the canvas stretching ourselves, which is why they’re still on top of the bookshelf.)

(I did actually spend some of my birthday money recently—I bought a new swimming bikini from a physical shop; I like to try on tops to see if they fit and give enough support etc. This is a place called Calzedonia, and I recommend it if you’re looking for swimwear in Europe. Great colours, a wide range of designs and sizes (because I’m heavy chested, I often get stuck with really boring colours, either black or beige, and this time I got a bright orange without padding and with underwire, so I’m thrilled) and you can mix and match for wide bottoms and small tops or vice versa. I bought an orange top and a green bottom and when I told my friend this later she snorted and said, “You bought the India flag!” which, oops, I guess I did.)

(I also spent some money at DM, which is literally my favourite store. It’s a drugstore, American style, so no medicine—those you buy at an Apotheke, which obvs is the root word for apothecary, a much nicer word than chemist or pharmacy—anyway DM has all sorts of exciting things from cat food to toilet paper to menstrual cups to tea for a runny nose and the skin care/make up section is one of my favourites, so I bought a few things, experimenting. Although I have to say I’m a bit disappointed in the shimmer oil, I slather it on expecting to have a little glow, but you can barely see it. Obviously made for white skin not brown.)

The other day, walking home from the station, K stopped to look at some pink fairy wings, obviously left there by a parent. A woman walking behind him stopped to laugh—and then walked home with us, chatting companionably with K the entire time (in German, I think my German is getting worse or else I’m getting more anxious about it which means my brain is just freezing up even at the simplest constructions. I need to go back to classes or I’ll be one of those horrible expats who have lived here for 10 years and can still only say please and thank you). She had not much money, she told him, so she spent her time cruising Berlin streets for what she could pick up, and ours was one of the best ones for free things. “Try two blocks down,” she said, leaving, “It’s even better.”

Many years ago, when I lived in Bombay, I met a visiting tourist, a friend-of-a-friend. He was, he told me, a “freegan.” He only ate what he could find in dumpsters—and all he wore was what he could find. At the time—I was about 25—I was grossed out, and this “freegan” became a punchline to a story I told about “Americans be crazy” for a long time after that.

Indians are weird about second-hand stuff. It’s obviously a caste thing, you can’t eat something off someone else’s plate, hand-me-downs are for “poor people” and the only way to prove your worth is to have new things. For many years, the only old things I bought were furniture from Amar Colony, always reupholstered or polished to become new. Antiques were fine, a rich people thing, but vintage clothes didn’t exist. One of my favourite sweaters now, a basic grey polo neck, is something I found hanging on the rails of a church. This was when I first moved to Berlin, where taking things off the road still felt “icky.” Vintage clothes shops were okay—we were posturing as rich people around the world—but free clothes? Ew. It took me a while to get over that mindset.

Capitalism ruins the world—such an easy truism to bark off and act so superior. Capitalism definitely ruined Delhi. Cheap things are everywhere, refresh your wardrobe with just one click and very little money spent, and throw away everything you don’t wear any more, just to join a landfill. Thanks to plastic being cheaper than all other materials, you see garbage everywhere, single use sachets of shampoo and empty chips packets and Coke bottles littered up and down public spaces. In the past, many years ago, there were still cheap methods of packaging, but these were newspaper bags wrapped around snacks or glass bottles. In Delhi, now, every time we order off Zomato there’s a whole bin’s worth of trash: plastic boxes and cellotape and five different kinds of unusable plastic spoons and forks. What to do? It’s so easy to order something in when you don’t feel like cooking, so much extra effort to research and find only places that do compostable packaging. Life is so much more convenient now, but only short-term, what’s going to happen in a decade or two?

The only reason we manage like this in Berlin—and we never order in—is because everything is already built into a culture of reuse and recycle. Ordering in is expensive and the food is rarely very good, so I prefer to cook. K has started to insist we only use organic meat which is so expensive that we only cook with 250 grams at a time.

Meanwhile I’ve started refreshing my wardrobe using a second hand website called Vinted. It’s exactly like all the various ecommerce portals except it’s people selling their old/unused clothes. I did a little research on brands and bought a pair of & Other Stories high waisted blue jeans as well as a COS white dress and since the seller also had a nice striped cotton blazer from H&M, I bought both. Remember how I said H&M was following me around? Turns out all these nice “fancy” brands I thought I was supporting are all subsets of H&M. I wasn’t supporting independent labels, I was just rewarding H&M’s idea of breaking off into little “designer” nooks to appeal to a wider audience. I tried to buy a pair of Doc Marten’s but the lady messaged me saying her son was very sick and she couldn’t send them on time and then she cancelled the transaction and never wrote back to me after. I hope her son is okay.

Finally, last week, admiring a friend’s bag, large enough for picnics (fit a bottle of wine and a book and other things easily) and light enough to go across your body without pulling, I asked her where it was from. “Weekday,” she said, “But it’s really H&M.” I decided to try and get away from their clutches and do a little research online for a good travel cross-body for summer days, when I wind up carrying much more than I anticipate. (Water bottle, umbrella, hoodie, Kindle/paperback, earbuds, a pen, a notebook, chilli flakes and hot sauce in case I’m eating out (this is a Berlin hack I learned from the same friend), my phone, my keys, my wallet etc.) I found great reviews for a brand called Baggalini, and searched for it on Vinted. Someone was selling the same bag I’d seen for 8 euros. I bought it and now it’s going with me everywhere. (It’s not the world’s most stylish handbag but it is extremely practical and theft-proof, which is important because this city is crawling with pickpockets.)

We had a chat, me and the seller, because Vinted has built in a translate option into the chat, I could speak in my language and she could in hers. “I want to take it to the park,” I said, “Will it fit a bottle of wine and a book?” and in return, she sent me back these photos.

Try getting that service off Myntra or Amazon!

Anyway, maybe this weekend you can have a clothes swap in a public place (your local bar where you know the owner? The park across the road? That last one may not feel exclusive, but sometimes it’s not about exclusivity either.) It’s always fun to see what people bring, and what you can go home with. Don’t feel guilty, the world is doomed, we might as well have beautiful things.

Share

If you liked this post—or any of my others—would you buy me a coffee? Your support means the world, and means that I can keep the lights on on this erratic newsletter for many months to come.

buy me a coffee!

Currently reading:

Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle vol 1 for my new novel, which is very good, if a bit slow. Reading it with post-it notes for jotting down things whenever inspiration strikes, which is plenty. This has also sent me searching for the first volume of Proust’s Remembrance of Lost Time, which I got on another second hand website called World of Books which is UK-based (they have a German website too) and buys up unsold books from charity shops to sell online. Really fast and easy to use and doesn’t give Amazon any money, so hurrah. (We also experimented with a Vinted-style bookstore called Booklooker to buy Gunther Grass’ Tin Drum, which K recommends highly, but that hasn’t arrived yet and is a bit more fiddly to use because you have to send a bank transfer before the person posts it.)

Currently eating:

Obsessed with burrata, best of all summer cheeses. Bought some last week to put in a salad, but then we just started carving off chunks and lowering them straight into our mouths with the back of a knife. I’m currently burrata-less, but that shall soon be amended. My friend served it to me last month with fried eggplant on the side and some chilli flakes to sprinkle on top and it was cool and delicious.

Subscribe now

Links!

Was the world’s oldest woman a fraud?

Bad waitress, a personal essay.

Are cats really domesticated?

The casual ignominy of book tours of yore. (Hard relate.)

How to tip around the world. (The USA looks too complicated for me to even attempt it.)

Today’s the summer solstice, the longest day of the year, and also Fete de la Musique, which means free concerts across the city if you happen to be visiting. I’m checking out two round the corner from me with our house guest, an old friend from Delhi who happened to spontaneously plan a visit this month.

Leave a comment

That’s all she’s got! See you soooon.

xx

m

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

Follow me on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. (Plus my book recommendation Instagram!)

Forward to your friends if you liked this and to people who throw out their old things every month “just because they’re not new” if you didn’t.

Also, write back to me! I love to hear from you.

The Internet Personified: Hindi Sad Diamonds

Fellow pretenders,

Over a month since Soft Animal came out! Have you bought it? Have you read it? Did you enjoy it? I want to hear allllll your thoughts: the good, the bad, the ugly. Just hit reply on this newsletter and let me have it.

Of course, now would also be a great time to buy yourself a copy and here’s a little button that will lead you to the appropriate page.

Buy Soft Animal online

I was walking down the road yesterday to meet my friend for ice cream. Germans loooove ice cream, even in the dead of winter, there’ll be one vaguely sunny day and everyone’s suddenly standing around eating “eis.” The more old fashioned shops have large cement bins shaped like cones outside. You can buy “spaghetti” ice, which is just ice cream in different shapes in the colours of spag bol. You can buy massive sundaes, there’s vegan ice on every corner, and ice cream shops often have lines snaking outside them filled mostly with parents and kids, but also regular adult people just getting their ice cream on.

[I made the switch to oat milk ages ago, Germany has some very delicious options, and it’s been a long time since I’ve eaten ice cream, but uff, sorry to report that my stomach has now lost any lactose enzymes or whatever it used to have. One small sweet serving and my stomach begins to rumble, and both times I’ve eaten ice cream this summer, I’ve had to *ahem* use the facilities the moment I returned home. It’s very sad and I will keep trying. I’ve always been mildly lactose intolerant, but it was bearable before, just a bit bloated and gassy, but now it’s a little painful. I wonder if that’s an age thing or a eating-much-less dairy thing. I do still eat cheese and yogurt with no ill effects.]

Anyway, the past few days have been beautifully sunny, and I felt full of good will as I walked along. It was the first day in months I was baring my legs—it’s chilly when the sun goes down, so if I’m going to be out for a while, I put on tights—and I had my Birkenstocks on and a little swagger to my step brought about by wearing sandals instead of shoes, because my feet weren’t used to them, and I was wearing a second hand thin corduroy dress I’d bought in Warsaw and hadn’t worn yet, no, life felt nice.

And then standing at the corner, waiting for the light to change as I crossed I suddenly got that roaring deja vu of where am I is this my real life? I’ve travelled so much in the past five years that sometimes I see another city superimposed on the one I am. People sitting at tables on the street will bring back Bangkok, an old carving on a building will be Budapest, the sun will filter through the trees and there’s a particular hot summer smell, and all at once, I’m in Delhi. This time though, my music switched to Lady Marmalade from Moulin Rouge, and I was thinking about Paris as I gitchy-gitchy-ya-ya-ta-ta’d walking past buildings and cobblestoned roads.

