On being molested and the memory it leaves behind

I have striven to remove adjectives and emotions born out of them from my writing on numerous occasions. To try and write without adjectives is an exercise in writing itself. The kind advocated by unfamiliar faces of creative writing professors on Coursera, and by teachers who invested a decade (at the least) in journalism.

I have always hated that rule despite realising over time that there is value in it. It is difficult to write without them. Asking a young, enthusiastic writer to write without adjectives is like asking someone who rides a bicycle to do so without the side wheels. It’s paralysis. But as good writers will tell you, truth does not need a crutch. And adjectives are crutches.

But this piece (at least parts of it) will not find very many adjectives. Stories of molestation don’t need them. For women, an account of assault is understood without the extra words. For the unaffected men, it seems to me after all this time, no number of adjectives will suffice.

I was 9 or 11 or 12. I don’t remember the age. But I am fairly positive it was before I was thirteen. I remember wearing a yellow turtleneck and a denim skirt. I had long, thick black hair. I still do. The kind of hair my mother adored and my father found to be beautiful each time I let it loose.

Memories aren’t supposed to be constant. So there is a good chance this one is shifting from one emotion to the next as I type. But with as much certainty as I can muster, I remember scenes. Everyone remembers scenes and snippets. Be it from movies, so carefully curated, the expression in someone’s eyes when you hurt them or scenes from one’s own past….with oneself as the protagonist.

I remember being kissed on my mouth. I remember the ugly scent from that small home. I remember being made to touch a penis… Much later on I learnt that I was taught how to give a hand-job. For the longest time I associated the mechanical up and down of a hand-pump with a throbbing penis. I remember being touched in between my legs. I had no breasts at twelve (or nine or eleven) so my torso was spared.

Soon after, I watched these HIV/AIDS awareness advertisements on TV. I thought to myself that some touches are bad. Some areas are sectioned off. Just our own. I suppose at twenty six women would call these areas “their own”. Shades of select men would (perhaps) argue that these are “disputed territories”. But those advertisements scared me anyway. I prayed fervently each time I thought of touch and the yellow turtleneck and denim skirt combo– in a classroom, in a playground, in an auto ride back home. I prayed and prayed and prayed.

I have a lurking suspicion that there might have been some pleasure attached to it. Or perhaps it was fear. I cannot distinguish. Most women I know cannot. But to break character, to break away from the story I will say this. I did not know what “rape” or “molestation” was at that age. But supposing I did, I wouldn’t consider going to the police station. Not because of structural oppression or some shade of shame which comes out of the assault. But simply because my first instinct wouldn’t be to seek justice or to punish the perpetrator. My first instinct would be to clean myself, to not feel so sticky, to wash, to hide in the comfort of a room with familiar smells of linen and talcum powder.

Of course women don’t report assault because they fear being believed. They fear a second molestation born out of disbelief from the people semi-listening to them. But I wouldn’t mainly report assault at the moment because I would want to cleanse my body, reclaim those “disputed areas” and just for myself, squash the dispute. It doesn’t matter if I kill the DNA, the remains of the assaulter. I would much rather wash and scrub to just make sure that this body is mine alonẹ. No one else’s.

Coming back to the account, I am unsure what emotions I feel years after. It isn’t an irrelevant memory. Memories become memories only because of their relevance. I can never be detached to this story and yet somehow, I don’t need adjectives to express attachment. I can just give a complete report of the process and put it out for the world to carry with. It is up to them to decide if body are are disputed or a set of properties owned by a single soul. As for the emotions, I feel grief. Anger doesn’t come naturally. But if not for grief, I feel more intelligent for having undergone assault. Somewhat stronger, and far more perceptive.

But perhaps this emotion, this very memory and several like these, is the reason why women at some point or another find themselves wondering if men are expendable. It is not like an account of a person’s assault ends in their childhood. That’s just where it often starts. You then see traces of it in adulthood and find your mind constantly wondering if what you feel is love– a pure, unblemished sentiment or a sense of assurance that the man you love will not dispute your claim to your own body.

Each time I have admitted somewhat solemnly, on occasion cheekily, that I was molested, men tell me that “they don’t know what to say” but women often reply with an “I love you.” After the admission of affection, they descend into a sort of shame for either not having suffered enough or for making a bigger deal of their sexual suffering.

These are the most striking set of opposites: Men share sexual prowess. Women share sexual suffering. Men ask proof. Women willingly wash it off their bodies. Men confess to feeling ashamed for not having succeeded enough. Women… for not having suffered enough.

