For years I had let my routine dominate my life. I was chained to the clock and was its willing slave. For years, my routine had seldom veered beyond wake up, walk, write, household chores, write, bed… the only disruption was when I travelled, and on Sundays, when I watched TV all day.
In this new life, in my new home in the little village of Sonnac in the Bordeaux district of France, the first thing I did was to liberate myself from the clock and numbers. I turned my day on its head. I woke up when my body told me to. Some days, I went back to sleep, getting up to eat breakfast at lunch time. I prepared meals that required minimum cooking and plated them as if I were competing on Masterchef . I washed dishes once a day, washed my clothes once in four days and swept the house once a week. I hadn’t come all the way here to reinvent myself as a domestic goddess, I told myself sternly. I had music playing all day. I wrote at night with a glass of wine on the table and I walked during the day.
Overhead, the sun would be blazing hot but it didn’t matter. One of the joys of getting to the age I am is that one stops worrying about inconsequential things like complexion. So, at two in the afternoon, I would walk my lonely roads while everyone else was probably taking a siesta. Once or twice, I would meet a lone tractor tiller combing the fields.
Late spring is a joyful time in all of Europe. After the long and bone-chilling winter, the skies turn blue and the sun emerges with a youthful radiance. The flowers appear; some familiar, like roses, jasmine, marigolds, gladioli and hollyhocks, and some typical to that land — daffodils, daisies, climbing roses, apple, cherry, plums — everywhere everything suggests spring and the abundance of fertility. And so, the vegetable gardens are laden with produce too — tomatoes, carrots, lettuce, artichokes, rhubarb…
Late in the evening, I would see old men and women, working on their allotments. Turning the soil, pulling out weeds, staking leggy plants, building frames, lugging in a tin drum to catch rainwater, driving a car with a pick-up attached to bring in the grass from their garden to make mulch… Soon, I took to watching these people who, in the vegetables they grew, saw a purpose.
One man, a retired bank manager, bicycled 30 km from Cognac, the nearest city to his allotment in Louzinac, the adjacent village. He would bring his lunch with him and work all day in his large allotment. In the evening, he would bicycle 30 km back. And I couldn’t help compare him to several men I knew; so much younger than him but who had already given up on life and settled rather too eagerly into being couch potatoes.
As I would walk back towards home, I would stop at an artisanal boulangerie. This one didn’t have a name and they didn’t make too much. Just enough to meet the needs of the village. But they also made pastries that until then I had only eaten in expensive restaurants around the world. Profiteroles, rum-babas, eclairs, opera cake, macarons, Mille-feuille, tarte tatin...
The boulangerie would open as early as four in the morning, when the bread-making would begin. By six, the first loaves would appear. Like boulangeries all over rural France, this one too would close by about 11.30 in the morning and, since they made pastries, would open for a couple of hours in the evening.
Since it was at the end of the lane I lived on, I took to dropping in there every evening to buy myself a pastry or refresh my bread basket. As I would open the door, a little bell would ring somewhere deep in the old building and the owner, a woman with curly brown hair, would emerge almost singing her greeting, “Bon jouuuuuuur”. I’d sing back, “Bon jouuuuur”. I didn’t speak French and the owner didn’t speak English but we managed the transaction with sign language.
After a few days, when I was promoted to the status of regular customer, I summoned the courage to bring up the madeleine. She smiled and shook her head. They didn’t make madeleines. How could they not make madeleines? I had wanted to taste them ever since I read Marcel Proust’s description of the madeleine from his Remembrance of Things Past . I had seen pictures of them. But until I held a madeleine in my hand, smelt its aroma and tasted its texture, how would the experience be complete?
I tried to find the madeleine in several other boulangeries when I went to nearby towns. But no one made it anymore. And then in a supermarket, I found a packet of madeleines. Rather like the cupcakes and unniyappams we buy as packaged goods, the madeleine, from being a family speciality, had turned into a commodity. I took the packet to Le Chais, the cottage where I was staying, and made a cup of tisane. I was set on recreating what Proust had written about so eloquently.
And there it was. A reminder of things past. Except that it reminded me of the star cake from a bakery in Shoranur called Baking Aroma. In a strange twist, the universe had conspired to bring before me both the madeleine I had sought and the star cake I had mourned for. The past and the present collided in a sweet moment.
But I was yet to find the epiphany I sought in travel until I walked into the old village church that is at least a few centuries old. Now the church opens on just one day in the year: on Christmas Day. It was so dilapidated that my landlady Jackita, who was once the mayor of the village, organised volunteers and mended cracks, whitewashed walls and laid the stone floor again. Jackita still has the keys to the church and so I had access.
It was an empty church. There were no pews or altar. There wasn’t even a candle. In fact, it could just have been a huge hall if it weren’t for the cross in an alcove. I sat cross-legged in the middle of the Church allowing the stillness to percolate into me.
It is said the sum of all real numbers is undefined but logicians and mathematicians did see a potential in zero to be the value of infinity. Since we developed mathematics to count definite things, and zero represents no things, here was a conundrum. If we see zero as the sum of all numbers, we must allow its usual value of “nothing” to change to a value equal to the sum of all numbers. Which means we assume zero to have a value greater than all other numbers. If zero is the greatest value, that is, the sum of all numbers, what then is the value of the number one, or two? Which is greater, one or two, if zero is greater than both?
These are questions that people have pondered upon for a long time. But as I sat there in that empty church, I knew the true power of nothing. Of the zero. Of being allowed to redefine and start afresh. Be it a church or life, with nothing we can begin everything.