The crossing in question. Very Berlin: see the TV tower in the distance? And yet, deja vu-y.

That movie was very big the first time I went to Paris. I was nineteen years old and my father had been asked to speak at a conference and took me along. All day, he was conferencing and I was out on my own with a French to English phrasebook and a copy of the Lonely Planet and a map the hotel had given me to get back. I had an iPod then, playing Lady Marmalade on repeat, and once I remembered the chorus was in French when I sang aloud to myself and people stopped and turned around to stare at me.

[Sidebar: once I met a cute French guy in Delhi and he said, “Do you know any French?” and I laughed and said, “Well, I know that one line from that song?” and he was like, “What is it?” and I said, “Well, you know, voulez vous coucher avec moi?” and he said, “Yes.” And who was pulling the line on whom at that point, I wonder, but we both felt very smooth.]

It was February or March when I first went to Paris, cold with little points of spring coming up. The museums were all closed, some strike or another, so mostly to amuse myself I wandered in areas marked off by my guidebook as “extras.” You went to Paris for the museums, my guidebook said, but if you weren’t going to museums, you could do these other things as well. I learned the Metro by myself, and every morning, I stopped at this one Shell station by our hotel where I got a cup of coffee to go. Everyone spoke French and I had laboriously memorised how to say “please” and “thank you” and “good morning” and “yes.” [Funny, I can’t remember the French for “no,” maybe I didn’t learn it at all.] I felt ridiculously sophisticated, I bought a red beret—cringe now at this thought!—and I put it at an angle on my head and felt as Frenchified as it is possible for one nineteen year old Delhiite to be.

One evening, when my father was free, we went to this flea market somewhere or another, and I decided to pierce my bellybutton at one of the stalls. The man used a sort of clamp with prongs to hold the skin up and then just pushed the ring through as easy as you please. I chose a barbell, which later I swapped out with a small ring with a butterfly ornament, that’s the sort of young woman I was, listening to Crazytown, dreaming of someone saying, “You’re my butterfly, sugar, baby.” Imagine being reduced to being someone’s butterfly, but those are the songs we had, and the songs we liked, where we were just images in someone’s thoughts and as images, we had to exist perfectly, as though we were just paper dolls, no thoughts and feelings of our own. So my getting this navel ring wasn’t a symbol of rebellion or anything, it was supposed to be an unexpected bit of sexiness that would be revealed when I chose to. I was a good girl inside, with my beret and my piercing, and my ideas about Paris.

There’s a rap bit in Lady Marmalade that I never paid attention to, I was too busy humming along to the voulez vous etc etc. It goes:

We come through with the money and the garter belts
Let him know we 'bout that cake straight out the gate (uh)
We independent women, some mistake us for whores
I'm sayin', "Why spend mine when I can spend yours?"
Disagree? Well, that's you, and I'm sorry
I'ma keep playing these cats out like Atari
Wear high heel shoes, get love from the dudes
Four badass chicks from the Moulin Rouge
Hey sistas, soul sistas, betta get that dough, sistas
We drink wine with diamonds in the glass
By the case, the meaning of expensive taste

Moulin Rouge is, of course, the story of an expensive sex worker who works at the Moulin Rouge cabaret and an innocent but poor man who is in love with her and wants to rescue her from all of it. I don’t remember much about the film, but I know Nicole Kidman with her pale skin and large eyes plays the lead, and she has consumption, I think, so is forever coughing blood into a white handkerchief. And there’s an evil pimp who refuses to release her from her obligations. Nicole Kidman doesn’t want to be there at the Moulin Rouge, but also she knows that’s she’s too “soiled” for the innocent writer who falls in love with her, so in the end, they don’t run away together. Instead, Nicole Kidman dies, and the innocent writer has to tell their story so she can “live on” or whatever. It was a very successful movie with the message that love conquers all, unless you’re a cabaret girl promised to a loan shark, in which case you have to die so the story can stay true to itself. I thought the song was about liberation, will you go to bed with me tonight and so on, but it’s really about being okay about spending someone else’s money. A man’s.

I ate snails in Paris and did not enjoy the taste. Mostly I liked pizza and the wine they served by the carafe. I wasn’t yet legal drinking age in Delhi, but in Paris I was. At one small restaurant I heard someone ask, “Excuse me, are you from SPV?” and it was someone who had been to school with me a few years prior, and that was a beautiful serendipitous moment.

My final day there, I stopped at the Shell station once more for a last cup of coffee. There was a young man who had been serving me every day. It was raining, and as I left, I heard him call out to me: Mademoiselle, Mademoiselle! I turned, and he released a rapid round of French at me, none of which I could understand. I just stood there, enjoying the moment, the rain and the French and the being alone in Paris with my cup of coffee, just another image of a woman in a movie, without thoughts or words of my own.

Thanks for reading The Internet: Personified ! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

If you would like to support the work I do—and keep it free!—please consider buying me a coffee! It’s not much and it makes me so happy.

Buy me a coffee!

Currently reading:

Still on The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch, but I am listening to the audiobook of Ann Patchett’s latest collection of essays which inspired this newsletter as she has a Paris essay in it herself. It’s called These Precious Days and is worth your time. I’ve recently discovered I can borrow audiobooks via my library app, so I load them up for commuting and walking and have a nice story going on even as I have to leave the house. The best of both worlds.

Currently cooking:

Asparagus season in Germany, which everyone is damn excited about, but it’s only the white asparagus that don’t taste as crunchy. I managed to get some green ones, but I had no idea what to make with them, since asparagus is generally not part of my repertoire. Used this recipe for pasta, but instead of making the sauce on the side, I aglio-olio’d it with garlic, and instead of using just goat’s cheese since I had very little, I added blue cheese as well. Also lime juice instead of lemon rind. It was delicious. Also asparagus does make your pee smell extremely funky, like you’re a very old man and you’ve been drinking your entire life and somehow you also pee in an outhouse, so with an undertone of rotten wood. It’s gross but in an interesting sort of way.

Subscribe now

Just a few bookish links this week:

The art of monstrous men, which I enjoyed because I also just rewatched Manhattan recently and got the ick from Woody Allen and his seventeen-year-old girlfriend.

An interview with the founder of Bookshop, an Amazon competitor.

And the late Martin Amis on the genius of Jane Austen (and the badness of rom coms.)

Share

And that’s all I’ve got! Speak very soon.

xx

m

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

Follow me on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. (Plus my book recommendation Instagram!)

Forward to your friends if you liked this and to the love songs of your youth which you realise weren’t really love songs at all if you didn’t.

Also, write back to me! I love to hear from you.

The Internet Personified: Very Opinionated Women

My fridge-cold seedless green grapes,

Soft Animal has been out in the world for a few weeks and is doing better than I expected. Having written novels in India for several years, you know that basically each book is a lottery. Sometimes, despite your best efforts, books fade away after one swift bloom, no one talks about them, they’re not setting the world on fire and so on. Relentlessly optimistic, I take comfort in the fact that all my books are still in print, still being bought and sold, even if in small quantities. That’s something: as long as you have readers, you’re alive in the world.

But Soft Animal is doing well, thanks mainly to word of mouth campaigns. I’m going to talk about the large one in a minute, but on an informal level, my mum sent the book details out to all her friends and acquaintances and they all ordered like three or four copies each, and now every now and then she gets a message from someone saying how much they like it. (I also sent out links to my own friends and professional acquaintances, but I felt shy about following it up, so I just said, “Hey, it would be so great if you could support me by buying a book” and left it at that. It’s hard marketing yourself! You have to be really confident about people’s love for you versus their irritation with your plug messages.)

[Here’s where I add a link so you can get yourself a copy and see what everyone’s talking about!]

Buy Soft Animal online

I had asked Karuna Ezara Parikh to blurb my book which she did amazingly. Karuna is the author of the incredible novel The Heart Asks Pleasure First, and a collection of poetry called Where Stories Gather. (You must read them both, Karuna writes prose with a poet’s eye, so all the sentences are gorgeous and lush.) We’re actually friends in real life, not just online, which makes it all the nicer to admire each other’s work. Anyway, after a while observing the Indian bookish space—where a lot of book posts on Instagram are just pretty pictures with the blurb, no critical ratings at all, and newspapers and magazines are killing their book section—she decided to start an online book club, and friends, Soft Animal is her first pick!

You can join Karuna’s Kitaab Club on Instagram here—and we’ll be in conversation on the 21st of May (5 PM IST, 1.30 pm CEST) where you can also ask questions, which will later be recorded as a podcast.

Join Karuna's Kitaab Club

Personally, I’m excited about this both as a writer (obvs) and a reader. I’ve long thought that India needed a book discussion space in the vein of say, Reese Witherspoon’s Book Club in the US, with some conversation, some critical thinking, some championing of books that might otherwise fall under the radar. I have my own bookish Instagram account, as you know, but that’s really just for small reviews, not so much a giant readalong as KKC is doing. There’s something about having community in reading a book—do you love it, do you hate it—and how many other people are having the same experience.

Anyway, thanks to this my book jumped up the Amazon rankings and is now selling consistently! So hurray for book clubs and hurray for word-of-mouth recommendations because in this day and age of More Books Than There Could Ever Be Enough Readers For, this is what we need.

I actually went to a physical book club yesterday. I had a nice one in Delhi, a bunch of friends, lots of dinner and drinks and chatting, enough debate to keep things lively. It was just a small club—still is—most of us friends from school or college or just life. I enjoyed the camaraderie of it, but we were also friends, you know, so it was about friends meeting and talking about books, not the books bringing us together. Maybe I should’ve remembered this when I went out yesterday, hopeful that I would meet some new potential bffs.

I wasn’t that hopeful, to be honest. The book they’d selected: The One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margot was just the sort of book I couldn’t stand. (More about that in a minute.) But it was a nice day, and the cafe wasn’t too far from where I live, and a room full of women talking about books is always an exciting thought for me. I did an English Literature degree after all, and I did make some extremely sisterly bonds in college.