I am writing this today not because the thought of intimacy freaks me out, although it does at times. I am writing this because I have wanted to hide this story for too long. I have wanted to stop feeling ashamed for not having suffered enough.. because I have. There is certainly to be more suffering, and I will write about it. But if only for a while, the next few pieces I pen, I want it to be outside of me. Someone else’s story, someone else’s dream, an iota of someone else’s relevance. Or even if my writing circumnavigates my emotions, I want it to be the softer, warmer parts of my memories.

Truth doesn’t need adjectives. But somehow without them, it is hard to pin down the exactitude of truth. I have just started writing the truth about this suffering,, about assault and anxiety with intimacy. I am yet to understand it fully and hence understand my self fully. Adjectives are like all the women I love: essential to heal and with each story resembling my own above account, healing follows without the utterance of words.

(Dedicated to an attempt at bravery and to all the women who inspired it.)

This body of ours

Photographs and screengrabs on Instagram,
Exist to supposedly remind us
That bodies are beautiful.
The hair we sprout, not unlike roots spreading strength
Is a way of saying in clear motherly voices,
That skin needs nourishment
As does nature, as do our male-folk.

But women, for as long as history has been written
Will either narrate a tale of their bodies
Or give themselves up to silence.
Unlike men in the gallows, we silly beings are sentenced to life.

Men, of course go on about minds and philosophy
About how “they think therefore they are”
While we, the laughably gentler sex
Struggle with our anatomy, only to
Wake up in the middle of the night to shriek,
And later shush our voices into faded pillow covers
At the thought of sex, the dread of touch.

This is not a serenade for our skeletons covered with browns and blacks,
Neither is it an angry rant,
nor a hopeful prayer:
Fading along with the polluted mist
clouding over us all.

This is a truth, one which coats our leathery skins with dread…as we
As I weep. At the thought of my frame.
Waiting to be rescued by beauty
A concept again, invented by men.

Men think about their existence because Descartes asked them to.
He never spoke to me. I am not a rationalist.
I am, like most women, simply sentenced to exist.

(to me.)

Stained womanhood

I wish my mother had told me
long ago, when I was thirteen,
when I first bled, that trust
is an expensive commodity
not to be given in charity.

I wish she had paused
as she listed out rules of menstruation–
“Don’t enter the prayer room.
Cold water and Rin soap.
Don’t lift anything too heavy.”–

and instead in a scary tone,
which only mothers employ remark
“the kindness of the male folk
is to never precede
a woman’s intellect”

The first stains of blood
should work to bond women
to explain, to assuage, to remind
that woman’s intellect is unattractive,
and for good, useful reasons.

trust is after all to be measured
like mugs of water added to fermented batter
too much, it falls apart
too little it sits like a lump
in one’s throat.

as always, trust should be regulated
for manhood never has been.

Preliminary thoughts on Kindness

I have done this far too many times to count: Sit on my terrace as mosquitoes come close to and move away from my ear lobes, and the wind pushes strands of my hair into my eyes. I gently move the said strands out of my eyes, rub them to douse the irritation caused, and wonder if there is any emotion which is unconditional.

The mental health community will tell you the same thing an old Wodehouse story will. “This too shall pass.” Emotions are supposedly fleeting: they come and go, kiss and scuttle away, comfort and deny solace with every turn of the clock’s thinner arrow.

Perhaps, what lasts is some values, if one were to choose to subscribe to them for the entirety of their existence. But values are not as clearly thought out as people would like to believe. Values are always far more instinctive, perhaps tracing its roots back to a time long ago when your mother/brother/school teacher pulled you aside and told you in a gentle voice: “One must/ mustn’t be XYZ.”

I wish I could trace the roots of my values. I would love to find out what makes me, me. Orhan Pamuk starts his memoir by tracing back his first memory ever. Memories are perhaps easy, or at least easier to trace. Some one reminds you of the time when you peed in a classroom, when you lent your handkerchief to a child of your own age, when you bullied someone.

Memories, unlike the shaping of values, often have witnesses. You always exist in someone’s mind as a good child, a struggling teenager, a lovable goof or a gossip monger.

But values are matters so internal, that even the administrative department of your brain with its gazillion files struggles to find its roots. Religion is perhaps one answer. Culture and family another. But the history of values hop, skip and jump away as you try to find when, if ever at all, you decided that this is the person you want to be.

In a conversation with my work colleagues, I found myself stating that I was quite okay being unremarkable, unsuccessful even. I don’t remember what prompted me to say it but I said it nonetheless. As the words left my mouth and my colleagues nodded understandingly, I sat there surprised by how truthful I was, how honest I felt in the moment.

Here’s the really fact of the matter. I like kindness without its repurposed packaging for the benefit of an audience and that is what I want to talk about. I am not drawn to remarkableness and I don’t know if I ever will. I am unsure why I attach such a high premium on kindness or why I tear up privately when I witness it once in a while. This is not a confession of the compassion I store in my heart. Confessions, the most honest kind are made to oneself anyway, not to the world.

