Friday, January 15, 2021

Morning Walk

Dead kitten at the turn

between street no. 6 and 8

who will pick it up

not me, not me,

thank fuck it doesn't have to be,

i'm glad it's someone else's job

even if they are probably not paid enough for it

will they tell their kid

picked a dead kitten off the road today

matted red fur around its neck like

a sign of belonging

man not wearing mask

another man not wearing mask

who are these idiots

cross the road

assume everyone is an idiot

weird smell from that tank

better stay on this side of the road

jump over the gadda just so

lady with pretty jasmine in hair

but no mask do you know you're going to die

you won't see the pachagotla next year

and serves you right

iron gate open ok good how many men today

oh look another woman but no she's done 

maybe if I come earlier

Maali-man,thanks for the stink eye

same to you, i don't feel sorry for your

dark roasted coffee hands and round (glaring) eyes

behind your soda-buddi glasses

what would it take to die

you'd think it'd be easier in a pandemic

no, you're not going to figure out my boobsize

under this extra loose sweatshirt uncle

ek paav grave mein, but i guess it's just habit or something

uncle, i hope you trip and break your ankle

i wonder if the kitten will still be there

was it a dog a car

i should take off the earphones and listen to nature

or something but i can't be bothered

why not silly love songs

ummeed par to duniya kaayam hai

will the kitten still be there

the nausea is because you haven't exercised in two years

get over it you wuss

uncle i swear i will break your head with that rock

pregnant lady without mask i wish for your insouciance

to be passed to your progeny 

may they live in a better world

whom am i kidding 

how dare you bring a child into this shitstain

time to go back

will the kitten be there

it is not

oh good

thank fuck it's not my job 

couldn't the person whose job it was

have done it earlier

what if I got a fern

tomorrow might be better

i mean what are the odds of 

two dead kittens

Thursday, April 09, 2020

Today I saw a Sparrow



Today I saw a sparrow-
a sparrow!
and then another!
and said to myself, huh
would you look at that?
'cause it has been an aeon
since I saw one close enough
that I could tell it had that
unimpressed look that all birds give you
right before they swerve straight in the
direction of your eyeballs
beady-eyed, sharp-beaked-
have I mentioned I hate birds?
I do,
I do.
I'm not going to let an apocalypse change that.

How to Deal with Everything
by Those Who Know
(and make sure to tell you so )
in neatly ordered lists :
·       Learn something new
·       Appreciate nature
·       Spend time with the ones you love
Even if they're bits of binary
packed into-
fuck if I know.
Another thing that the apocalypse won't change-
the profound blissfulness of my ignorance
of things great and small-invisible-

-like that damn virus-
its poky bits-
no, I refuse to say
protein spikes made of amino acids
-poky bits is good enough for me-
the parts that we're so busy
trying to break down
disintegrate,
obliterate
sanitize
the poky bits are a song, you guys,
and it takes
one hundred and five minutes and forty-eight seconds
of your (very) mortal time.
its music-
lilting, uneven, kind of boring
to be honest-
anyway-
having been translated,
it’s not any more knowable-
not to me, at least,
still secure in my un-knowing-
and I wonder-
I wonder-
if those forty-eight seconds
are what leave you gasping on a hospital bed
your breath nothing like music
and I wonder –
I wonder-
what the music sounds like
when we break it down
with our weapons of purity-
Is it-
a sudden silence
or a dissonance stretched out
and out and out and out,
un-listenable, un-bearable
and then, at last,  the quiet.

