Windows to Madame Bovary
A literature scholar adjusting to her new house in the Millennium City
It’s midnight. Her fourth-floor house is quiet. Her daughter, husband and ma-inlaw are sleeping. She settles down on the dhurrie by the window, lights a diya, pours herself a glass of red wine, and opens her much-scrawled copy of Madame Bovary. Sugandha Sehgal, 36, teaches this novel to grad students. An assistant professor in Delhi University’s Jesus and Mary College, she has taken leave from work to finish her doctoral thesis on “Bodies out of context: politics and aesthetics of social media feminism.” Late last month, she shifted from her long-time house in Delhi’s Dwarka to Gurugram, in sector 62, Golf Course Extension. Trying to strike a friendship with the new home, she tells us on a Whatsapp video chat how she is experiencing its windows and balconies at different times of the day and night.
11.30pm: “I have been teaching Madame Bovary to university students for years. A line in it—“the window, in the provinces, replaces theatres and promenading”—rings very true for me as I sit for hours by the window, gazing at the changing spectacles of everyday life. After putting my baby to bed, on weekends after the wine, I like standing in the balcony, and looking at the moon. In fact, the moon is visible from every part of this house, which is more like a glasshouse with its too many windows. I remember stepping into my bedroom a couple of nights back, when the curtains were open and the moonlight was streaming straight into the room.”
2pm: “From the study’s window, I see the Millennium City’s underbelly, with an army of labourers building a residential luxury tower brick by brick. Seeing them, I see pure physical labour, making me wonder what it would mean to build palatial houses for others to live in.”
9am: “Every morning, my daughter’s first request on waking up is ‘Mumma, can I see the red slide?’ I then show it to her in the playground outside from our bedroom balcony, and each time she is thrilled to discover that the slide hasn’t vanished overnight.”
5.30am: “The scenes from all the windows at this hour are about the wind howling, reminding me of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. I don’t know what this wind tries to say but she has a song of her own that she sings everyday by my windows.”
Sunset hour: “I haven’t seen the sun setting in this house so far. Maybe I don’t care for sunsets. I actually prefer looking out of the windows after the sun has set and it is already dark.”
DEHRADUN: A huge rockslide may have crashed into a hanging glacier, forming an artificial water body and causing the glacier to crash a few kilometres upstream of the Rishi Ganga river in Uttarakhand’s Chamoli , spawning the deluge that devastated parts of the district on Sunday, according to the Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology.
A team of five scientists who visited the flash-flood site in Chamoli submitted its interim report to the institute’s director Kalachand Sain on Tuesday. It was the first team of scientists to visit the disaster site. Sain said the team of scientists led by Manish Mehta and Amit Kumar, who inspected the area on Tuesday, had tallied their ground observations with satellite imagery. Giving details of the team’s findings, Sain said it all started at a peak known by locals as Mrighu Dhani, a few kilometres uphill of Raini village, the last human habitation in the upper reaches of Chamoli district.
“There was a hanging glacier,” Saini said, and on top of the glacier was a huge rock mass.
Because of freezing, thawing and temperature variation, the rock mass loosened and came crashing down, creating pressure on the hanging part of the glacier.
“The fresh snowfall had also added to the weight over the hanging glacier also. And this hanging glacier broke off due to gravitational pull, slid down with the entire rock mass, all snow and took along more snow, debris, and boulders and soil.”
Sain said as the huge mass came down with force and slowed down near the base of the valley, where the Raunthi Gadhera stream flows. This stream receives waters from the glaciers.
“As the huge mass slowed a bit, then stopped, it blocked the water of the stream and the water quantum kept increasing. This damming up of the stream increased to such an extent that it breached the whole accumulated mass. The whole mass of water, boulders, and rock mass came crashing down with force towards the Rishi Ganga dam site,” he said.
The slush from Raunthi Gadhera stream, coming down with torrential force, washed away a hydropower project on the Rishi Ganga river and caused massive damage to the under-construction Tapovan hydel project. Until Tuesday evening, officials in Uttarakhand said 32 bodies had been recovered and another 174, who are missing, are feared dead. Geologist Dan Shugar of the University of Calgary had hinted at a similar possibility on Monday but did not speak about the possible formation of an artificial lake.