This is perhaps a plea, a soft hope which will perhaps finds its way onto Instagram (sandwiched between a photograph of banana bread and a post on the intolerance impregnating India).

Kindness is not a fool’s game. It is a well-thought, almost academic attribute. To be kind means to sit and browse through thoughts after thoughts as each one asks you if kindness matters more than dignity, more than success, far more than intellect.

My answer, which has been the same for the last four years is that it does. Kindness is an active quality unlike dignity or intellect which is self-possessing. One cannot stake a claim to kindness unless they find themselves partaking in it on a continual basis. The best don’t stake a claim to virtues anyway. They just let it be and busy themselves with a hobby, a friend, a chore, a job.

Intellect can be silent. As can dignity. It is quiet. Both these qualities are a testimony to their own existence. One need not prove it (unless they want to). Kindness however requires noise, it requires going out into some microcosm of this world we inhabit and do something to change some thing else. Whatever it might be.

I cannot trace my fondness for kindness. But I can tell you that I find myself drawn to the quality and the people who possess as each day falls into the night seductively. I find myself hoping more and more that if I keep trying, the attribute will build and fill me up. It is work, it is effort and it isn’t necessarily happy. Sometimes being kind means to be uncomfortable, slightly anxious even sufficiently unhappy.

But happiness is an emotion. It is fleeting. Perhaps if we try to capture more of kindness, affix it to a simpler life, emotions wouldn’t matter as much as values do. The world is too full of people acting out because of their emotions anyway.

Too trite for truth

If I am being as cautious with my memory as I usually am, I met Atiq sometime in January. As I stepped out of the house, without the mask on my face (the second wave hadn’t hit yet and neither had my fear of the pandemic) I made it a point to not latch the gate too loudly as the clung sound of the latch hitting its socket invariably woke Apollo up. He would then follow me, his tail wagging, his salivating mouth waiting to eat the Good Day biscuits I would buy for him (They cost five rupees and each pack had seven biscuits). Although I am used to it by now and welcome it with a smile, initially I was so keen on being by myself on this short walk of mine that anything hindering this ten-minute-a-day solitude was something I viewed with irritation.

As habit, when I latched the gate of my home, I thought of something to think about on this walk of mine and vowed to stop thinking about it by the time I came back home. This particular way of thinking, on occasion helped but more often than not ended with me thinking long after I fed Apollo his biscuits, returned from my walk and latched the gate the second time that evening.

I thought keenly about the few freelance journalists I had discovered on Instagram and how stalking their profiles, reading their articles, understanding the work they do and reading how they responded to comments on their photos made me wonder if I was taking up too much space in the world and doing too little. In fact, my predominant thoughts nowadays were about strangers on the internet: women with gumption writing, writing, writing away.

“It is the pandemic, there isn’t much you can do” the small part of my brain always keen on comforting me remarked. I thought more about bravery, how much it mattered to journalism and if it is a skill to be learnt or something which is born out of oppression; because if it is the latter I told myself soaked more in misgivings than in sweat–as I crossed the aunty on my left selling jonna rotte–I am likely to never be able to do anything which even whispered bravery.

I paused my thoughts and smiled widely at the paan shop uncle and got myself five Marlboro reds and a pack of biscuits for Apollo. I tore the packet and took the seven biscuits out in a bunch and put it right in front of him as he paused, sniffed the biscuits, looked up at me as I stared right back and then started eating them. After he finished his fifth biscuit, I turned to walk back home and walked slowly, knowing it would make it easier for Apollo to catch up to me. I had unpaused my thoughts, shifted into a new one and thought about Pranav who remarked to me once, around three years ago that “Journalism isn’t for you”. He said this in a scathing, superior tone. As I found myself caught up in an old, painful memory, I heard Atiq’s voice say “Excuse me?”

I half-turned, stared at him, unsure what to say as he walked closer to me and asked “Is this your dog?” his words clearer, his syllables more rounded than mine which wafted off into shapeless murmurs. I noticed Apollo at my heels, his tail wagging and now that I was no longer in transit, he rubbed the sides of his face against my left leg, demanding to be petted. “Um, no.” I replied “He just stays in the gully and I feed him occasionally. So he is used to me now.”  I bent down to pet Apollo for a few seconds before standing up again.

We stood at the beginning of my gulli: Atiq and I with Apollo between us, his head against my left calf.  Atiq then mentioned in a calm, settled voice that he had seen me before. I asked him if he studied at the University a few blocks away and he responded with affirmative surprise and asked me how I knew. “Most foreigners in M.G.Road are here because of the University.” I said in the most matter-of-fact tone I could conjure up as I slipped my right palm under my left elbow and let both hands hug my tummy.  

