Krystia Basil

Works

Cycle Gap

My piece on writing while parenting was featured on the podcast @Read650.

You can listen to it right here 👇🏽

You can read it below 👇🏽

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In the teeming seaside city of Chennai in the South of India, where I am from, we have a turn of phrase - 'cycle gap'.

It is not a translation from Tamil, the regional language, one of the oldest in the world. It is not English, although it may seem apparently so. Its etymology lies in that sweet spot between the two, the true language of the Dravidian masses, the hybrid Tanglish.

Cycle gap -

Literally speaking, it's a gap just enough for a bicycle to squeeze through in heavy traffic, usually between a towering truck and an overcrowded bus.

Figuratively speaking, it's the slim window of opportunity that the quick and the brave seize and manifest into a grander destiny.

Born on the congested streets of my hometown, wielded in a broad range of arenas from police stations to parliament, auto stands to airports, classrooms to boardrooms, and executed with equal parts flustered vexation and grudging respect, the phrase is a poem in its own right.

Any notion of me being a writer was born in cycle gaps.

A single word scribbled on toilet paper during a diaper change.

A barely coherent sentence typed one-handed on my phone while nursing my daughter.

A stream of consciousness feverishly recorded on voice memos.

It didn't matter how much or how well I wrote, it mattered that I did.

As I stumbled along in the dark tunnel of early motherhood, cycle gaps were my shafts of light.
As I struggled to find my identity as a mother, cycle gaps helped me discover myself as a writer.

As 'moming' morphed into several full-time jobs, cycle gaps allowed me to have a side hustle.

Now, there are many things you can do with your cycle gaps -

You can take a break from Bubble Guppies and watch Bridgerton.

You can take a well-deserved power nap.

You can take a much-needed shower.

Bridgerton - check

Power naps - check

Showers - I opted for discretionary dabs of Arm & Hammer fresh meadow scent so that I. Could. Write.

Writing helped me process the panic that comes with parenting.

Writing helped me weed through the what-ifs.

Writing helped me face my fears and fail forward.

There was a period of time after my daughter outgrew the baby swing when she would only sleep in my arms. I would hold her and bounce her and sing to her but the more I watched the clock the longer it took her to fall asleep.

So I stopped watching the clock. I made peace with the process. I sat with her and learned to appreciate the weight of her warm body in my arms.

It anchored me. It stilled my mind. It allowed my thoughts to meander, flit unfettered, make connections that are impossible during the whirlwind of wakefulness. I wrote and rewrote epics in my head. I didn't retain more than a word, a fragment, an image.

But these words, fragments, images - they were my passwords to a portal.

As my children slip into their dream world, I step through this portal into the imaginary world I've been slowly and painstakingly building, word by word. This is my playground and I play with abandon the way my children have taught me all day long.

I change, rearrange and discard with audacity.

I rebuild, strengthen, and shape with specificity.

I paint, polish, and embellish with whimsy.

I am the Goddess of my own imagination and so with hubris, I create. 99% of the time I am a person without control over anything. During that precious 1%, in that cycle gap, I seize control. I manifest.

In between potty training and playdates, I weave together words.

In between laundry and dishes, I pull together a plot.

In between my baby's first step and her first word, I birth my first book.

In the cycle gaps of being a parent, I become a writer.

A Sky Without Lines

Arturo loves to look at maps and trace the lines where different countries meet, as if greeting each other with a big hug. But his mother tells him these lines have a different purpose - to keep people from moving freely across the land. Arturo and his mother are separated from his father and his brother Antonio by one of these lines. Try as he might, Arturo cannot think of a way to cross this line to see his family again. But then he has a dream, of flying through the open sky, a sky without any lines and meeting Antonio on the moon.

Artful, nuanced watercolors illustrate a young boy's sorrow at separation and his hopeful dreams of a world without borders.

My Library

Read650's collective of memoir-based essays by 12 authors on the topic 'My Library - True Stories of Books, Nooks, and Furtive Looks'.

If I could, I would choose to live in a cocoon of books stacked ten high and twenty deep. If I could I would choose to die amongst books—words swirling around my soul skeptical of another heaven. All my life, libraries in all forms have been my true church, reading my true religion.

This love of reading is my mother's living legacy to me. Newly married and settling down in the sprawling metropolis of Madras, the first thing her husband discovered was that he had committed to a library visit once a week. These were libraries where you paid a small fee per book, per day. This expense would find a permanent place in the monthly budget. But riding his scooter to the library, with his young wife primly sitting pillion, impeccably dressed in a chiffon sari, her arm wrapped across his hammering, happy heart, the effort and the expense had been worth it.

Three kids later, the tradition continued. On day 1 of summer, my father knew to prepare for the hour-long journey to the biggest and best lending library in the city. We now had a family van, our trusted Maruti Suzuki. We carried with us two large jute bags with sturdy wooden handles. They would come back, filled to the brim with novels for my mother - Danielle Steele and Mary Higgins Clark jostling with Stephen King and John Grisham. For us kids, it was Archie and the gang, spunky Nancy Drew and those groovy Hardy Boys.

But it wasn't just the lending libraries of Madras that fed my reading frenzy. In the seaside town of Pondicherry, my cousins maintained a small library in their home, stacked with back issues of Reader's Digest as well as books on the adventures of adolescent girls in boarding schools like Saint Clare's, Malory Towers, and the alpine Chalet School. Oh, how I longed to be a boarder, sharing tuck boxes during covert midnight feasts.

When we visited the cosmopolitan city of Bangalore, my other cousins introduced me to Trixie Belden who solved mysteries around her hometown Sleepyside-on-Hudson. Trixie was klutzy and awkward, but smart and fearless. I related to her growing up. I still want to be her when I'm all grown up. And the series is absolutely why I live near the Hudson.

I came to the United States for my Master's degree at Miami University in the bucolic town of Oxford, Ohio. My first winter… Knocked. Me. Near. Dead. As undergrads stocked up for snowstorms with giant bags of pretzels and six-packs of beer, I shored up my spirit by heading to the cavernous school library and checking out armloads of books on every subject that had ever caught my imagination growing up. In my cozy off-campus room, I set up a third-hand bookshelf that I lovingly lined with my library books. I racked up substantial fines I had to pay before I could graduate, a small price for two years of literal literary immersion.

To date, my most delightful discovery about the US is not the jalapeno poppers from Arby's or the lemon-glazed doughnuts from Krispy Kreme. It is the very fact that public libraries exist. To be part of a community that prioritizes access to books the same as access to water - I do not take this for granted.

My parents taught me well, and I'm trying to do the same for my children. It is now my treasured tradition to visit the local library with my kids. After storytime, I read in a rocking chair while they lose themselves in the children's nook. We leave with far too many books to carry.

View a live reading of the essay by Krystia Basil:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIGe3FpkzT0