Thursday, June 27, 2019

City Life



“We tell ourselves stories in order to live”/Joan Didion


I grew up in a 100-plus acre campus placed in the middle of a city that had been a city for four hundred years when I first knew it. Not that I ever knew the city — not really. I literally lived in a house on a hill, surrounded by trees and rocks; visitations of all manners of birds and beasts were daily occurrences. I watched trees wither and bloom again; I burnt the soles of my feet clambering over rocks mid-summer- the city of my childhood was a ten minute walk, and an entire lifestyle away. Every week, I’d encounter it — briefly. The visit to the vegetable mandi and local kirana store, the one to church. “Shopping in Secunderabad” was, in the early years, a life event, coinciding as it did with birthdays and Christmas. But most of what I knew about the city was hearsay: classmates who took trips on buses, who played cricket in narrow lanes, who did things like eat pani poori from street vendors, and who had, after 1991, access to the magical world of cable TV. I only walked five minutes from “home” to “school”, so I didn’t learn the trick other girls did of carrying safety-pins to ward off lecherous men in buses. Other girls had a route — school and home, and a curfew; I stayed out reading under my favorite tree until the light grew too dim and wandered home with my armful of books that I’d managed to beg or borrow; somehow my mother’s disapproval never seemed serious. I’d hear of neighborhood intrigues and gossip, of the dictum of never talking to strangers, of waiting at bus stops for buses that were perennially late, and it all felt like another world; like the store glass window I had my nose pressed up against — someday, I thought — I’ll walk in and buy it, be a part of it, belong.
If people asked me where I lived, I would say “Hyderabad”  — and yet: my city existed, as it were, only in my imagination. As I grew older, this idea of my city was hopelessly entangled with other imaginations of other cities — cities that I read about in books, or saw on TV and in movies. Cities that were, quite literally, continents away.
By the time I was twenty and ready — well, pushed, really — to step out of this idyll, I was as much in love with New York and Bombay as with Hyderabad. These cities, as transmitted to me by a half dozen films, were the places where things happened:  I was a romantic young woman, and Bombay or New York were clearly made for romantic young women to Live Their Wonderful Romantic Lives: their own quirkily furnished, spacious apartments in lovely neighbourhoods, meeting interesting people, overcoming impossible odds, being rewarded for being superstars at their work and (most importantly) meeting The One.
I couldn’t have described to you how this city was built; what it streets looked like, what the weather was like there, or how many people lived in it. I could, without hesitation, tell you what it felt like: freedom.



*
I spent the first half year of my working life sharing an apartment with five other women. The next half year was spent sharing an apartment — a hole in the wall — with three other women. The ceiling had mirrors. But our curtains matched our cheap cutlery, and the only furniture we had was a TV and two mattresses. And so it started: my single life in a City. For the first time I understood, deeply, viscerally, what it means to be a city dweller.
The vagueness of the city of my imagination was up against the reality of it: the jostling, the noise, the dirt, the smell. It was the freedom to wake up late on weekends, to wander streets picking up second-hand books, to discover fancy restaurants and cheap ones; it was cheap Chinese takeout everyday because we couldn’t be bothered to have a functional kitchen; it was texting my crush all night and early into the morning without anyone reminding me that I needed to be at work by nine am, it was being in control of my everyday existence to a level I’d never had before and it was exhilarating and terrifying. Just knowing that I could buy a book and not have to account for that expense to anyone was the equivalent to flying out of a window fifty feet off the ground.
But it was also this:  do not walk alone after 6pm, always take public transport after 8pm, never just go for a walk in a park, never loiter, is your bra strap showing, are your legs waxed, do not go alone to watch a film, avoid certain areas, even in the colony where you stay; in short, an eternal, unceasing vigilance of my body- where it was, what it was doing, did it have to be there, were other people ok with it being there, did I, in fact, have the right to the space I occupied?