The conversation was a brisk exchange of facts: I asked him where he was from and he told me that he was from Bangladesh. He asked me if I had lived in this city all my life and I said I had. I asked him if things were okay back home and he said they weren’t bad where he was from but the surrounding areas weren’t as lucky. He told me he lived in the lane across from Banda’s gym with his brother and another friend. I told him that I lived with my parents and my brother in this lane. His brother, he said was doing his masters in physics at another university nearby and that he chose to study English. Keen on knowing how old he was, I asked him which year of his education he was in and he told me that he was in the second year of his bachelors degree. I told him that I got a masters in English myself and as he remarked that it was very rare to bump into an English major on the road, if at all ever, a part of my head registered the fact that he was at the least three to four years younger than me. He asked me for my number and I smiled uneasily as he responded with a warm parting of his lips and added that it was “okay to not give him my number if I didn’t want to” and I, partly out of politeness and partly because I found him intriguing punched in my email ID into his phone (a more cautious choice I thought, than giving him my number).

I then said goodbye, walked back into my home and headed for the first floor bathroom where I had for the last three years, stared at the mirror and smoked as thoughts in my head poured out of my lips in a conversation I had with my reflection. I wondered if Atiq was flirting with me and brushed aside the idea because I didn’t look pretty enough to be flirted with that evening. I was sweating, my hair was in a disheveled bun and if my memory served me right as it did about the simpler facts of life, I hadn’t showered that day. Atiq on the other hand, was clean faced even though he said he had just come out of the gym. I didn’t doubt the truth of his claim at all but felt a voice, buried somewhere deep inside of me wonder how one managed to take care of their health, their appearance and such when half of my time seemed to go in decoding and understanding others’ motivations even if they were just women with gumption on the internet who wrote, wrote and wrote away?  

I checked my inbox thrice, maybe four times post dinner before putting my phone aside that night.

The next day I got an email from Atiq at seven thirty in the evening. What threw me off about the email was that he had said “Where are you?” instead of “How are you?” which disconcerted me as it wasn’t how trite conversations worked and one was always supposed to be trite when befriending strangers of the opposite sex. Right? I wondered if there was something sly about this mail, or much worse if some unconscious part of me was plain xenophobic or if my fear was just the ever gyrating emotion of being a woman who met a man on the street and now isn’t sure of his intentions. Fears are trite too. Unsure still of the various possibilities, I decided to be cautious, pay some homage to a traditional idea of dignity and wrote back to him saying that I hoped he was well but the dates for an exam I intended to write came out and now I was fairly busy with that.  

A day or so later (my memory falters a little here), I went for the usual cigarettes and biscuits walk with Apollo at my heels and thoughts of whether irrespective of the pandemic I must leave the city to pursue good, serious writing work. Unlike my earlier ten-minute-a-day solitude walks, I had an occasional eye on strangers in the road, amidst whom I assumed Atiq could walk up to me any minute and say hello.

I walked back with the same thought hanging in my head like a stray feather escaping from a pigeon’s wing does before slowly, slowly falling to the ground. There was no sight of Atiq. I kneeled outside the gate of my home and put the biscuits in a bunch for Apollo to eat when a “Hey, hello” voice made its presence known. I looked at Atiq and smiled a small smile and asked him where he was coming from. He lifted his left hand to show me the bag of fruits and asked me pleasantly if I wanted an apple. I said no and asked him how his semester was going. “Dull” he said. “Online classes are boring.” I said I understood and then I asked him about what books he liked. I don’t remember what he said next but we spoke about Agha Shahid Ali (the poet I had last read) and how terrible neo colonialism was. He spoke of his distaste for America which I agreed with and the words ‘cruel’ (he said) and ‘greedy’ (I said) were thrown around as a part of this conversation. At this point my phone buzzed and with that as my cue, I excused myself to go back inside the house with a meaningless “Be safe, see you around”.

“Who were you talking to outside?” Amma asked me ten minutes later, as we all stood, plate in hand waiting for her to finish serving herself rice before we could go next.

“Just this kid from the university at the Chaurastha. I met him when I went for a competition once. He’s from Bangladesh.” I think I used the word ‘kid’ purposefully to dull any worry that would arise from Amma.  

“Oh I have seen him.” my brother remarked, biting into a noisy papad. “That tyre shop uncle told me that he has seen him buying drugs or something like that. Be careful.”

“I just said hello,” I said somewhat crisply. “I barely know him. Also that uncle could just be prejudiced.”