When I first moved to Berlin—well, if you can call it moving, dashing in and out of the city—I was so scared I wouldn’t make any friends, that I tried harder than I normally would. Every occasion—large online meet ups like this for example—would hold at least one person who I could later hang out with and we’d talk and become besties instantly, instantly. You can see where this is going: fear made me force connections and while in one or two cases, I’ve actually gotten lucky, and kept the friends I made in the beginning, it just wasn’t sustainable. I was tired out from trying so hard, every new meeting felt like an audition, and when things didn’t go well—not badly, just not great—I felt crushed, as though I had personally failed.

The truth is by the time you’re in your forties, you have a pretty clear idea of what you enjoy and what you don’t. If you’re very lucky, you have some good friendships already—even if not in the same city—so you know what your model for relationships should look like. It’s one year later now and I have some friends, and also, vitally, more to do and keep myself occupied with, so I’m not quite so eager any more. It’s a bit like dating, isn’t it, except at least with dating you have sex to distract you and in the case of friendships, there’s actually no stakes at all. If you think about it, friends are the least transactional relationships you can have, you could walk away from them at any time, and the only reason to make an effort is if you enjoy the company of the person as exactly who they are.

Lenni and Margot is uplifting literature. I don’t mean literally, I mean that’s the genre it falls into. Think Amor Towles or Frederik Bachmann or that book about an Elinor someone? Lessons in Chemistry (which I enjoyed despite myself)? Books which follow a routine: quirky underdog, often unloved/misunderstood, makes an unlikely friendship, everything is okay in the end! (Well—and this isn’t a spoiler because it’s on the blurb, in Lenni and Margot’s case they’re on an end-of-life ward so not quite okay in the end, but you know, lessons learned, plotholes tied up.)

did a really good job summing up his mixed feelings about upmarket fiction over here so I'll let you read that first before I add my own thoughts.

The Biblioracle RecommendsWhen Upmarket Fiction Doesn't Work (For Me)So I decided to read Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus because it seemed like everyone else was. This is not like me because I am self-declaredly famous for not reading certain books precisely because so many other people are reading them. I even wrote a…Read morea month ago · 37 likes · 24 comments · John Warner

Lack of connection is my biggest problem. I felt absolutely nothing for Lenni and Margot, even after reading an entire book about them. Lenni is a seventeen year old girl dying of cancer, Margot is an eighty three year old woman who tells Lenni her life story. At no point was I moved or even, frankly, that interested. I could “see the strings” so to speak, I knew that at this point I was supposed to cry, at this other point I was supposed to shake my head fondly and go, “That Lenni!” But these characters were flat, set pieces almost. A list of points supposed to make you feel things, like a Netflix Christmas movie.

Don’t get me wrong: a lot of up lit is nicely done. I still feel manipulated but pleasantly so. It’s like when you read Agatha Christie and you solve the puzzle along with Poirot. A pleasant brain scratch, like doing a crossword puzzle. But while Christie never makes me impatient (her ideal detective book, she once said, stopped at 50,000 words), these ones do. I’m so often waiting to feel something that by the time I reach the end I’m more irritated than I normally would be. [Lessons in Chemistry was saved for me mainly because of the dog character, I liked him a lot even though he was basically a dog genius that understood everything and was a stand-in parent.]

Anyway the book club was okay. Most people gave the book a six or seven out of ten, I gave it a three—which did not help me win friends and influence people. At some points I thought I was talking too much, but no one else was saying anything, so what could I do? After two years of therapy, I’ve become okay with having unpopular opinions—or at least, expressing them in public. Not every meeting is destined to hold your new best friend, a lesson learned late for me, but better late than never. (I’m particularly working on ironing out all my “people pleasing” tendencies, so I’m more awkward and silent these days than I’ve ever been, but happier for it.)

Me with my Book Club Opinions

Related: I’m getting a bunch of messages from so-called “book marketing” services. Most are straightforward, offering me deals of 100 rupees per review, which they claim they’ll flood on Amazon and Goodreads. Today I got one that offered me “tailor made author branding” and curating “in-person author experiences.” You’ve got to wonder if these people read your bios at all before sending out their messages (almost always on Instagram DM). They probably don’t. I wouldn’t advise you to sign up for any of these, they seem scammy. On the other hand, what can I say about actually being able to sell your book? You hope for the best, even eight books later, and you hope the people talking about your book will help sell it. I’ve had launches with three people in an empty bookstore, and famously, a reading at a cafe where it was just me (and a couple who was there on a date, but who couldn’t leave after I fixed them with my gimlet eye). The truth is, you’ve got to hustle, even if it might make you unpopular, and hope that your book captures enough of the zeitgeist that it becomes a movement, a phenomenon. Having a newsletter helps, of course. Hand out free copies judiciously, and remember, readers can usually sniff out a paid for marketing campaign and that might make them (unfairly) avoid your book, even if it’s the greatest work of social commentary since Jane Austen.

Just a fun thing: Happened to book tickets very late at night one day for a comedy musical improv night, and was regretting it when the day finally rolled around yesterday. I’d been out late the night before, and this must be old age, because even though I was careful not to drink too much and eat my dinner at a proper hour etc etc, I was still sleepwalking all through the next day. I actually told myself I’d only go out three times a week during the summer, but I feel my low energy levels are going to limit me to maybe only once. Twice if I’m lucky. Or maybe I should resist the lure of late night spots and go home at 11 pm no matter how much fun I’m having. Old age! It comes to us all!

Anyway, the improv group is called Kaleidoscope and they were doing basically my favourite bit from Whose Line Is It Anyway, where they took audience suggestions and made up a song on the spot. In the second act, they did a long Broadway show, also completely improvised. It was really good! And really funny.

Subscribe now

Currently reading:

Anne Frank: A Graphic Memoir: Picked this up on a whim from the library, just to revisit it and found myself deeply moved once more. It’s the uncensored Anne Frank (her father bowdlerised bits) so there’s also long descriptions about the female genital organs and so on, but mostly, it’s so beautifully done. The art is vivid, she comes alive, and again I was struck by how well and clearly she wrote. The world lost someone who could have been one of the finest writers in it if she had been allowed to grow up. Would recommend this graphic novel if you can find it, the pictures are beautiful.

The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch: Also a library book. My first Murdoch, the Booker winning memoirs of a man who has taken a remote cottage by the sea. He used to be an actor, and had lots of lovers, and is he slowly going mad or do creatures exist? Slow read, but beautiful.

The Covenant of Water by Abraham Varghese: If a white person had written this I’m sure I’d roll my eyes at how the people smile with white teeth in brown skin blah blah blah exotic India during the Raj, but I’m giving him a pass (for now) because the first section of the book is about a child bride being brought to Travancore to marry a forty year old widower and that’s really vivid and finely done, so I’m hoping this second bit (Scottish doctor arrives in Madras) is going to improve as well. It’s a mammoth book, and I’m only 15% through so who knows, who knows.

Currently cooking:

Gosh, how much cooking I do these days. And I’m really into it? It’s the best hobby. (When I get bored there’s always frozen pizza which is delicious and/or pesto on pasta.) But I was searching for a nice simple chicken pulao recipe, not biryani, I can never do it well enough to be happy with it, but just rice with chicken, Singapore/Indian adjacent. I found this nice recipe and it turned out beautifully. (I added a tablespoon of Shan Bombay Biryani masala to it.) (You may not be able to get Shan masala in India easily, because it’s Pakistani, so any sort of biryani masala works as well, I should think.)

Also because our microwave is broken, it tasted even better reheated on a pan with a spoon of ghee, which made the bottom layer crispy and the top soft and fluffy, so there’s an extra tip. I used chicken legs which we shredded once the rice was cooked, so each bite had a bit of chicken in it.

Thank you for reading The Internet: Personified . This post is public so feel free to share it.

Share

No links this week, because I haven’t read anything super interesting, so send me things! I’m at a bit of a loose end, so I’m looking for new exciting things.

Platform Magazine asked me a bunch of questions though, so if you want to read about what I was thinking when I wrote Soft Animal, you can do that here.

Leave a comment

As always, have a great week and I hope to see you for the book discussion on the 21st!

xx

m

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

Follow me on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. (Plus my book recommendation Instagram!)

Forward to your friends if you liked this and to one of those spam marketing messages disguised as real ones if you didn’t.

Also, write back to me! I love to hear from you.

The Internet Personified: Several observations and an event

Dearest daffodils,

It’s out! The book I wrote during the pandemic and then worked on for a few years after, finally now, in the third anniversary of the lockdown is available on thankfully non-lockdown-ed shelves.

Almost all bookstores across India stock it. (If they don’t, please let me know and I’ll fix it.) It would be very helpful if you were to actually go to a store and ask for it, space being limited, shops often only stock what’s “in demand” and only reorder books once the first lot of 3 or 4 sell out. Readers outside India, I have no good news for you yet, however, if you still have a Kindle India account, you can buy it wherever you are. I’m not in India to sign copies right now, although if you email me, I can send you a digital personalised inscription you can print out and stick to the front of your book, because we’re super modern like that. (Reply to this newsletter or meenakshimadhavanATgmailDOTcom.)

Of course, if you’re super busy and just don’t go to bookshops any more, here is the link to *sigh* Amazon as well. I hate linking to them because they offer hefty discounts where almost all of the discount is straight out of the author’s pocket, HOWEVER, they are extremely convenient, so don’t feel guilty, I do it all the time as well.

Buy Soft Animal online

I’d recommend you get a physical copy because it has these really cool footnotes that are more fun to read on paper, but of course, they’ve done wonders with the ebook version as well, and shelf space is valuable.

If you are buying it off Amazon, could I ask that you leave me a review as well? This bumps up the book in the algorithm and makes it more visible in search results. A totally honest review, of course. We’re not in the book praising business, only honest critiques.

Anyway, that’s my selling done for now. Expect to see a little reminder about the book in the intro section of this newsletter for a while, but no other news unless it’s really exciting.

Observations

I was recently thinking about this guy I used to know. Not know-know, but just know. We were friends, I went to his house for a few parties. I don’t know what brought him into my mind, I recall when I thought of him, sitting on a sofa, watching Indian Matchmaking—oh yes, it was one of the people on the show. He didn’t physically resemble this guy from my past at all, but something about the way he was talking triggered the memory. Anyway, I realised it had been a good fifteen years since I had heard anything of him, which would not be so unusual had I not been acquainted with lots of our common friends. How do some people vanish so completely from our lives? Is the severing of our connection a physical act, as though we are attached by string and it’s cut with scissors or is our connection more like a chalk line which fades away, blown away by the wind and when it isn’t refreshed, just vanishes, leaving no trace at all?