*


What shapes the contours of the cities of our imagination? The stories we tell, not just through fiction, but also through memory — a different kind of fiction, perhaps.
My mother moved, in the 1960s, from a small village in Kerala to the same city that I now live in, to pursue a college education. She tells me that for most of the first year of college, she barely understood a word spoken in class, and had to copy her cousin’s notes to make sense of “all that English”.  The college education was a stepping stone to a job. I don’t believe she ever thought of the acquiring of a job as self-actualization: it was necessary; like marriage, children — all inevitable in the scheme of her life as she had learnt to imagine it. 
My father tells me a dozen stories of the time he first moved to Bangalore, to Hyderabad.  My mother, only a few. Every time we pass the exit toward Brunton Road, my mother tells me: my hostel used to be there. The sisters were very strict, she says, if you weren’t inside by 6pm, there was no dinner for you.  Or she tells me: I watched Aradhana in Opera Theatre three times.  Or she says, I took your father for his first Chinese meal ever there. That last one always make me laugh: in our family, my mother is the least keen to explore new places; so the idea of her proudly “showing off” her knowledge of the city to my father is both endearing and strange.
I try to imagine the city as it was through her eyes, but it’s difficult. Some things seem the same: in particular the struggle with patriarchal authority, manifest in all the small and big ways. Other things are patently different.  I try to imagine what I would tell my children, if I ever have any: what would I point out, what would be left to say: I was here. Just like the way my mother’s city has vanished, my city, the city of my individual experience will vanish too, dying with me, before me.


*

What kind of stories do we tell about our cities? About women in our cities?
Our collective schizophrenia about women shows up ever so clearly in our stories: Madonna or whore, sometimes both, always other.  Where I saw transgression, I was also quickly running into the limits of it- singleness as a transient state because of the inevitability of coupledom; growing up, I don't recall ever reading a story that featured a non-heterosexual or transgender character. Women may have had authority over their own lives- to an extent- but rarely were they shown in positions of authority over other people- unless those other people were children or women. 
So looking for models- consciously or unconsciously- in fiction also became a choice. Whom to believe, to what degree? I can't, of course, claim to have known that these choices existed at the time- but over time, the fact that I had made that choice became clearer. 
I suppose it was inevitable, in the larger scheme of things, that my earliest encounters with the stories of single-in-the-city-women are also tied up with the shame of an illicit pleasure- vestiges of which I feel these decades later, as I write this. I was sneak reading Mills & Boons and Harlequin romances at the impressionable age of nine. These were the much maligned “chick lit” books within which a whole different kind of woman lived alone, worked, fell in love, and had the most magnificently purple-prosed orgasms ever. It would take me decades after I had abandoned them entirely for me to articulate what these stories gave me: a template for women who got what they wanted. Wish fulfillment as an entitlement, not a favour.

*


The intangible qualities of the cities of our imagination: the freedom, primarily, to be ourselves and in control of our lives tend to be opposite to our lived reality. The reality of streets without street lights; the lack of public restrooms designed keeping in mind women’s needs; the harassment verbal or physical; the gendered division of the city that is not just spatial, but temporal — our freedom sets with the sun. 
The City gives me this as its peculiar gift: invisibility. The gift that is also the double-edged sword- liberation and burial, depending on the moment. I’m often happy to be invisible in the city: it keeps me safe, it allows me to slip through the hostile, to pursue my happiness and pleasure without interference. At other times, this invisibility is the thing I fight: where I have to loudly, repeatedly, relentlessly say with words and body: I am here, I am a person, I am entitled to this space.

*


I look around city spaces and see, for most part, women erased from memory: parks named after men, streets named after men, hospitals named after men, statues erected of men, traffic circles and stations.  Everything durable remains largely male-identified. Women, if they exist in our memory of cities, exist on the periphery, quite literally. One study found that even in cities which had a higher proportion of streets named after women, those streets tend to be away from the centre, the pulsing hearts of the cities.
And so, the imagined community of Women of The City in my head is largely that: imagined. When I think of women-only spaces in the city: women’s schools and colleges, hostels, “PGs”, restrooms, “ladies only” compartments on trains or seats on buses, beauty salons — the sense is not one of community — though that does build in these spaces, of course; but overwhelmingly the sense is of segregation. Space being gendered under the guise of protection or privilege, which is also - not so coincidentally- control.

*


One of the first stories I remember hearing was the one about the woman who was turned into a pillar of salt. This was, of course, a punishment, an eternal testament, a warning, a body made metaphor — many things. Lot’s Wife has been many things over the centuries in which this story has been passed down across time and cultures- she has been many things to many people.
I think about her these days: a woman looking back at a burning city — a city destroyed because it gave itself over to Pleasure above every other thing — even goodness — and I think of her body, compelled to turn back, once more, one last time, and paying the price of disobedience.
I think about how we don’t know her name.

