Asiatic Library

Asiatic Library, with its Town Hall flight of steps, Cinderella-like from afar and chipped and battered up-close, a promised haven of untouched library treasures locked deep in unreachable and—more importantly—undecipherable metal chests, is an exercise in shedding. At the door, I am shed of my backpack. Name in the register, token in hand, I place the carcass among the deposited bags; it folds in on itself, forlorn. In my arms, I juggle a laptop, two notebooks and a fountain pen, encased neatly in a travel box that Charley Miles does not let me throw away when she gifts the fountain pen to me, because who knows when you might need it? I approach the desk, pull out a notebook with a combination of elbow, chin and chest and point. Tillotson. Rajput palaces. Rs. 3,500 on Amazon—here, free. Do you know where I may find it?

A kind lady directs me to the corridor of metal chests. Look for the name, she assures me, then write down the code here—paper handed to me—and bring it to us. We will bring the book to you.

The cupboards are steel, rusted and authoritative. They eye me. They look much like the Godrej cupboards my grandmother used. They remind me of the old saying: Godrej lasts a lifetime. I try and move confidently. I have tried to navigate this corridor once before; then, I scampered, pretending to look urgent and hassled to hide the shame of my absolute bewilderment. Is this subject? Or author? Or foreign author mixed with subject? Or title and periodical? Or just periodical? I find a file of cabinets titled ‘Author’ and yank on a drawer labelled ‘Ti’. It reveals a belly full of catalogue cards, handwritten in faded ink pen. The list is endless, my fingers parting yellowed paper that frays at the edges, soft and musty. When I finally reach the end, it is only on ‘Tilak’. Recognising the next drawer holds success, I am excited. The drawer is stuck. I keep pulling, trying to pretend this is just a minor setback. After one minute of rattling the large cabinet, sound thundering among equally thundering fans, a librarian helps me. He opens it with ease. Second exercise in shedding: my dignity.

There is no Tillotson. But I have checked this out with the secret knowledge of the Internet—I am certain the book is here. I will not be defeated: not after one hour in J.J. flyover traffic, being roasted under the Mumbai sun, skin turning a fleshier brown. I move to the ‘Subject’ cabinet and begin to search.

The librarian, a kind man who has decided I know little to nothing of life, is beside me again. He disappears to help customers who want books: in between them, he returns to me, a guruji drawn to his most damaged pupil. Tillotson? But he is English. I’ve been looking in the wrong cabinet all along. He points, to a cabinet I believe is neatly labelled ‘Periodicals’. All foreign authors are listed there.

When I find the promised drawer, beginning with the famous ‘Ti’, it is again stuck. This time, I shed all semblance of capability. I am desperate. The librarian reappears—slippers slapping slow against the long flagstone corridor, weary for this damaged pupil who keeps straying—and pulls. It is indeed stuck. He comes back with a hammer. Having pulled the drawer above out, he proceeds to hammer at the edge of my drawer, short, powerful strokes that drown out even the thundering fans. If I have shed my knapsack, my dignity and my capability—and possibly any belief a stranger could harbour that I am more than twelve years old—I am now re-clothed in stares. Asiatic pauses to observe the spectacle—bang, bang, bang—as the metal cabinets eye me, certain that they will outlast any life I choose to lead, no matter how healthy. I vow to take my calcium tablets and exercise.

The drawer opens. The librarian leaves. Tillotson is not there.

I gather up my laptop, books, wallet and fountain pen, delicately arranged in a pyramid. I don’t understand, I cry. The Internet—the Internet—said the book would be in Asiatic Library.

Madam, says the librarian, and, for once, I sense a touch of weariness, this is Central Library.

I am ushered down more corridors, this time with escorts. It is clear my fame has spread. Each librarian, no matter which section they sit in, knows: this woman cannot be trusted to get where she needs to go. I am deposited in front of more metal cabinets, placed under a beautiful wide ceiling with glossy old leather armchairs. A man behind another desk watches—at the first sign of need, he will be by my side. But there is no need. This time, I find Tillotson, perched under ‘Til’, smug and confident as anything. I am directed to another desk, a calmer man, who promptly takes down my name and strips me of my laptop. He asks me if I need it. I say of course not: I hold my pen and notebooks tighter, and feel proud.