Connected: we are throwing our first Berlin house party. Or our first “official” Berlin house party, we’ve had smaller groups over before and last winter, right before I left, I invited some people to a bar and they came over after. This will be a party with food that I will cook, and people that I would like to befriend. Some are, of course, already friends of that special quality you only get in your late thirties and early forties with other people in your same circumstances. You become close, but you realise you have life and work and boundaries and so the closeness has mutual respect and regard for each other’s time, and yet so many years of stories to catch up on! So much to delight in!

How do you make friends in a new city is a question that comes up a lot on Facebook groups and the Berlin subreddit, and the answers are usually, “Join some sort of sports team” or “have a hobby.” And these are great answers! I just hate sports and my hobbies are solo ones: reading, art, watching TV, not a lot of group participation there. But really, it’s mostly about swallowing your pride. If you meet someone you like, you ask for their number. You message them, once, twice, thrice (maybe not all in the same week, there’s a balance between enthusiastic and stalker.) You arrange all the meetings, offering plans and times. You go to them. You put yourself out there. And sooner or later, you’ll have a friend who will also make plans with you. A bit like dating, but there’s no “wait for three days to call them back.” I say message them immediately saying how much you enjoyed your time together and making a tentative plan to meet again. Invite them to a party even. Now as to how you meet this interesting person into whom you will be pouring your effort, for that you might have to try hobbies or sports. (Sorry.) (I also have two good friends here but with whom I share Delhi connections so I got lucky in that regard.) People enjoy being liked and admired especially in a platonic way, so if you’re open about your liking and admiration I don’t see why you couldn’t be surrounded by people in your new city.

I wonder what it is that divides a city into blocks, so you’ll never leave your own neighbourhood if you don’t have to. Bombay had it, and I put it down to traffic, people don’t want to spend an hour on the road just to meet someone for drinks in another suburb, so you have friends limited to your area. (And why a Colaba woman might never date that lovely person in Malad.) Delhi also has horrific traffic, but somehow all of South Delhi is a monolith, you hop in your car (or an Uber) and travel ten-fifteen kilometres within South Delhi but somehow if it’s North or West, it’s “too far.” Berlin is very kiez-y (kiez = neighbourhood.) It’s almost a joke, but also not. Since we live in Friedrichshain (East, where a lot of your favourite clubs are, rapidly gentrifying but still refreshingly ugly) we are wedded to it. Luckily for us, there’s lots of reasons to explore other parts: the Turkish food is much better slightly to the West of us, a lot of friends live elsewhere etc, otherwise we’d never get out of our particular pocket. A lot of people in Berlin never do. It’s like a curse, a well appointed kiez.

Although finding a place to stay is half chance and half arranged marriage. There’s a good reality show idea for you: Berlin Househunting! Anyway, we weren’t really given much of a choice as to street and locality, we went to a bunch of viewings, saw a bunch of places and we were approved for this one (second on the list, but the first people got someplace else and dropped out.) It’s been lucky, I have a good friend who is my neighbour, two train stations almost equidistant to the house, four supermarkets from very cheap to fancy organic, lots of bars and a trendy area a ten minute walk away which is ideal because then people don’t wake you up by partying underneath your windowsill. [Also five Indian restaurants on this road alone but we avoid them, they cater to German tastes and are about as Indian as a Coronation Chicken sandwich.] [The restaurants are, on the whole, pretty average as I’ve said before. Not in all of Berlin, of course, there are some lovely places to eat, but in this area I haven’t found much to blow me away.]

So many times in the last three months I’ve found myself stopping and going, “Oh huh I’m living my regular life.” After a year and a half of back and forth between India and Germany, I’d gotten kind of used to constant motion. No sooner had I settled down in one spot than I’d be off again, no sooner were my groceries from India used up than I’d be able to buy new ones again. What I’m saying is this life, the one I’m leading right now, it always felt transient, temporary. Like I was just taking a break from my life in Delhi. We didn’t even have pictures on the wall. It was like the cats and K and me, we were all just taking a break from our regular programming. Sometimes I’d even feel jealous of the cats, like how they get to stay in our house all the time and I have to keep leaving. A few days ago, I bought something online for the first time. Here, I mean. I treated this like my normal life. I have to keep stopping and reminding myself that I don’t have to do everything immediately, that I have a long time to let things unfold. I was joking last time I was in India about how I have a Life A and a Life B, and they keep swapping depending on which country I’m in, and now I’m in Life A, and Life B is on hold. So bizarre but so comforting.

I was at this club called Sisyphos the other day, but not in its club avatar, it was actually open during the week as a flea market, which was quite bad. Children screaming everywhere, overpriced goods, but we (my two friends and I) had a drink and a snack and then walked home by the river, which was lovely and had a spectacular sunset. While we were waiting in line for pizza (other option: bao-burgers, which were very small and didn’t look that nice), we started talking about the German word “vielleicht” and how it sounds almost like Hindi. (Pronounced ‘fill-highsht’ I realised much later that it sounds like ‘filhaal’ which is ‘presently’ in Urdu and not at all the same meaning as vielleicht means “perhaps” but the same sounds sorta.) There was a woman behind us in the queue, German, our age, perhaps younger, and she began by saying, almost angrily, “Excuse me, are you [something] [maybe she used the word ‘upset’? I’m not sure] that German is not the same as Hindi?” So of course we laughed and clarified, but she took this as a way to, I don’t know, interrogate us about India, but in the most ignorant way. She wasn’t racist, I don’t think, but she was quite stupid. She seemed to get stuck most of all by the fact that all three of us were speaking English. “You’re from India and you’re speaking English!” she kept saying. At this point, I got bored and turned away from her to examine the slices, but my friend, with more patience than I, tried to explain about many different languages, blah blah blah but this chick would not stop with the, “omg how is English all of your [as in us three] first language?” I don’t expect people to know a lot about India (even though it’s a very large country and a little knowledge never killed anyone) but the confidence with which this woman just waded in to a private conversation between three people and displayed her ignorance was just baffling. And how she didn’t seem to pick up on any social cues either, just merrily being like, “OMG DO YOU GUYS HAVE ELEPHANTS?” (Not really, I’m only joking, but you know what I mean.)

Beautiful Spree sunset, I took this on my phone and I’m very pleased with it

There is, I have heard, the occasional very mean racist person in Berlin that one encounters, but on the whole this is a pleasant open-minded city which is extremely diverse and also pretty safe for your lone woman walking home by herself, which is a TREAT. These days I’ve got a Stephen King audiobook I borrowed via my library app and I just get out and walk for about 30-45 minutes, listening to the story, just wandering about, making the streets my own. It’s really nice.

On that note, I end. I just poured myself a glass of wine (7 pm and I’m alone at home writing this to you, the sun’s just come out after a long cloudy day) and I’m thinking of you reading this at whatever time it is for you. I hope you’re also well and happy.

Share

Subscribe now

Currently reading:

I’ve been in a huuuuuuge reading rut, so literally all I’ve done recently is re-read Marian Keyes, but yesterday I went to my own shelves and pulled out Midnight In the Garden of Good and Evil which is beautiful narrative non-fiction about the American South, specifically Savannah, where the author had to put a little note in going, “hey btw this is non-fiction and not a novel.” I too would like to visit Savannah.

Today my friend wanted to go to a few bookstores so we walked to the Berlin Shakespeare and Sons (not related to the Paris one, I asked) where instead of just looking at the books, I actually bought one (SO EXPENSIVE HERE) but this was one I wanted in print and to own. It’s collected German stories and essays but with the English translation on one page and the German on the other. Very cool, and nice stories as well.

We also stopped at a little cafe I know of which sells all their second hand books for 2 euro, and has a sizeable English collection. I bought:

Mutton by India Knight (hilar.)

The Collector by John Fowles (re-read but TERRIFYING, I don’t know what possessed me, a woman who is enjoying walking around on her own, to purchase this book that is a cautionary tale for women who walk around on their own. One of the scariest books I’ve ever read, keen to see if it still scares me since I’m somewhat inured to that sort of thing now.)

Some Hope by Edward St Aubyn (have wanted to read the Patrick Melrose books for a while. Enjoyed the first in a ‘this is good writing’ way not in a ‘great story’ way, because again it’s quite desperate, and this is a trilogy.)

The Last September by Elizabeth Bowen (looked nice, I like her.)

The Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin (is that one word or two? Re-read, wanted to own it.)

What have you bought and/or read recently? (Besides my book OBVIOUSLY!)

Leave a comment

links links links

Quite a sad antivaxxer story.

India’s beef with beef.

Inside the temple of Sadhguru. (I mean, I think the journo went with zero Sadhguru context, so this story is quite tame, but it’s an interesting insight into one of his American retreats.)

On pretend cooking.

A great essay on Grey’s Anatomy. (which K keeps insisting on calling “Grey’s Academy” which is… close.)

And that’s all I’ve got! Remember to drink lots of water and also, yes please, buy my book.

xx

m

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

Follow me on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. (Plus my book recommendation Instagram!)

Forward to your friends if you liked this and to people who keep asking you dumb questions if you didn’t.

Also, write back to me! I love to hear from you.

The Internet Personified: How to write a book

Gather around, my supportive satsumas,

Happy Easter weekend! Here in Germany, it’s a loooong weekend, so I anticipate Berlin will be quite empty by Thursday evening. As for us, we just have to be organised enough to shop for our groceries much in advance, which is a tall order, and I suspect we’ll be down to pantry staples and pommes (fries) from the shawarma shop across the road by Tuesday. It’s still much colder than it has any business being in April, but every morning my little winter garden/study is flooded with sun, so the cats and I sit here and bask.

The pre-order link for Soft Animal is live! The book comes out on April 24, and if you’d like to read it the very minute it hits stores, be sure and click the link which is here.

Here’s the praise the book got already.

I’m not going to be in India doing any book events this year, so all my appearances will be virtual, which means it’s extra important you pre-order (or just order!) Authors get new book deals based on how well their previous books have done, and if you vote with your wallet, as it were, then it helps keep me afloat. To paraphrase what Rilke said in Letters to a Young Poet, I wish I could give you all copies of my book because it makes me so happy when my words reach people that actually get them, but sadly I am poor and don’t own more than ten author copies. The rest depends on people buying them and letting bookstores know to stock me.

So pre-order! Push me up the Amazon rating list! Let me write more books for you!

