Author Prajwal Parajuly finds joy in dosa-less dinners and disappearing laundry

At the risk of reading like someone itching to be punched in the eye, I will say I am more content in Sri City than anywhere else. Friends accuse me of toxic positivity.

Sri City has allowed me to build a life I didn’t know I wanted. I am a cliché and a half.  For more than a decade, I led the opposite of a structured existence. I slept when I felt like it. I woke up when I felt like it. I wrote when inspiration struck. I said no to any writing that didn’t excite me, fully recognising the privilege at play. I never made my bed — I say this with zero exaggeration. But humans thrive on routine — you don’t need an expert to tell you that. Mundaneness is a beautiful thing. Sri City has provided me with more structure than even school did.

The regimented life I have here would make a colonel proud: wake up at 8; walk and jump rope in the neighbourhood park; say hello to Machu the dog, who makes a dash for my crotch; write a little; head to work in the university shuttle whose driver doesn’t return my greeting; classes, students and administrative meetings (fun, fun, eww); head home in a shuttle where the driver deigns to smile at me; eat a dinner as tame as the day; grade papers and call it a night. Contrast this with my life in New York, where I eat breakfast at 6pm and go to bed at 4am, and you know where the Sri City evangelism comes from.

I may have lulled you into believing that I live in a place where nothing happens. But excitement is never far off. I find it in the scavenger hunt triggered by the Krea laundromat losing an entire bag of my clothes. At other times, excitement visits me in the building in the form of monkeys whose habitat we have destroyed. And sometimes I even invite it — excitement, that is — into the sitting room of my apartment with the two bathrooms whose shared wall goes only three-quarters of the way up when I host poker games with a mix of players of superior, adequate and dubious skills.

But who needs excitement where there’s equilibrium? Who needs excitement where there’s teaching?

I am among those writers who like teaching more than they like writing. I often say, to my publicist’s horror, that I got into writing not because there was a story in me bursting to come out but because it was the easiest path to fans, fame, and fortune. (Ha). I write for all the wrong reasons, the shallow reasons. But teaching? Teaching is what I do for the soul. Teaching is what keeps me up at night.  It helps that Krea University students are smart and likeable (except when they switch off their cameras on Zoom).

Sri City is where I started writing again after quite a hiatus. For far too long, I clung to the coattails of the two books I wrote ages ago. I had stopped enjoying writing because it had become a job. But once I got settled here, I took a stab at translation. I finished a children’s book. I worked on travel essays. A similar burst of efficiency had last hit me in 2019 when I decamped to Landour, in Mussoorie. Landour is pretty, though. Aesthetically, Sri City has no business being this petri-dish for productivity, and yet the words are flowing in genres and languages I didn’t think I had any talent for.

I know I am aided by the lack of theatre, casinos, and concerts. But where there are no bars, there’s the sky-high up, where we are sometimes treated to rocket launches from the nearby Indian Space and Research Organisation. There may not be a beach, but we have the … winter monsoons. I kid.  We have Pulicat Lake close by, and waterfalls and hills to hike to. This is slow living at its best.

Could life be better? Yes, no doubt.  I’ll never forgive Krea University for excluding dosa from its dinner menu. The mess food is decent for campus fare, but I didn’t uproot myself to eat butter chicken and egg curry and paneer lababdar. I have a problem with the freezing classrooms, but I carry a jacket with me at all times. I wish house help were easier to find. The university does send a revolving trio of cleaners three times a week — and they do a good job — but the stipulations of their contract dictate that they just sweep and mop the floors and clean the bathrooms. How much easier life would be if someone cooked, did the dishes and put the laundry away.

They could skip the bed, though. These days I make it first thing in the morning.

Prajwal parajuly is the author of The Gurkha’s Daughter and Land Where I Flee. He loves idli, loathes naan, and is indifferent to coffee. He teaches Creative Writing at Krea University and oscillates between New York City and Sri City.