The room I enter is calmer, more sedate, rows of desks where librarians work in heavenly silence. Even the fans are more respectful. It has—oh sweet lord—a computer, with an online catalogue that I can use to find Tillotson’s book number. Another librarian stands over my shoulder as I type and talks me through it anyway—because, why not? Leave nothing to chance. She watches as I open my fountain pen case and then my fountain pen, writing the code on the sheet she hands me. By the end, my fingers are stained with ink. It is a valuable book, she says, checking its classification. I think of Cambridge, where rare books are placed on a pillow and you’re given a soft-cloth paper-weight to hold the pages down—a fat, ridiculously snake-like apparatus that I was constantly tempted to drop onto the floor, to watch it slither and curl—and you are not allowed anything but a pencil. Would there be, I say, holding up my hands, a ballpoint pen I can borrow?

The next two-and-a-half hours are spent among those librarians, turning the pages of Tillotson’s Rajput Palaces carefully with my clean fingers and sometimes with my elbows, taking down detailed notes. It is by far the most useful book I have encountered for my study, and I am rewarded with beautiful, beautiful floor plans of Udaipur City Palace. These I am allowed to photocopy (or to send for photocopying, after filling out another form) and I carry them with me as I leave as evidence of my triumph. On my way out, librarian after librarian smiles, nods, does all but clap. The guard at the door returns my empty bag to me and watches as I refill it, proud. After today, I would not blame them if they were glad to see the back of me. But it’s not that. It is not even that they are proud of my triumph, their lost and baffled pupil; I not only found the book I wanted but stayed, diligent, to comb through it properly. No. I believe their delight came from a simple piece of knowledge, evident from my step, my smile, the two sheets I all but waved at the crowd. Asiatic Library, chipped steps, metal cabinets and all, has found a fan.

WOOFing

As a term, abbreviation or not, ‘WWOOFing’ leaves much to the imagination. The first time I told family members, friends, and godfathers, the reaction was almost the same: a dog farm? Where they teach you to ‘woof’? No, not ‘woofing’ the verb. WWOOF: World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms. After that, opinions branched into distinct categories. Incredible:

‘That’s amazing! What an experience!’

‘I can’t believe you’re doing this. I am so envious.’

‘Tash, the things you’ll learn…’

And, the ever apparent, incredulous:

‘So essentially, you mean: unpaid labour.’

‘Wait, you’re paying someone to let him let you work his fields? You’re paying labour? I am struggling to understand this.’

‘Stay at my house for three weeks instead; I’ll let you do the dishes and I won’t charge you. What more can you ask?’

Needless to say, I fell into the first category. I am a city girl: the idea of moving out into the fields, the Tuscan fields no less, and pushing my body into spaces it had not gone before was intriguing, if not challenging. And I needed challenging. The year had been spent battling with the novel, escaping into travel and using my degree to decent use. Now I needed to learn, an area as far removed as my MPhil as possible.

I can’t say I did much learning. The things I know are likely useless now that I am back in my city, and probably useless out in the field as well, because which farmer would not know it? But they are precious to me. I know the zuccinni grows with a yellow flower on top and when you extract it from its mother plant, at 7am in the morning, its petals are prone to tear on the thorny stems. I learnt that stuffed zucchini flowers, lightly fried, are delicious. That when you pluck a field of tomatoes, the dirt ingrains itself into your skin. That breaking a raw tomato in half and rubbing it on your fingers eradicates the dirt. I stood among rows of magenta bull’s blood beet leaves, and listened to them snap in the morning air, releasing a faint scent of sap and cold dew. I drank wine taken from the farm’s personal store, filled in a plastic jug because all the official bottles were sold. I listened to the story of the making of that wine, brewed only last year. I walked up the hill and saw the vineyard from where they were plucked, new crop now ripening for the winter. I pulled leeks out the wet, sodden earth, half dug out with a shovel first. Ever pulled out leeks? There is nothing more satisfying than yanking that unassuming, green stem and watching the white bulb wrench free, its roots dangling with the remains of the earth.