“Ah okay.” My brother said nonchalantly and as dinner conversations at my place go, we all found some gadget to spend our dinner with. I was partly amused by the whole drug anecdote. I know my brother meant marijuana when he said “drugs”. But which twenty something liberal arts studying person (including my brother and all our friends) had not done “drugs”. As I thought my thoughts, I tried to trace the green smell lingering in late-night university spaces back into my memory.  

But the two meetings, my brother’s tidbit, my now disturbed walk, and some fear fogged by my ability to dissect things took over. So I messaged Neelam, a friend from the same university as Atiq later that night and asked if she knew him because I had bumped into him and he had asked if we could hang out sometime. I told her I was “just being curious.” She said she’d check and informed me the next day that while she didn’t know him, she had heard from a friend of hers that Bangladeshis’ from the university were hyper sexed and would sleep around here before going back home and marrying a woman who was virginal.

Uneasy and grateful for the tiny bit of anonymity texting granted me, I sent back a crying-lauging emoji and told Neelam that I had no desire to date him but simply wanted to know. On her end, Neelam continued with her story of her friend who had then made a sweeping generalization about men in “that part of the world” and had called them “sexual frustrated and repressed.”I told her, now a little bugged, a lot more shocked and with a caution I often employed that while I didn’t know her friend, I was wary of such views because they felt too harsh to be faithful to truth. What I of course didn’t tell her was that I was very wary and unsure where my wariness came from. When I told Devi of meeting Atiq on the road much after the whole thing ended, she laughed at my concerns of eyeing foreigners with suspicion and said “Only men come up and say hello to strangers, ask for their numbers na? Women don’t do this.”

The last time I bumped into Atiq was a week after I spoke to Neelam. I had gone out to buy myself some cigarettes and a tetra pack of Real pomegranate juice. This time Apollo wasn’t around as Amma had fed him some left over curd rice post which he ran around with his other friends. I thought again about writing because thinking about it was easier than just writing itself. I shifted from there and thought about an ex-flame, about writing about family, about Atiq and about that one friend from school who just dropped us when school ended for reasons still unknown before I finally settled on my own sense of ambition and how wobbly it seemed in the current political climate.

On my way back, I saw Atiq cross the road and so I slowed down and waited so that he could see me which he did. I wanted more details, something to shape the version of him which lived in my head but I wanted this without having to initiate a conversation. As I waited, he walked up and smiled his usual smile and asked me what I was up to. I told him about my purchases and he was surprised to know I smoked. I asked him if he smoked and he said that he didn’t. I giggled and uncharacteristically (for me) asked him if he smoked up and he smiled uneasily, looked away and said no. I wasn’t sure what prompted the no. “Either he was embarrassed by the question because he didn’t smoke up or guilty because he did” another part of my head informed me.  The question, in all its flippant over familiarity was inspired by my brother’s statement a week ago. I got no clear answer unless sheepishness counted as an answer and I now found myself reddening because Atiq had reddened first.  

Atiq after the briefest pause said “One of these days, we must get something to eat at the restaurant nearby.” Still withdrawing from that tinge of shame but relieved by the return to a semi-normalcy and a general state of unsureness which soaked our talks, I fumbled a “Yes. We should. The pandemic….is just worrying. My parents are in the risk category.”

“You don’t have to, you know?” Atiq said softly, almost kindly with just a tinge of exasperation. (I think) “No I would like to” I said and impulsively asked him if he would like to meet my friend Neelam, from his university and that the three of us could hang out. I don’t remember what he said in response to that. In fact I don’t remember anything after this question except Atiq’s face and the bottle of Bailey’s water in his right hand. But I remember it being civil for a couple of minutes more before we withered away and I went back home, to smoke and talk to the girl in the mirror. As I attempted to put together my memories of Atiq like a collage, I realized that I thought about him far more than I had listened to him.

What I next remember about this story is getting a rather unclear mail from Atiq the next day evening where he told me that he would be busy for the next few months and was sorry he couldn’t meet my friend. I replied some two hours later after some thought and said I hoped I was at no point unpleasant or rude and wished him good luck with whatever he was busy with. I ended the email by saying “Until next time”.

Atiq didn’t write back and a part of me was relieved but a larger part of me still wonders if there is anything I could decode about him from the information I have. I sometimes itch to mail him and ask him if he was flirting, if he was just lonely and looking for a friend, if he was ashamed of smoking up, if he did smoke up at all, if I had embarrassed him (because if so I didn’t mean to and I didn’t think poorly of him) but something: either some vague idea of dignity or some other unknown (but still trite, I am sure) fear prevented me. With the coming of the second wave, it has become fairly dicey to step out anyway and so I purchased my cigarettes, Apollo’s biscuits and anything else I wanted fairly early in the morning and stayed put at home for the rest of the day.