Pre-order Soft Animal

How to write a book: an explanation

Begin in childhood. Be an odd, lonely, bookish child. Realise the difference between having lots of people around you and people knowing your heart. When you think of being a child, you often think first of being alone with a book, but if you start to unravel that memory, you remember you used to have a lot of friends. They just weren’t like the people you knew intimately, people you had read about so often that their pages grew spattered with food, the spines bent, the covers fell off, again and again you returned to them, almost like you were being them, pulling yourself into their world, until you knew them better than yourself. Admit this to no one. Play with your friends and your cousins so well that no one realises you are actually two people, an inward and an outward. Begin keeping a diary, but soon grow dissatisfied with your own limited vocabulary. Begin writing a book in a spare notebook in class, a large family saga, the kind you like to play by yourself in your room—an orphan girl taken in by a large family, but this time everyone is Indian. You read books about white children, and you adapt them to your world. You find a tape recorder and record an audio play—all parts played by you. You call the family you invent something long and elaborate, the Goenkars, say, or the Goswalas. Every book you read has a large family, it is the only one you know how to invent.

Are your imaginary friends imaginary to you as well? You know they’re not real, right? How did you name them—what made them be called Sarah and Gaurav? Sarah is the bossy older sister, Gaurav is a little whiny. They both think you’re great, they both think you could do anything you want. They will teach you how to fly. In your new neighbourhood, the other children aren’t very nice. You wait instead for Sarah and Gaurav, the three of you can play, but you know they’re not real, and so you drift wistfully to the park, and watch the other children who have known each other since birth, swap friendly asides. They’re all in twos: sets of siblings. Even your imaginary friends are siblings. George of The Famous Five isn’t, though. She has a dog. You wish you had a dog.

When you make friends, Sarah and Gaurav disappear and never come alive again. You feel guilty, where do imaginary friends go? But they have each other, so they’ll be fine.

The other twelve-year-old girls seem so much older than you at your new school. You are still reading Judy Blume, but the bookshop owner recommends Sweet Valley High. It’s what everyone else your age is reading, he says. You clutch your copy of Superfudge.

You see a captive bear and it makes you write a letter to the editor of a newspaper. The editor not only prints it, he sets it in the centre of the page with an illustration. It’s your first byline—it has your name and your age and your school. An older student comes up to your classroom and asks for you, asks if you’d like to join the nature club since you seem to have an interest in nature. Nature Club isn’t as exciting as it sounds, but you are so thrilled to have been personally recognised, personally requested. You realise how heady that feeling is—your classmates still don’t get you, but someone else did.

Your parents’ friend is starting a children’s section in a newspaper. You’re too many years away from learning about nepo babies so you ask if you can get paid. To your surprise, the editor agrees, you get Rs 350 per article. You begin the personal essay trend in the kid’s pages of a newspaper, writing about your friends. You get into trouble for mentioning one by her initials, how many boyfriends she has. She’s only thirteen. Your friends surround you the next day, slit-eyed with judgement and superiority. “My father said,” says one, “That Meenakshi must not be a real friend at all.” Luckily, the subject’s parents don’t get the newspaper. It cures you of writing about your friends—at least, with identifying details. You learn a valuable lesson: if you don’t want to get caught, enough of it has to be made up. You also don’t know the words “plausible deniability” but if you did, you’d be applying it here. You don’t write any more for the newspaper, you wonder: am I a real friend? It’s sad to think maybe you’re not, but everyone had read your writing. There was that.

You keep a diary. You make friends. You work on the school newspaper. You learn human connection, and you know some parts of you are just yours. You’re living a story you’re telling yourself about a well-adjusted young woman. Where there were Sarah and Gaurav, now there is you. When you’re out, some part of you detaches, and this part writes everything down—in your head, and later in your journal. Because it’s private, you use it for social observations. Sometimes you’re so pleased with your turn of phrase, you wish someone else could see it, but mostly, you’re happy to have a place where you admit to being uncomfortable and angry and sad. That’s the only time you write in your diary. The rest of the time, you’re drifting along, but you’re keeping up your fiction in other notebooks. It gives you pleasure to write, to tell yourself a story. You’re not writing it for anyone else, and so your stories are as self-indulgent as it is possible to be.

You grow up. You get a job at a newspaper. You decide for the first time since that kid’s page many years ago to write about your life, but for an audience. You start a blog. You haven’t learned, you never will learn. You don’t mention people’s names, but the identifying details are so strong that your colleagues find out anyway. They don’t like being written about. The ones you haven’t written about loudly wonder why—mainly this one guy, much older than you, who seems to hate you. Later you realise his constant comments about what you wore to work—just normal tank tops and jeans—making it so you’d shrink as you passed him, would count as sexual harassment. Of course, it is him who finds your blog, he seems obsessed with you, this older man, he never gives anyone else such a hard time, and he mocks you loudly. You go home in tears and take your blog offline—only, you’re really proud of it. You worked really hard. You delete the post about your colleagues, they’re not that interesting, decide never to write about work people, and change the URL. You call it The Compulsive Confessor, it’s what your mum says you are. You change your username to eM, me spelled backwards, the first letter of your name. You say, “Oh no, I stopped blogging” if your colleagues ask, but honestly, who else is that interested in you, the youngest and least important member of the newsroom? They forget all about it, and as the youngest and least important member of the newsroom you have to stay late with the air conditioning and the fast internet and you write and write and write.

Success! Your first book deal! Editors reach out to you because of your blog, you choose Penguin. The newspapers make a big deal about how you write about sex—relationships, really, you tell them. You’re not Belle de Jour-ing, you’re blogging about being a single woman in India. It’s certainly not X rated. But that doesn’t sell papers—or books for that matter, so you give in. You are very young, you believe you will always be able to write from 1 am to 3 am and then wake up the next day and go to work and go out with your friends and that it’ll only get easier with practice.

And then? And then you do it all again, except you can’t, blogs are slowly not becoming a thing any more, other people are writing about single women in India, and besides, you don’t want to repeat yourself over and over again. You branch out. You write other books, just by putting one word in front of another, each time wondering if this is the time you’ve completely forgotten how to do this. You are poor, you are rich. You are well known, you are obscure. Literary darlings appear and disappear. You steal from people’s lives like a magpie and then put them together and tear them apart in your fiction. You don’t discuss your writing while you’re writing. You hate editing, it never comes naturally to you, but as you get older, you realise that for the book you have in your mind to match the book you’ve just put down on page, you need to rewrite, restructure, cut, polish.

You wonder: how do I write a book? You realise it is by writing. You work on your books and you occasionally write shorter pieces for money, but you also write for joy. You keep a little notebook next to your laptop where you can make notes about people who pass underneath your window. You need your novel-in-progress to rest between chapters, like dough, so you write down the beginning of a short story, just as a warm up exercise. An email newsletter, even. Joy isn’t to be found in imagining a book launch or big international success, those things are lotteries, some people get them, some don’t, some deserve them, some don’t. Joy is taking something you’re good at and doing it just for you. Joy is writing down things for people, and having them know exactly what you mean.

Share

I hope you’ll all read (and love) the book! Just sharing the pre-order link once more, because maybe you just decided to buy it and it’ll save you scrolling back up again.

Pre-order my new book!

Meanwhile, here are some links, because I also read some excellent things this week:

I wrote about crows and Berlin last time, and so did someone else!

A mean but entertaining profile of fantasy writer Brandon Sandersen in Wired which the author responded to very graciously on Reddit, so worth reading both side by side.

Arundhati Roy on free speech.

Breeding dogs to be cute is animal cruelty. (Quite a sad piece because you’ll never look at a pug or a French bulldog the same way again.)

Fomo and chronic illness.

Inside the home life of women across the world.

And: because I was intrigued by how Germans eat a cold supper—as compared to India where it seems traditionally women slave over stoves to produce several fresh hot meals every day, I wondered if it had anything to do with female emancipation here. It turns out… sorta? But also the thick German folk bread everyone loves was popularised by, yup, the Nazis.

if someone sent you this post, subscribe for free!

Have a great week! Don’t forget to share the pre-order link with everyoneeeee you know!

xx

m

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

Follow me on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. (Plus my book recommendation Instagram!)

Forward to your friends if you liked this and to people who tell you they never read fiction if you didn’t.

Also, write back to me! I love to hear from you.

Leave a comment

The Internet Personified: Just another spring newsletter

Dearest morning cups of coffee,

Thanks for reading The Internet: Personified ! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

I was going through my draft posts on Substack, and I found this from August of last year.

Yesterday I found a dictionary in a box on the road. My house guests are getting used to me stopping, staring inside boxes, glancing at bags. Right now, my cousin is staying with me, he has an air of detached amusement as I look at the free things. He’s just packed up his things into one suitcase and is going to travel the world. He doesn’t understand why anyone would want more things even if they are free. I get him to hold my dictionary, the matching set of glass tumblers, perfectly new, each with a different colour at the base. Pretty glasses, I’d buy them. A great dictionary—English to German and vice versa—one I’ve been looking for. Everyone who passes through Berlin and stays with us is subject to a little rave about how great Berlin Presents are, how it’s the ultimate anti-consumerist cycle, you don’t want something and you leave it outside and someone else will take it. Sometimes it’s only junk, but there is a red box outside our front door which I think is the fire safety box, on top of which we have placed objects we no longer wanted, and gone for a walk, and by the time we returned, they were gone. My friend who stayed with us last week got into the spirit of the thing and picked up two scarves. Back home, she realised she didn’t like one of them so much so we left it, folded, on the red box and walked to Hansbach, my favourite local bar, a few blocks away. By the time we returned, swollen with wine and camaraderie, the scarf was gone. Berlin gives and Berlin takes.

The dictionary was published in 1985—it’s in mint condition, meaning no one from 1985 till now has actually used it properly—and it’s full of words that are no longer in public use. You know the ones. The slurs that were commonplace. The ones that have been phased out by more descriptive, less hateful terms.

At the Helmut Newton Museum of Photography, we wandered the aisles, gazing up at his large nudes. Beautiful women in high heels smoking or eating or lying down. Why must they all be in high heels? Why must they all be beautiful?