I learnt there was a vaguely hypnotic rhythm to plucking strawberries. The bushes themselves don’t grow higher than half a foot, so you have to kneel and forage, parting strangely prickly leaves to find the green buds and then the crimson ones, ripe and full against your gloved palm. I learnt, after sorting through crates and crates of potatoes, that a bad potato is a disgusting thing and smells to high heaven. And my arms are weaker than I imagined and that no one else had any illusions about their strength (all the men would step forward to help me carry the boxes of potatoes). I rode on a tractor each morning. I picked the smallest pair of gumboots. I ate nutella for my second breakfast and a banana for my first. I watched Giovanni make the unhealthiest, but easiest and most divine bacon cabonara, and let Carey, our amazing New York chef, teach us about different dishes. She makes a mean macaroni and cheese. I ate the vegetables we picked that morning and moaned about zucchinis. I sat on our balcony after a day’s work, a cold beer in front of me and Tuscany ahead, Viktor strumming the guitar on the side, and I felt at a soulful peace.

Pretty Fly (For a White Guy)

[Note: I’ve been given permission to write this blog post on the understanding that I will name it the above title. I have spent almost all of my life knowing this song, and assuming that ‘fly’ in the title referred, literally, to a ‘beautiful fly’, because women were spiders who desired the fly (see lyrics: http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/offspring/prettyflyforawhiteguy.html). Lucy now tells me this makes no sense whatsoever, and it means ‘cool’, which makes far more sense both in the context of the song and in the context of this blog post.]

Jaipur is a mixture of stereotypes (the snake charmer at Chandpole gate, the sacks of dried red chilli that burn your nose as you walk past, puppets and jodhpuris) and a sense of alienation that has little to do with the city itself. Travelling with my friends, Lucy and Charley, has been a new experience for me, not the least because I usually travel alone, but also because of how people react to us as a trio. I cannot claim extensive travel in India on any scale, but the places I have been to have reacted to me in two ways. A) You’re a foreigner attempting to be an Indian. B) You’re a Mumbaikar, and are about as knowledgeable as a foreigner. And yet, my status has brought with it perks I never noticed until this trip. The ability to disappear for one. To blend into a crowd, despite my obviously out-of-place clothes, and to be not looked at twice. Charley, who has glorious and long red hair, cannot do this. Lucy, whose eyes are sea green, also struggles. And I, default traveller with these two wonders, find myself a sudden centre of attention, a focus as a means of communication with my travel partners.

I cannot quite pin point how this feels. On some level, it is a strange sense of acceptance to barter with a shopkeeper in Hindi, using the usual ploys (‘What? That price?! How will I eat?’) and have him play the same game on the other end (‘Block printing Madam. Extra special. Never find anywhere else’—despite the fact that the shop next to him has the same piece on display). It is also nice to leave said shop and have your friends thank you, instead of laughing at your Hindi. I have held more conversations in Jaipur with locals than I would have done on my own. Most of these have been answering questions few of them would have asked an Indian: Where are you from? How do you three know each other? Can I take your friends’ pictures? No? Okay—can I take your picture first and then take your friends’ pictures? Some of them have been strangers who smile at the three of us and then melt with joy when I can speak Hindi, because they want to help and wouldn’t know how to in English. I’ve translated instructions from a guard in Hawa Mahal, and stood witness as my friends were blessed with scared thread, and given prasad and a tika for a Mumba-devi festival that I have never heard of, and still believe is made-up.

But there have also been strange moments. A man who caught a pigeon and shoved it in our faces while shouting, ‘I love you!’ and then followed us down the street. The autorickshaw that would not leave us alone. The resentment of several well-meaning and perfectly nice people when I’ve prevented them from taking a picture with my friends. The sudden appearance people next to us when we sit down (women and children mostly), as their partners photograph them sitting in front of a wall. The comments people make in Hindi when they think we’re all British and then their look of embarrassment when my glare shows them that I am not.

I went to a new year’s party this year, where I was called ‘white’ for not knowing what the word ‘patiyala’ meant (it is a large peg of alcohol). However, having now seen Lucy weeping because her sunblock has melted into her eye, and watched Charley spray herself with mosquito spray like it’s perfume, I think I’m pretty fly for a white guy.

Tofino: Prayers

Someone prayed for me tonight. Her name is Sarah: she’s come to Tofino from Calgary, as short vacation from the business that is her life. She brings her travel guitar with her and she sings ‘Let it Shine’ on the Tonquin beach as Mella, Geraldine and I dance in the sand, a combination of Wicca, boogie moves and exuberance. Her voice is beautiful and touches me in the same way as Lisa Hannigan and Ben Howard have.