Staying at home helped: and as I unearthed more writers, more journalists on Instagram and Twitter, I found myself more keenly involved with the process of excavating parts of my personality which I didn’t understand. As for Atiq, it didn’t take too long before I found myself at peace with this ambiguity of not knowing him, and not understanding our interactions in all their strange informality.

To do him any justice at all, I told the woman in the mirror one evening as I finished the last of the cigarettes for the day, meant to not unearth his motivations.

SMOKE IN DREAMS

unlike the weather reminiscent of smoke from yesterday’s bodies

already wrapped like ugly gifts, waiting to be discarded

my dreams join today’s fresher victims,

with the condensation beneath my eyes

leaving traces: so sticky, so insidious.

i dream for the.… uh, who knows?

i lost count already.

dreams of death: not with the wash of calm

or the ancient sentiment of

‘They lived a good, decent life.            

(Amma used to say that a lot.)

i thought nihilism was for people long gone,

who moved into those spaces of heaven and hell

as we, the settlers of this earth move our belongings

in the same geographies: 15 by 12, 6 by 8 (or something like that).

we memorize the contents: two pens, a chap stick, a few notepads,

 a jug, Yeats’ thoughts squeezed shut in a paper back.

it’s easier honestly, this inventory, than counting vials of Remdesivir.

simpler than collecting tears: enough to put all the fires out.

and in this mundane writing, as we breathe with a ‘warning’ sign in our heads:

we now avoid sleep, we detest sleep and force our burning eyes open.

at least our new found nihilism, will not be accompanied

by a failure to retain memory of yesterday’s smoke wafting

into tomorrow.

The World is Bigger than my Head is

the world is bigger than my head is

i forget this sometimes.

diving and dipping and sinking

into a cesspool of my own thoughts

I cease to remember

that the world is bigger than my head is.

yes, the cesspool of my head is unpleasant

it reeks of shame, has crusts of anger

and it feels heavily like what failure does.

but again…

The world.

the world has its own cesspool.

cesspoolS actually.

they are bigger, murkier

they stink of pissing matches

between men who erect statues.

of their own faces.

these men shove dust on daily grief

which folks collect with their wages.

they make these cesspools, these men.

no body asked for them

no body wants them.

folks try cleaning up cesspools everyday

and some days I join them

but somedays MY cesspool beckons me back

but on all those ‘somedays’

i remind myself that the world

has bigger cesspools.

and if I clear those up

my cesspool disappears too.

the reeking smell will fade away,

the crusts will start to wither.

and so I would do well to remember

that the world is bigger than my head is.

 

 

 

SNIPPETS ON THE WORLD OF PRIVILEGED CHILDREN

1. My niece Nisha dropped by today. She kept toying with her handkerchief and chewing the inside of her cheek. I asked her, in the exuberant voice an adult is supposed to employ with an eight year old if everything was okay. “Would she like a chocolate?” I wanted to know. “No.” she said rather pensively. I asked her if she had questions. She was full of questions, always.  She looked at me perplexed, as if gauging if I was competent enough to answer her query. She then turned her eyes to the wind-chimes hanging near the window. After sufficient, serious deliberation she asked me, “Akka, what is a riot?”

It was my turn to stare at the wind chimes.

“Where did you learn that word?” I wanted to know.

“Thata asked me to go to my room and closed the door when he was watching T.V in the night. I heard on the T.V. It was noisy.”

“T.V is always noisy Nishu.” I tried to cajole, to divert.

“But yesterday it was noisyyyyyyyyyyy” she emphasized. School hadn’t taught her her adverbs and adjectives yet. “But tell me no akka. What does riot mean?”

“Erm Nisha… Riot is a bad thing. It is when some people hurt some other people just because they are angry.” I managed.

“Chintu Anna pushed me once and I fell. Is he a riot?”

“No no. Chintu anna is not a riot. Riots are when many people get hurt badly.”

“How many people?”

“Many. But it doesn’t matter. Come I’ll give you a chocolate.”

“Can I sleep on the sofa, Akka?”

“Don’t you want to go out and play?”

“No. I didn’t sleep last night. Thata also didn’t sleep. I saw him walk up and down a lot.”

“Hmm. Okay Nishu. You can sleep for a while.”

“Akka if riot comes to our house, will we also be on TV?” she asked.

“I don’t know, Nisha. Why don’t you sleep now? I have some work to do.”

2. “Allari chestunava? (Are you creating any mischief?)”, Chilaka asked Varuni with a twinkle in her eyes.