Berlin Presents. Less than a year later, I’ve learned these things have cycles to them. In the winter, there are fewer boxes, the clothes are mostly woollen and/or useless. Still: the other night, K and I walked to this punk bar called Supamolly, not far from us, it also is on the ground floor of a squat, I think, and there was a rack of clothing outside with some actual nice things, not just nice for the side of the road things. I picked up four—a sweater, an oversized sweatshirt, a dress and another sweater, which turned out to be too small for me, and which I, in turn, passed on to my friend’s son, who likes yellow as much as I do.

I am currently at K’s parents’ home west of us, near Frankfurt, in a small village where no one leaves their junk outside. It’s funny, my idea of beauty is usually narrow cobblestoned streets, buildings with a sense of history no matter where they are in the world, a shaft of sun filtering through a tree dusty from the side of the road, fairy lights in a balcony, that sort of thing, and here I am faced with hills that literally roll, landscape that literally stops you in your tracks to gawp, after a while it all becomes very much Screensaver, you like it, because it’s pretty and it’s there but you stop seeing it, I guess. I did very much enjoy my walk yesterday with K and his mum, looking for sticks* and spotting a beaver in the river (although it could have also been a water rat, either way it was small and plump and cute. The large beavers you’re probably thinking of—as was I—are an invasive species from North America.)

See? Almost stupidly beautiful and bucolic. I am pleased with the way this photo turned out though.

(*Call it penis envy, but when I go for a walk in nature, I always look for a nice stick to wave. I was practicing my German by telling K and his mum this story yesterday: when I was a child on holiday in Hyderabad with my cousins, we’d often compete to find the perfect stick. There aren’t that many perfect ones, and usually the winner—the finder, the bearer—would be subject to jealousy from the rest of us. So much was the perfect stick resented, that the others would try to break it, or take it away from you—boys!—but I always loved when I found The Stick, feeling powerful and adventure-y. So looking for a stick is a habit that has not faded. K also found one, getting into the spirit of things, and in the end we dropped them in the river and watched them float away, a sort of Saying Goodbye to Perfect Stick ceremony.)

Ideally, I wanted this newsletter to go out with a pre-order link but since I don’t have one yet, here is the cover reveal of my new book! Isn’t it beautiful? It was designed by Gunjan Ahlawat at Penguin, whose other cover designs you can see here. Originally we’d gone for green and pink, but there was another book that looked very similar to it, so Gunjan found this glossy grown up grey—unusual and stunning for a paperback. Click to see the description and the lovely generous blurbs by Meena Kandasamy, Karuna Ezara Parikh and Dhruv Sehgal. I tell you what I’ll do, I’ll send you a separate newsletter with just the pre-order link when it comes out so you can be the first to know (and buy it!)

After that little advertising interlude, let me get back to my LIFE. I’m here and not in Berlin because of pesky bureaucracy (a word I STILL cannot spell so I always write it as fast as I can and wait for spell check to fix it). I might as well tell you, since maybe one of you will do the same move I did, and while there is information available online, in this case you have to know what to ask for? Which is as complicated as knowing the answers, a very philosophical dilemma.

Anyway so once I got my spouse visa—called a Family Reunification Visa—I had three months to change it into a resident’s card. Easy right? Nope. First, I had to get an appointment, which are thin on the ground all over Germany. In Berlin, someone told me recently, there’s actually a Telegram group dealing with black market appointments, ie, you can take someone’s pre-booked slot for like €50 or similar. Over here, in this village and surrounding areas, things aren’t quite as bad but still not great. I booked at the beginning of February and got an appointment for the end of March. I looked at the website and wrote down what I needed, except both K and I completely forgot—or deliberately misremembered? I don’t know, this process is so murky it’s hard to say what we knew and what we didn’t know—that I had to be registered with the local authorities before I got a resident’s permit, ie, the foreigner’s office would not be registering me, that would have to happen in a completely separate place. This was relayed to us at 10.45 am on a Friday, and the local Bürgeramt (fun name, but sadly less delicious than it sounds) closed at noon and refused to see us at all. So, hey ho, I got an appointment for Monday and asked our lovely next door neighbour (in Berlin) to look in on the cats for one more day, only to realise… there’s a transport strike on so I can only return on Tuesday after all, which has nothing to do with my paperwork, I’m just complaining about how the stars are misaligning. (Honestly, German’s biggest PR coup is this idea of “German efficiency,” let me tell you, friends, it does not exist.)

Because my visa runs out next month, now my next step has a part two, where the registration office is going to give me a visa extension while I wait for an appointment either here or in Berlin. This is called a Fiktion, literally a “fiction” which I find funny but also a portent of doom.

All of this just to say that my paperwork journey has not yet ended, even though I was cheerfully assuming that I would walk in and out on Friday, resident’s card in hand. It’s probably lucky that I’m not actively job seeking in Germany right now because I can’t do anythingggggg until this stupid permit comes through.

There’s not much to do here, and so I usually go to bed after dinner, say 9ish and read till about 11.30 and then sleep solidly and wake up bright and early the next morning. Today I woke up at 7.30 am, and finished reading Richard Yates’ Easter Parade in bed, a beautifully written but ultimately depressing story of two sisters in war and post war America, their different steps taken and how eventually it was no use, no use at all. Good book though, would recommend. I’m on a Richard Yates kick this year so I’ve got a lot of his books on my Kindle and am slowly making my way through them.

So this morning, I woke up at 7.30 am—I checked my wristwatch which is just a regular watch, nothing “smart” about it except that it keeps the time which is quite a miracle—and then I checked my phone, and it still said 7.30, and I was a bit confused and then I looked it up and realised the clocks only go forward tomorrow, in the middle of the night. For the last week, I’ve been slightly obsessed with the idea of time just changing, we’re standing there at midnight and suddenly, without us moving, it’s one am! It’s so weird but also so cool, like we’re all time travellers. Everyone here is so blasé about it, they moan and groan about how it’s such a pain. I was at the dining table yesterday talking about how it was kind of exciting, you know? To have time just jump forward like that? And my mother-in-law said, smiling, “You’re so excited about everything” and it’s true, I really am, and I will be sad next year when this moving-without-moving is just another thing for me to roll my eyes over. Like snow. You wouldn’t think I’d get bored of snow, but walking in it is cold. It’s not even Winter in Narnia Beautiful Cold, it’s just slushy and icy and the only romance is if you’re indoors.

There’s this really funny bit in one of the Adrian Mole books, where he calls his mother and says, “Do the clocks go one hour further or back?” and she says, “Spring forward, fall back!” and he starts shouting at her going, “What does that mean?” and she shouts back: SPRING FORWARD FALL BACK!

I tried it on K, who asked which way the clocks go, I said, “Spring forward fall back” and he said, “WHAT DOES THAT MEANNNNN?” so clearly it is a timeless and true joke. (Even though, come on, in spring your clocks go forward, duh, so 11.30 am today is 12.30 pm tomorrow. Good news for me and India time because it’s a little later for me to get you guys at exactly the same time.)

All this to say that time is a social construct, which drinkers have known for ages, which is why the old saying: “it’s 5 pm somewhere.”

“Spring!” I say, pointing to all the empty bottles—Berliners love to drink outside in the summer. “Kreuzberg,” replies K. That’s this grotty little super trendy neighbourhood.

For more fun stories & to get me directly in your inbox, just subscribe! It’s free and it’s cool and I don’t send it out very often so not spammy either.

Speaking of spring, for the past few weeks, a pair of crows have been busily making a nest in the tree overlooking our living room, which means we can see them very clearly. I have named one of them Crow Mama (because I liked the pun) so then obvs the other one was Crow Papa—or at least, he is on days I’m feeling gender normative. On others he (or she!) is Crow Mama’s life partner of either sex. They’ve been taking a long time with this nest: first they had to get all these twigs, fuck knows where they found them, and build a little base, which they kept adding to, making walls and a floor, high walls so the chicks won’t fall out, and now they’ve begun lining it with leaves and soft things they’re finding in mysterious places. Every now and then, one of them will sit down in the nest and sort of fluff out their bums, do a little shake so that everything is tamped down nicely, a little circle like a cat settling down in her bed.

Europe has many different kinds of crows, and I was interested to see that these two were very different from the birds I’d seen back in Delhi. The most common crows in India are the house crows—smaller, blacker, with shiny grey feathers. These ones, the ones nesting outside our flat, were much larger and had more grey on their bodies. Turns out they’re the hooded crows, but wait, it’s even more interesting than that. Europe also has a large population of carrion crows, which are all black and more in the West, while hooded crows live in the East, where they have been slowly evolving into two completely separate species despite starting out as the same one.

Now normally, in speciation, two species become one, but in the case of these two kinds of crows, they were forced to split up during the Last Glacial Period, where one set became more grey and the other more black, and then it turned out they didn’t want to mate with the crows of a different colour! So very literally, prejudice has turned these crows from one into two, and you can read all about it in more detail over here.

Then the other day, while both the crow parents were out doing their crowly things, a black and white bird with a bright blue side came and stole one of the sticks holding the nest together. This being too long for it, it broke the stick off and then flew away with its half stick.

I got very into birds when we had our small rental in Goa, because that garden was wild and full of them. I had to special order a copy of Salim Ali’s Birds of India, an invaluable (but also sadly very heavy) guidebook, which I kept by my desk and looked up all the different birds I could see. I’m having to start all over again in Europe, I don’t even know the basic names for trees, let alone birds (and most people know the German names for all of those things, which is not especially useful when you’re trying to gain knowledge in the nature section and not the language section). But this bird was common enough for K to know what it was: “that bird that likes to steal shiny things” he said, and sure enough, it was a Eurasian magpie, also part of the general crow family, so really, he was borrowing from cousins.

Now this bird is super intelligent, one of the smartest species, a conclusion scientists have reached, because it’s able to recognise its own face in a mirror, which is kind of remarkable when you consider that Olga da Polga, an extremely intelligent, almost human cat, hissed at her own reflection for three months after we adopted her. Other non-humans that recognise themselves are chimpanzees, dolphins and elephants. I don’t have a follow-up story about my particular magpie doing something smart, but I do have an anecdote that proves how dumb people are. Originally, the magpie was called just the “pie” but people added “Mag” as in “Maggie” as in “a woman’s name” because they chattered all the time. Ho ho ho, the joke’s on you now isn’t it? I’d like to see a smart bird named after a dude.

They also feel sad, which makes me sad. Better to think of animals as constantly living in the present than to imagine them mourning and in grief.

Sexy AND smart

Reminder to BUY ME A COFFEE if you liked this little newsletter or any of the ones previous. Your support means everything!