Tonight, she asks if we are awake enough for introspective questions. She’s been reading a book, one of those self-help success books and there are four questions that she would like to try out. The questions are simple: they focus on our future, what we want most, what we have to make what we want most happen and what we need to develop and overcome in order to make that future a reality. Mella speaks about teaching and living in Canada – someday, one day. She talks about the confidence she needs, the very real obstacles of immigration and citizenship. I speak about writing but then get derailed to the anxiety that I have carried with me – what these moments are adding up to, what is the value (the ultimate value) of how I am living my life. Talking to them places the dichotomy into sharper focus, and it is Sarah who says: It is like there are two sides to you – one asking you to show down and take it all in, know it to its depth, and another that is anxious about the time that is running away from you.

After the lights are out, she asks if she can pray for us. The request is tentative but comes out of a place of sincerity, like she cannot not ask. She prays out loud. Her words are beautiful: they centre on each of us, our individual wants and obstacles and the kind of person she sees us as. This last part is especially touching: there is a clarity and focus to what she says that sharpens the lines around our bodies, deepening us from the mass of humanity. I am trying to find the words to explain what made the moment so special: the spontaneity of course, but also the intonation, soft at certain parts, stressed at others, carrying the depth of her care.

Tofino: Roy Henry Vickers (First Nation Artist)

I went for a story-telling hour with a First Nation artist, one of the most famous in Tofino. It was incredible, for so many reasons, many of which cannot be put into words. But this is what I wrote down when I came back, in an attempt to get all the impressions as clearly as I could.

This is not a blog post, because I have neither time nor words to make it such. These are only impressions. What do you recall of him? The calmness, a centred figure that carried within it an idea of knowing. His voice: “boom like”, Melanie said but it wasn’t at all – it wasn’t soft or loud, merely clear and calm, an even reel that drew you in. I noticed how he never varied his volume, not for the hushes cabin walls or for the persistent toddler that tried to talk over him. His voice remained, untouched by the external, and you tweaked your hearing to hear better or softer. I remember the story: Ben, the sea lion they saved from starvation and raised as a pet, before they let him go. The way he said at the end: ‘That’s a true story. Or most of it anyway.’ How simple the whole story was – a sea lion is gained and a sea lion is lost – and yet rich in detail, unanxious about its own importance, content in the knowledge that it was rich in importance to him. The details – the revelling in the miniscule – the size of the sea lion’s teeth, the dogs as they circled him, their planning, their eyes. Sound. The rapping of his knuckles against the desk he sits on, breaking into the air and making us jump: his cousin, knocking on the door in the early morning to say that Ben had come back, that he had found his way home. The faces he made, his body. The craning of the neck to show Ben, lifting his head; the slow titling of his torso to show how Ben hugged; the hands, showing Ben’s flippers as he pulled himself along the sand.

He says in the beginning that he hates public speaking. When people asked him to talk, he would say: “Look at my paintings. A picture is worth a thousand words.” And yet later, he says, he realised that storytelling is worth a million pictures, painting in each listener’s mind, all the more beautiful because they belong only to the person and the speaker cannot see them. “Human beings have the art of seeing with their eyes closed. We call that art visions.”

At the end, he teaches us a song in his original language. As the head of his clan, he has the right to give us this song, and having learnt it, it now belong to us, free to sing whenever we like. It’s the canoe song, sung to align the rowing of the oars, to ensure everyone moves as one – is one. He has brought a skin drum with him and he beats it to the rhythm. There is something soothing about hearing our voices embalm the air. After we’re done, he requests that we don’t clap, to not disturb the feeling we have created. “In my culture,” he says, “we say: I raise my hands to you.” Together we lift our hands to our shoulders. They automatically curve; perhaps our bodies feel the need to create beauty out of our gestures. It is a First Nation’s sign of gratitude, but also a universal sign for asking, and, in the cradle they form, for giving.