“Leduuuuuuuuu. Vanta chestunna” (Nooo. I am cooking) Varuni replied, in mock anger. Her anger was followed by a giggle. It always was. Chilaka was the neighbor, Randhir Uncle’s house help and every morning she stopped to speak to Varuni for a few minutes before she went to work. The two houses were divided by a very low wall and Varuni often sat on the wall and played with her kitchen set.

“Varuni! Come inside!”

“Haan Amma, coming!”

Varuni went and stood next to her mother in the kitchen.

“What were you doing Varuni?”

“I was talking to Chilaka. She was asking me about my kitchen set.”

“It’s getting very hot outside Varuni. Play inside the house for a few days. Randhir Uncle doesn’t like it when Chilaka talks to others.”

“Can Chilaka come and play with me?”

“No baby. Chilaka has work to do. Maybe some other day.”

A few days passed. Varuni didn’t play outside. She played by herself in her mother’s bedroom and listened to the hum of the Carnatic music which blarred from the CD player her mother kept playing.

One fine morning, she sauntered out of her house and plucked a few roses from her mother’s garden.

“Ro-se-ss” she said softly to herself, happily. She saw Chilaka walk by across the low wall towards the neighbour’s house. Her face lit up.

“Chilakaaa!” she called out with glee.

“Varu papa.” Chilaka replied “Ela unnavu?” (How are you?)

“Varuni paused to respond and surveyed Chilaka’s face. Her left cheek was red. Not the blooming, bright red of her ro-se-ss but a dull, scaly red.

“What happened to your face?” Varuni asked in telugu.

“Em le. Kindda paddanu.” (I fell down the stairs.)

“Oh sare. Nenu repu kalustanu?” (I’ll meet tomorrow?)

“Nenu repu raanu, papa” (I won’t come tomorrow) Chilaka replied.

Before Varuni could ask more questions, a voice shrieked from the living room of her house.

“Varuuuuu!”

“Coming Amma.” Varuni shrieked back.

Varuni stared back at Chilaka before slowly walking back inside the house.

“Amma, Chilaka’s face was a soft red. Not bright like my roses. She said she fell.”

Varuni’s mother’s face hardened.

“Were you playing outside again?”

“Yes, I got roses.” Varuni replied. “See!”

“Don’t. Randhir uncle doesn’t like it when Chilaka talks to anybody else. I told you this before.”

“Can I ask Randhir uncle to let Chilaka play with me?”

“No Varuni. I said no once. And stay away from Randhir uncle. Just don’t play outside.”

“Amma, did Randhir uncle push Chilaka down? Is that why her face is like that?”

“I don’t know. But I am not friends with Randhir uncle. Neither is your father. And you shouldn’t be too.”

“And Chilaka?”

“What about Chilaka?” she asked her daughter irritably.

“Can I be friends with Chilaka?”

“Sigh. No baby. Chilaka needs other friends. Her friends will help her. Now come, do you want a kitkat?”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Funny Word Friendship

I don’t know how to say this to you, to all of you. Friendship is a funny word.

Modern friendships even more so. Modern friendships are hilarious. Every time I hear the word friendship, I cackle like a witch and chuckle like an old uncle at a dinner party, glass of whiskey in hand.

But please don’t look so offended. My mirth isn’t meant to belittle friendship. It isn’t meant to belittle any of you. I just want all of you to consider the possibility that what life has thrown at you is very different from what it has flung at me. It’s not a game of “who has it worse”. If anything it is a game of “who all am I?”, “how many things am I?”

Hey do you remember? Put down that cup of coffee for a second no? Remember when we sat on the steps of the college, debating nationhood. You liked culture more than I did. I liked liberty more than you did. Don’t you remember how you were cutting and I was acidic?  But I liked how at eighteen we could be transition between poignant and pointless seamlessly. The next day morning we sat on the same steps and discussed the first time we kissed boys and how prickly their facial hair can be. How many people can do that?

But now it’s trickier and so it is also funnier. I still like liberty more than culture. I was drawn to a book two years ago simply because it was titled “To Hell with Culture”. Don’t get me wrong, I like culture. I just like liberty more. Even the culture I like is very different from the one you like. Honestly, not much has changed. Don’t roll your eyes at me now. Nothing has changed, really. How do I know? Well we can try debating nationhood and find out.

Or how about you? Nice scarf, by the way. Now I know you wish I waxed my arms and slapped some lipstick on. But I get tired easily you know. Vanity doesn’t tire me. Working towards vanity however and attempting to wear it over my own exhaustion however does. I know you’d like me to meet you for brunch at some place in B’hills for some dish with asparagus in it and some drink with charcoal in it. I haven’t cashed my check yet so I am going to pass. I don’t know what to say to you nowadays. I don’t understand boss jokes and no, I didn’t go to the Coldplay concert. I don’t like the same TV shows either and I read into every conversation we have a prolonged distance, a desire to change that and a failure to achieve said desire.