Help me continue to feed my soul with tulips (these were a gift!)—and Olga’s body with fancy cat food.

Buy me a coffee

Currently reading:

On book three of my Game of Thrones re-read which is going so well, I’ve also started rewatching the show. Odd to be on book three but to be watching season one, but nice to have some RETROSPECTIVE THOUGHTS.

After I finished Richard Yates on my Kindle, I decided I wanted a soft family story with hard truths again so I’m going to re-read some Anne Tyler, who I love. In the same vein, I pulled out Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout from the library, which was so good, and yet so short, I was sad when it finished.

Links you should read

The better you write, the more you will fail.

I really love Lindy West—and her take down of Oscar winning The Whale made me laugh-snort but also nod in agreement.

Bird-related: the biggest celeb in New York.

Visa-related: Germany denies entry to foreign spouses (who can’t pass the language requirement.)

What happens to the pets that happen to you (by Anne Fadiman, another favourite essayist.)

On blurb-writing, hard relate as I’ve recently been doing a few.

Hilarious: inside the virtual world of Meta.

Last time I had put a bad link to this long read about drinking, so here it is again, fixed. (Although I did fix it in the comment section, but I’m not sure how many of you checked.)

Well, it’s nearly lunchtime by my body clock which should really be the only clock that matters. What a wild idea!

Speak soon.

x

m

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

Follow me on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. (Plus my book recommendation Instagram!)
FOR NOW!

Forward to your friends if you liked this and to the last government officer who stonewalled you if you didn’t.

Also, write back to me! I love to hear from you.

Thank you for reading The Internet: Personified . This post is public so feel free to share it.

Share

Thanks for reading The Internet: Personified ! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

The Internet Personified: Travelling Without Instagram

My lovely children of summer,

(Gmail miiiiight eat half this post because of my lovely photos so click on the title to read comfortably in your browser.)

There’s this great German phrase my friend Johanna taught me recently. It’s actually a toast when you’re drinking together, which makes perfect sense, because they do enjoy drinking in this part of the world. It goes: “We will not be so young together again.” (So jung kommen wir nicht mehr zussamen for my fellow Deutsch learners.)

We were in Warsaw, at a lovely little wine bar on our final night there, when she taught me this. I was pleasantly melancholy from the wine and the idea of the end of a trip that seemed to finish so much faster than the months we had spent planning it. Later, before I went to bed, I looked it up, technically, technically I guess a drinker could use it to spur on another: “oh go on, have another, we’re not going to be this young again!” But it made me feel the way singing “Auld lang syne” on New Year’s Eve does (yes, I know no one actually does this apart from people on old British period dramas, but before I go out on NYE, say around 6 pm, I start warbling a little, “andddd neverrrrr broughtttt to miiiind” like I’m doing an Adele cover. It drives K mad.) a little bit like you’re going to cry, because life used to be endless, endless, you know? And now here we are, forty one, and we have to watch our knees if we step off a stool too suddenly.

Forgive my morbid mood, it’s the cold and the snow and the dark grey skies outside. I really was going somewhere cheerful with this, I promise, but I keep getting tangled up in March in Germany which is nothing like March in Delhi. This March is awful! This March matches, in fact, my board exam mood that I get into at the beginning of every March since I was in high school. But in Northern Europe, spirits are starting to lift. Smiles on faces. There’s a tree to the left of me which I just notice this morning is covered with a delicate dark green moss on the upper branches which wasn’t there last month. In the tree in front of our dining room, two crows are constructing a large and messy nest, today they returned with more twigs and shook the snow off their new home with philosophical resignation. At 6 pm, the sky is a dark blue instead of pitch black. And when the sun comes out as it does, every now and then, it’s actually warm instead of just bright. The biggest sign in our very urban neighbourhood is that the douchebags who use the silent electric scooters on sidewalks, nearly mowing you down if you’re not careful, have started up again. Spring!

Johanna took this photo of an optimistic sign at a neighbourhood bar our first night. We had great fun with the sign, whisper shouting “SPRING IS COMING” to each other even as a tremendous wind blew our eyelids back and froze our bones.

What happened is, last week, I decided to just not go on any of my social networks (Twitter, Instagram and to a smaller extent, Facebook) for a day. No particular reason, I was just feeling sort of crowded, too many voices in my head, too many opinions to keep track of. I realised I thumbed my phone like a worry bead, switching between windows in a cycle: Instagram-Twitter-Facebook-Instagram. Every few seconds, pulling down the tray to refresh. Who had something new to say? Who was outraging about something I needed to feel a prickle of indignation/schadenfreude/just here for the comments about? So I took my break, and then the next morning, I continued my break and so on and so forth until I was solidly “digital detoxing” for whatever that’s worth. I fully intended to be back on my socials for Warsaw, but it just felt so nice to be offline, I can’t explain it, it’s like suddenly there’s a whole chunk of mental space. It’s like one of those dreams where you realise that beneath your house there’s a whole smaller house which is yours but you never noticed it before.

I didn’t do anything to force myself. I checked if I had any messages on my socials once a day, but I didn’t feel the need to look at photos or stories or tweets. It all fell into place quite naturally, like I was this non-social-media person this whole time and I just needed to release that inner self. I messaged some friends who interact with me a lot online and told them about it, but for the most part I realised that no one really noticed. For all the extremely online shit I was doing every day from the moment I opened my eyes, I could stay off it for days on end and no one was coming looking for me. It was freeing. I miss my friends and their brief 24-hour updates, that was nice, knowing what everyone was up to all the time, feeling like I had a window into their days no matter where we were, but so much of social media has become a short cut to reaching a whole lot of people at once. Which: terrific! But this means that everyone assumes everyone else has responded to your story with your big news, and so no one does (lonesome), sometimes your besties don’t even see your major updates which you don’t know and then you feel sad they haven’t responded (double lonesome plus resentment) or the thing that one person will find specifically funny but is reaching 2000 people gets diluted because you’re not messaging them one on one. (Friends, please send me photos and updates, no matter how small! I want to see every kitty, every dog, every child, and every you dressed up for a night on the town. THANKS.)

And: cue the Warsaw trip. Johanna and I had been planning this for a while, she had a mid-week break in March because of Women’s Day and so suggested we go somewhere accessible by train. Neither of us had been to Poland before, and Warsaw seemed exciting and also with enough fun things to do indoors, which we needed because of the aforementioned wind and snow. (Gdansk was on my list but it’s a beach town and your good time is directly related to your walking around Old Town by the shore.)

The view from our Airbnb was particularly gorgeous. See that tall building with the clock to the top left? That’s the Palace of Culture and Science, a white elephant of a “gift” that the Soviets forced Warsaw to accept & then grandly named after Stalin. You can see it from everywhere in Central Warsaw. (Photo by J.)

I haven’t travelled without uploading photos to Instagram for years now. My usual practice is to take a bunch, edit and filter them and then post them on the ‘gram the next morning as a sort of travel diary. That’s not including the several photos I post on stories either. I construct a travel narrative as I’m doing it, a story I’m telling myself along with the people that follow me. The story is often tediously the same: here I am living my glamorous/adventurous life in a foreign city, look at what a great time I’m having! The thing is, often you do have an extra good time because you look at it from the outside, you’re the actor but you’re also the audience. And sometimes you have a shit time but you’re pretending to have a good time so you’re confused about why you’re having a shit time because surely every evidence points to immense fun wish you were here?

So when I stopped taking photos for my Facebook and my Instagram, I sort of stopped taking photos. This person once told me ages ago at a wedding, “Sometimes you don’t have to have a good time, sometimes you just have a time and that’s okay.” Johanna and I had great fun doing all the things we enjoy doing: museums and cute little cafes and bars and second hand clothes shopping and just sitting and reading in our pretty Airbnb. But also we froze on the long walks to and from places, the public transport system is kind of weird in Warsaw, not that many connections and not even the same ticket for the tram and the metro (that we could figure out), and it snowed most days we were there, and I found Polish food very dull and this made me sad in a way only a meal that doesn’t live up to my expectations can. (I soon switched to non-Polish and all was good in the world again.) Those spots were our “time.” If I’d been chronicling our journey online, perhaps I would’ve felt the need to make the cucumber soup look delicious or the snow magical in a Lorelei Gilmore sort of way. (Snow is so pretty when you are in your apartment and you have no need to leave your house for the next 24 hours.)

Sharing a pensive moment outside the POLIN museum which is excellent, a history of Judaism through Poland’s history as well.

But I’m sad I didn’t take more pictures. I thought I enjoyed photography, but maybe all I enjoy is the sharing of photographs. Getting a particularly nice one to show everyone what exactly it looked like while I was away.

This is the Neon Museum, which is advertised as “the most Instagrammable museum in Warsaw” so I was a bit sceptical as those experiences tend to be all show and no substance. However it’s a fun museum showing a quick history of post Socialist Warsaw, with a little movie playing at the back. (Photo by J.) And here’s one I took, because obvs.

I’m going to have to go back on social media next month because my book is out and I have to promote it and be cool, but honestly, I’m not sure how much difference promoting your own books online does. I run a small books account on Instagram (which I might keep doing because I only follow book accounts on it and it’s nice to have a record of your reading) and I know many people buy the books I recommend. But I think it’s because I’m a disinterested third party. I follow authors online and I don’t necessarily buy their books because they post fifty times about it. I don’t know if more people would be inclined to buy my book because I post fifty times about it. So it’s hard to say if social media even is that important despite what everyone tells you. (However, for sharing links like this newsletter, it is, and since I’m staying off Twitter this month, would you just be amazing and do it for me? THANK YOU I LOVE YOU.)

Share

We were at this large warehouse space with lots of little restaurants and bars and J went off to find a beer and I looked up and saw this red balloon against the roof, and it was so beautiful.

No, but I’ve really liked whatever little of Eastern Europe I’ve seen (and it’s always been SO COLD when I’ve visited so you can imagine these are pretty amazing cities despite the bad weather: Prague, Budapest, Warsaw.) They seem somehow unexplored—but only in relation to say, France or Italy or Germany. I knew very little about Polish history when I visited and now I know so much more. They feel somehow more accessible because they are slightly cheaper than most Western European countries and yet, more foreign because of the languages. You should go. And you should send me a series of messages about it and we can talk about our shared experiences.

If you liked this post, or any of my others, would you consider buying me a coffee? Your support means so much to me!

Buy me a coffee!