Takuminarti (Inuit Art)

I went to the Montreal Museum of the arts today. Like all glorious days, time had run away from me and I felt frustrated with the amount I wanted to do, write and see. I come to the Takuminarti art collection – wandering down staircases and up elevators – and am startled by the depth of feeling evoked in me by the tiny sculptures. Stones move, breathing into emotion caricature of figures: men carved as seals; shamen pulling fish out of oceans; two stags, antlers in the air, kissing. There is perspective here that drags the living out of the inanimate – a rawness of emotion to features that are recognisable and yet mysterious, as if the artist found only the strange, twisted and magical in us worthy of representation. I read that Inuit art is fascinated with the relationship between man and animal: the moment when the man takes the shape of an animal or the animal within him revealed (I think of a man, arched back, as a wolf breaks out of him). I wonder how they create the impression they do – that smoothness of bone as a face, sitting upon a porous antler body, offering a yellow otter and I cannot look away, ensnared by the detail that is both ordinary and extraordinary. How the pieces fit together just so, how they create a whole that is larger than the sum of the parts. It is essentially the battle I have been fighting all morning with my characters in the novel, as they flap around the page, flat, and turn back into stone.

I read the placard on the floor that says ‘Takuminarti’ is a new word coined for Inuit art. It is  derived from several dialects of different tribes, mainly the Nuvalik dialect. It means works of art so beautiful, you cannot look away.

Flowerwoman

She runs a 24-hour flower shop in some lane in Montreal; it has a narrow entrance, but is long within. It is 2am and the light from her shop creates a luminous section of pavement, white and glaring. We pass it earlier in the night and Nik pokes his head in to see if she is there. I saw bent shoulders and a broom. That’s her daughter, he said. She not here now – but we’ll bring you back to meet her. She’s a bit of a legend around here. Her shop burnt down last year and the neighbour raised money to re-build it. That’s how much she means around here.

Now the birdcages glow, reminding me of quaint shops in England. There is another pair of shoulders in there; they look the same to me, but Nik says that this is her, hair cropped short, face young (40 maximum? Not old enough to have 14 children. She shows me the pictures of the daughter she just married), eyes troubled and roving. She talks for a while about people complaining about her flowers on the pavement; the complaints wears heavy on her and she unburdens to Nik and Nihal like they are old friends. Nihal introduces me as the friend from India, and she peers at me from in between the gap they create; I smile, and say hello, and tell her I have heard much about her.

She tells me, in her broken English, that I must make my mother proud; work hard, maybe find a job in Montreal, but never forget all that she’s done for me, and where I come from. Then she guides me in, a short leading twitch of her fingers, and pulls out a small beaten red box. This is for you, she says. I open it; it’s a small twisted Chinese dragon sculpture. It bring strength and luck, she says. Use.

I offer money, but she smiles and shakes her head, patient. Money like toilet paper. You need, but too much – what you do? You throw away. On the way out, she pulls out two tigerlillies, and hands them to me, also for free. They are remarkably resilient, and last for a week after. She tells me to come back, and I say I will, I am here for two weeks. No, she says abruptly, working her way around her limited English. Not now. You come back a year later. You go be stronger. Better. Beautiful. Go find yourself.

I wrote to someone recently how writing gives everything purpose. But I forgot to add the flipside of this – taking what feels exceptional and kind and writing it into something that seems common and usual, part of all the literature you’ve read and clichés you’ve encountered. Perhaps both effects come from the same skill – the universality of a language. I read back on this and can see it as far more ordinary than I felt in the moment. Then it felt serendipitous, a stranger reaching out from the circle of her world to touch mine. Here, the magic dies in words, live as it might in memory.

Thunderstorms

Yesterday, I wrote a scathing note in my journal on how nice Montreal was. Everyone seemed happy: the pink-pigtailed girl with her pink bike, learning to ride beside her father; the eight year old who ran yelping down Mont Royal viewpoint as her father chased behind her, giddy, trying to fly a kite; the old man who met my eyes while crossing the street and smiled; the lady with the baby who turned back to make sure she answered my accident smile at the child. Nothing difficult happens. There are no corners to snag your heart on, no spaces to push your limits with.

Today, the heavens open and it pours – Indian-rain style. Rumbles of thunder crack across the sky. The sky turns a coal grey. My phone (still connected to the museum WiFi) goes crazy, flashing warning after warning. SEVERE THUNDERSTORM ALERT. MAKE SURE ALL YOUR APPLIANCES ARE UNPLUGGED. MCGILL GRADUATION TENT BEING EVACUATED. FLASH FLOODING EXPECTED. I turn and walk straight back to the bus stop, hiding my bag (with my precious laptop in it), under my coat. I get soaked. I figure if there is to be flooding, it is smarter to make my way back to Candiac before the buses stop. I wonder what kind of flooding? Indian flooding? The kind that needs canoes? If I was stranded, was there somewhere I could spend the night?