With you too nothing much has changed. I still don’t like asparagus and boss jokes. They seem dreary to me and they are still important to you. Maybe we could go eat pizza? You still like cheap pizza don’t you?

Or you, you staring at me from the mirror. You who looks just like me and does the same things I do. Nothing has changed with you either. You push yourself to dwell so much on the mere presence of distance that everything else seems incommensurate. Your uppity politics don’t agree with me. They make my head spin and make me question every single relationship. You walk in and out of vanity. You shuttle between acceptance and denial. Your attempts to be a joyous hippie and a stiff upper lip activist seems a lot like a scam.

How do you accept anything to last if you keep doing this to me? Why would I want to be your friend?

Friendships are simply funny. But more importantly, modern friendships are hilarious. Heartbreakingly hilarious.

Adrift in Mahfouz’s pages.

“There is nothing like our houseboat, he murmured. Love is an old and worn-out game, but it is sport on the houseboat. Fornication is held as a vice by councils and institutions, but it is freedom on our houseboat. Women are all conventions and marriage deeds in the home, but they are nubile and alluring on the houseboat. And the moon is a satellite, dead and cold, but on the houseboat, it is poetry; and madness is everywhere an illness, but here it is philosophy, and something was something everywhere else but here; for here it was nothing.” — Adrift on the Nile, Naguib Mahfouz.

I picked up Adrift on the Nile by Naguib Mahfouz not out of curiosity but out of a crippling desire to quell the voice which reminded me that it had been a long, long time since I read a book. The book discussed the lives of a bunch of young men and women: an actor, a civil servant, an art critic and a few others who spent their evenings and nights in a houseboat, Adrift on the Nile—as the title suggests— discussing love, life, the world around them, the world they never saw at all… all in semi-mysterious ways under the influence of cannabis. They passed around the pipe, languidly chatting, occasionally laughing and generally at ease with themselves and their sins.

Like most good books, Mahfouz’s novella not only conjured up images of acacia blossoms and gleaming lights from the Nile but also forced me to evaluate traces of my shaky reality jammed amidst the writer’s lines. The way I saw it, the book was about a bunch of things: the fall of the Egyptian bourgeois, religion and sin, conflicting morality. But nothing was as striking as the houseboat which took care of their laughter and gently cradled their gloom.

Before me I saw Mahfouz’s houseboat shrink and dissolve in the Nile and in its place rose spaces which cradled me, put me to sleep. The noisy Irani café, a friend’s terrace at 3 in the morning which favoured unshielded conversations, the arms of someone intimate, the jhoola at home on a quiet afternoon.  These were to me what the houseboat was to Anis Zaki (the protagonist) and his friends. It was an asylum, a refugee. I couldn’t inhabit these spaces for too long but as long as I was there, I was secure. Secure in my madness, my sanity, my joy and most importantly my gloom.

These spaces don’t wash away gloom like rain does dust. They have a knack of reproducing your gloom, maybe even amplifying it. But along with that amplification stems the strong held conviction that maybe this gloom isn’t all that bad. It like anything else is a part of life, part of a meaningful life and it feels better to accept this gloom than to try to force your way out of it. Without this gloominess, I wouldn’t be me. And who else could I possibly be? My gloom is free in these spaces. I don’t bite my tongue, I don’t censor my crude moments, my sharp tears. I watch them rise and fall: dip high and low and wait for the sense of calm to come to me the way a kite-flyer waits for breeze.

Spaces like the houseboat move you so much that you feel compelled to protect them. Sana, one of the characters in the novella at one point asks why the rest of them wanted to invite a dangerous woman to the houseboat. This insecurity of hers is important to note because it mirrors to a large extent how commoners feel about their country, their home, their family. They aren’t easy constructs to live with because they harbor so much pain. But they are ours. And so are the smaller spaces like the houseboat. So every time I find my ‘houseboat’ (whatever it might be at that point of my life) threatened, its existence terrorized I find myself wanting to preserve it the way it has time and again preserved my blue moments. To these spaces, I owe loyalty. I owe it commitment and to let the outside world ruin its existence seems to betray everything captivating about it.

The sad part about spaces like these is that they don’t last forever. It’s beauty is in its impermanence.  And like Anis Zaki and the rest, there comes a point when we have to leave our respective houseboats and find newer asylums to reside in. And perhaps, part of us rests with that space. With the dissolution of that space, a part of us dissolves too. But the reassuring aspect of life is that there will always be newer houseboats which honour our gloom and teach us to do the same.

*to Abhishek E.A.