Currently reading:

The latest in the Thursday Murder Club books: The Bullet That Missed. Look, I got back into these books after taking the second one out of the library and then going back and re-reading the first one, but they’re very… schlocky. Manipulative, I’d say. Charming as fuck, no doubt, but self consciously charming.

My neighbour said she wasn’t ever going to read the box set Game of Thrones she’d bought herself and did I want them and I realised I did feel like re-reading them all from the beginning and we have a new bookshelf, so everything worked out in that regard.

What I Bought That I Love:

Two second hand things I just wanted to show off somewhere:

Of the two t-shirts and two dresses I bought in Warsaw only one has internet presence, so see how nice.

From a brand called Janina Warsaw but I found it in a thrift shop so it’s much more faded. I love slogan t-shirts, don’t you?

And a popcorn maker! I’m also trying to give up processed snacks—hard when you love all things fried potato and this popcorn maker has been 100% worth it especially since we also—yup—thrifted it.

Thanks for reading The Internet: Personified ! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Links I Liked

The trials of an Indian witness. (Guardian)

How did I let drinking take over my life? (Guardian)

The terrifying cult of good taste. (Things Worth Knowing)

How to talk about grief to someone who is seriously grieving. (Atlantic)

Brief interviews with publishers of extremely specific magazines. (The Morning News)

And that’s all I’ve got! Come and talk to me here any tiiiiime.

xx

m

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

Follow me on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. (Plus my book recommendation Instagram!)
FOR NOW!

Forward to your friends if you liked this and to people still using #blessed unironically in the year 2023 if you didn’t.

Also, write back to me! I love to hear from you.

Subscribe now

The Internet Personified: Ground control to Major Min

Happy Valentine’s Day, my sweet little cinnamon rolls,

I’ve been back in Berlin for less than four weeks, and I have jumped in with both feet. Having done that thing that people do when they move to new cities, ie, accept all invitations, I am tired out, which is a nice problem to have if you’re an introverted extrovert like me. I get energy from other people, hearing their ideas and participating in their conversation, and this energy I turn into writing and editing, which I do alone in my little glass-walled study by day. Which means I’ve got to be a lot stricter with my social plans, trying not to let anything happen before 6 pm ideally, by which time I’ve done a full day’s work and am ready to rejoin the world. Although I miiiiight have overdone it. I have not had a whole day just at home not leaving the house at all for over six days, and I’m beginning to feel the stress of burning the candle at both ends. Squishy, our black cat, chose last night to practise his operatic arias, and K was away last night too, so it was just me, sitting bolt upright in bed, begging him to stop. Finally, he got into bed with me (sometimes he gets lonesome if he can’t figure out where the rest of us are) but I stayed awake between 5 am and something, only to wake up at 8.30 as I normally do, still feeling a little tired from my restless night.

It is the next day. We’d gone for a reading at our local public library last night, a very rare English language event about dating across races. An Iranian woman and a Nigerian woman were in conversation about their essays and their experiences about racism in the city. It was okay, not any earth-shattering revelations, nothing we hadn’t heard before, and the writing was quite bad, so I was a bit sorry we had picked “good” seats, ie, wedged in on all sides with no way to leave. Funnily, I think K and I were the only representatives of “interracial romance” in the whole room. On the way out, I spoke with the person who organises events for the library, telling him how much I loved the space, which he was really happy to hear. I do, I do truly love libraries, especially ones I am familiar with, even if the selection for English language readers is small, I still enjoy being there. He told me that he prefers to organise programmes in a language that is more accessible to the majority of the community that uses the library, which is sadly, not people like me, so English language stuff is few and far between. All the more reason to become fluent in German, I guess.

But my “immersion” technique is going well. That last sentence makes it sound like I have more of a plan than just floating around the city and overhearing occasional words when it suits me. In the area I live, it’s now increasingly common to only overhear English when you’re walking by a knot of people, so that’s pretty useless to me, but there’s the rest of the city to be listened to.

Just the other day, I was at Markthalle 9 with some German friends. If you’ve been to Berlin, you know it as on the list of attractions: an old school food hall which on Thursdays has a bunch of pop up restaurants from 6 pm to 10 pm. Heaving crowds and no place to sit. A deposit on your glass so you’re sure to take it back and reclaim your four euros. That kind of place. I’ve visited before as a tourist, and now occasionally as a resident. Anyway, so we were there till 9.55, when they rang a giant bell and told us to leave. We were all still finishing our last drinks, when a lady came up to us and said they were closing, except instead of the usual word I’ve heard before for “closing” which usually refers to doors being shut, she used “feierabend.” I usually break apart German words I don’t know to examine them for context, and here she was saying “party evening.” “We’re now having a party evening,” she said to my friends. Meaning that it was time for the workers to party while the customers went away. I asked the Germans about it and they said it was pretty common to use in a shop or a restaurant. “You could even say, “I’m now ready for a party evening,” when you’re going to bed and you’re done drinking,” said one of them. I went home and questioned K further (he’s been a bit ill—not COVID—last week so he stayed in while I gallivanted.) “Could I say,” I asked him—this is my favourite game, taking new German words I’ve learned and putting them into different contexts— “Come over this evening for our feierabend?” “If you’re making a pun, sure,” he said. So I haven’t quite figured out why the word for “party evening” is the word for “closing” but not literally the word for “party evening.” Languages are hard.

I Googled it, and came across this interesting blog about the origins. I’ll quote the best bits:

The second part of Feierabend is Abend and it means evening. Note that the German evening lasts longer than the English one does, so it is also used in sense of night. The question “What are you doing tonight” translated literally using Nacht might sound a little salacious or the answer might just be “Sleep. Why?”

Feierabend is the moment when you have finished your work and there is not really a translation for that… by the way, it is actually strange that there is all these grumpy faces in Berlin subway at 5 pm as they all have party-night.

This is one of THE MOST used goodbye-phrases amongst colleagues. And it doesn’t matter whether it actually IS evening or not. It is also used by two night nurses at 8 am to say goodbye and you can also say it when your coworker, who is only a part time, leaves the office at noon.

And here is the little gender reminder… it is of course DER Feierabend so it is masculine because MEN work while women enjoy their Freizeit (free time) which is hence die Freizeit… what’s that? Not 1950 anymore?… true true true.. but back then when the articles were forged by those wise men, those were the days I tell ya’.

In my case, I’m trying hard to stick to a schedule, which is easier in the winter because it’s so dark and grim outside and it takes me 15 minutes longer to get ready because of all those layers, something I keep forgetting and then I’m late and in a rush but still trying to pull on my long johns. I have my party-evening at 6, and if I live by that rule, it means I get quite a lot done before I leave the house. Also why I’m desperate to finish off my next book before summer comes around again and the whole city is calling to me.

I’ve been using my tarot cards more and more these days, just for fun, just for a little optimism boost as it were. I put them on my bedside table and often my question is, “should I go out tonight?” I’m not sure what I’m expecting the cards to do here, to be like, “no! don’t go! stay in with Netflix!” but anyway, often the only answer I get is YES GO OUT YOU’LL LOVE IT. Last weekend the cards said: Wheel of Fortune (destiny), The Tower (big changes) and Six of Swords (get out of your comfort zone.) Which might hold true for my life in general. Another card I keep pulling is Three of Pentacles (indulge yourself, stop scrimping) and while I am not some giant millionaire-spendthrift type person, I find myself worrying slightly less. Same amount of money, less stressing about it. It’s hard to loosen the tight grip your fingers have on all your financial anxieties but just a little letting go makes some difference to your general mental health.

The night I drew those cards, we were going to an event at a second-hand bookshop I love. It’s called Another Country and it used to be run by a transwoman named Sophie. This bookstore was her baby, she had parties and events all the time, it was a safe space for other trans folk, she kept spare hormone shots at home for anyone who needed it and generally made it welcoming and a home away from home for queer folk. Now, I just stumbled upon it as a reader, having no clue about all these backstories, just knowing that it was a terrific bookstore, one of the kinds I like best, lots of squashy chairs, books stacked almost to the ceiling, a really good collection etc. And then Sophie died, and it looked like I was never going to get to go to the store again. But then a team of volunteers took over to run it and now they’re having weekly events and all sorts of fun things, including, the night we went: a pub quiz. (Which our team totally won. Our prize was a bottle of wine, but we’d already had one bottle of wine, so I was happy to share with all, after all the winners had taken a glass.) I have left my email address behind so that they can let me know if they need more volunteers, but for the moment, I’ll settle for the occasional pot luck pub quiz evening.

But I’m a little tired now, so I think this weekend I will finally sit down with my jigsaw puzzle and a hot drink, cozy in the house, something nice on the stove, the cats threatening to ruin everything by walking all over it, a good show on TV after, early bed with a library book; winter has many delights, both within and without.

Thank you for reading The Internet: Personified . This post is public so feel free to share it.

Share

If you liked this post, or any of my others, would you buy me a coffee?

Buy me a coffee!

You can also buy one—or all!—of my books to support me as a writer!

Buy one of my books!

Or you could do bothhhh—a little something for me and a little something for you. Remember my new novel comes out in April, so you have to catch up on my backlist first.

Currently reading

White Teeth by Zadie Smith (which is a re-read, I wanted to get into it again because of the IMMIGRANT EXPERIENCE etc.): I don’t know. Still a great book but not feeling as great as it did when I first read it. Maybe even slightly pretentious and long winded? SHOCKING. I love Zadie Smith! Why is this happening to me?

Notes On An Execution by Danya Kukafa: A serial killer is being executed, his life is told from many different points of view. A library book I’m halfway through. Quite good, quite gripping.

Currently watching

Wednesday, which you’ve obviously seen, a fun teen drama about Wednesday Addams, a sort of dark grim supernatural comedy. And rewatching The Legend of Korra, both on Netflix.

On to the amazing links!

Oldie but goldie: the American male at age 10.

Things I do not like hearing.

The girl internet and the boy internet.

Another v specific German sitch: when do you say “du” and when do you say “Sie”? (“aap” and “tum” for non German Hindi speakers.) (Thanks Akshata for the link!)

Ok gtg, love you, miss you, byeeeeee

Subscribe now

xx

m

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

Follow me on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. (Plus my book recommendation Instagram!)

Forward to your friends if you liked this and to everyone in the Southern hemisphere currently enjoying a glorious summer if you didn’t.

Also, write back to me! I love to hear from you.