Half an hour later, it clears. I watch from the bus, incredulous, as the sky turns porcelain blue; the only indication there has been any rain at all is me and the sopping wet stranger at the front of the bus. When I tell Jocelyn aunty this later that night – my visions of Mount Royal high water, evacuation canoes hid in bus stop shelters – she laughs.

‘Oh no, couquette,’ she says. ‘Now when they say snow storm – that’s when you go home.’ 

Tofino – Lighthouse Keeper

It is 7am in the morning here, and the view outside the large bay windows is a deep and steady grey. A blue oyster house sits perched at the end of the boardwalk, the sea still. Now I cannot see the mountains, but I know they are there – blue and misty, and on particularly perfect days, touched with snow.

Vancouver Island is paradise – lush, wild, more untamed than any part of Canada I have so far encountered. On the drive up, our bus driver – a bearded man with a slight drawl and a beaded necklace, the kind you find on surfers – says: Welcome to the Tofino Express, ladies and gentlemen. I don’t care what they say; I still find that name funny. His sense of humour is acerbic but easy (I once met a strange man on this bus. He was very serious when he said he was both Buddha and Jimi Hendrix in his past lives. Pretty impressive for a kid from Milwaukee. But who I am to judge? I could be wrong – it has certainly been known to happen.). Tofino is much like that: small, touristy and laid back, but with depth beneath its veneer, if even that depth is only offered by its sheer natural beauty.

I’ve spent most of today in this room, soaking up the pattering skies, and the hardwood floors and rustic furniture. When I first arrived, no one was down, but now I have been joined by an assortment of people; reading books or kindles, writing emails or just staring out at the vast wide sea, cup of tea in hand, taking it in. The effect is calming. I had expected blue skies and hard sun (roasting me as it did in Jericho) but this is as – if not more – beautiful. I feel like a sailor, or a woman given a lighthouse of her own, equipped with everything I need: tea, chocolate, beauty and a crystalline solitude. Perhaps owning a lighthouse is the way forward. 

Objects as Family

I wander into the museum of Anthropology UBC without my notebook, which is sad because ideas (thoughts, impressions, observations, whatever you wish to call it) hit me all at once and then slip away before I can examine them. The sheer enormity of what I see stays with me. In the great hall, large totem poles flank the entrance, once columns to peoples’ homes. Gigantic ‘house dishes’, large enough for a child of eight to sit and play in them, are carved into the shape of seals, eagles, wolves. A long layered ‘speaking stick’ jeers at me, its many faces carved all the way to the base. Beauty and utility is mingled in first people artefacts, to an extent that astounds me. Totem poles were used to hold up homes, a form of making where one lives sacred (I remember a quote in the museum that speaks of the doors of the house as the mouth of the beast, the fire its soul). House dishes were used for Tribal Feasts, and in home usually displayed food items whose land the Chief had claim to. Speaking sticks imbibed the user with the authority to speak to and for the people at meetings.

There is distinct merging of object and person. I think of the large wooden statues, hollowed from the back, that were used at meetings. The face stretches all the way down to the torso, the lips curled into an emphatic ‘O’. Speakers would get up and stand behind the statue; their body disappearing, merging with the object, and only a voice echoing out, as if coming from the ancestor himself.

MOA hosts what I term a room of curiosities: stacked treasures that bleed and sharpen in their contrast – masks, sculptures, bows, arrows, boxes, canoes, paintings on lion seal skin. Within these columns upon columns (a small sneak peak into the thought process of the museum and what they choose to put on display in the main gallery), this is hidden: a small placard describing what a person feels walking through this room and seeing his history encased. It is titled ‘Objects are Family’ and he writes: ‘It is an amalgamation of objects from the past and people and ideas from the present. These object are family.’ Near me, a woman seems disappointed with the collection. It’s not the same, she is telling her friend, a tall white man, to see them in here. It’s the specific history that matters, the memory the object has in the house; where it was placed, how it was used –’

I find the idea beautiful, even if not exactly novel – the inanimate given meaning, imbibed and layered with the animate.