*

I used to see her every Sunday as a child, on that weekly trip to church. She’d be standing at the same junction, begging bowl in one hand, cradling a child on her hip with the other. Tattered sari, burnt face — evoking in me pity and terror and guilt. As payment, every week I’d slip her a coin or two from the safety of the auto rickshaw. 
Twenty years after I’d left that city behind, I see her by happenstance. I’m in an auto rickshaw very near the same place. I crane my head to watch her pass me by: older, hair streaked with grey, no child tags along — instead, a purse slung on one shoulder, sari neatly pinned, she strides toward a junction named Paradise.





Thursday, August 30, 2018

It might have all been said before, and better.
Now, the moon waits, patiently,
for darkness to steal over the tree tops,
hushing the new leaves,
and a lone star sparkles to the north.
A breath on the window pane,
like a crack in glass
fading away in seconds-
Even the cold denies me.

Saturday, April 28, 2018

For Asifa. 

I wish I had never heard her name. 

Maybe, in a better world
I would have, anyway. 
Maybe, then, it would have been breathed
in awe, in wonder, in pride-
maybe


The odds are against it, though. 
I rather think-
she would've grown up ordinary-
an indifferent education,if any,
jobs that paid for the gas
and energy saving electric bulbs,
and because this better world
is still the same world
maybe a husband to cook meals for
and children's noses to wipe snot from
and the occasional quiet moment
of looking up at the stars
and thinking
what if

an ordinary life
the best odds offered
to any of us-

- I wish I hadn't seen her eyes
brighter than anything in that photograph,
even her purple kurta with the yellow flowers-



I wish I had never heard her name.

Saturday, June 17, 2017

Today, everything in the world feels like
a reproof
Two mynahs sit motionless on a wall
Two pigeons hop on the grass
Two squirrels chase each other across a roof
A pair of moths wander into my kitchen.

I dreamt of you last night.

There's a universe in which
we are allowed a different ending,
where our hands meet for a brief, sweet minute
palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss
where I watch you watching me
where my tongue comes unstuck
to say,
give me my sin again.

Friday, April 28, 2017

How My Mother Showed Her Love

How my mother showed her love

Well, mostly, she didn't.
I mean, she didn't bake me a cake
for my birthday with pretty pink and white
frosting, and candles stuck on top
like all the other girls got
(she didn't know how to, and
in any case, we didn't have an oven)
She didn't polish my school shoes
Or make sure my homework was done.
If my uniform wasn't ironed,
she said, well, you should have kept it
with the clothes for the dhobi
why didn't you,
and let me go to school with a crumpled shirt.

She didn't kiss me goodnight.
I don't recall a hug until that day
when I put my arms around her
one day in the kitchen,
just like that, I said,
when she asked me what
I thought I was doing
that was when I was
fifteen, and spent most of my days
hiding from her
and the world
so I guess the surprise was warranted
My mother never hugged me she said
in later years, when I would force-hug her
and complain about how she never
initiated contact

tell me the truth I said once
I'm adopted aren't I?
she got this-expression- on her face,
snorted, and said, don't you have
anything else to do
Later I found a diary
where she'd scrawled-
in the manner of one crossing off
an item on a to-do list-
Delivered baby girl 4.20 pm
or maybe it was to make it real to her
that the red puny crying thing
with a bush of hair
was, in fact, hers.

When I was six
competitive motherhood caused her enough anxiety
that she told my father
I don't think she reads enough
though by that time I was reading
the entire Gospel of Matthew King James Version aloud
without messing the thees and thines,
curling my tongue around the words
Verily I say unto thee

So my father trusted the Indian Postal Service
to deliver to me a package of books- ten books!-TEN-
a glorious number-an unimaginably large number-
it took three months to arrive-
I remember the green paper packaging tearing under the scissors
I took to it- no, my mother, wasn't the kind
who stopped her child from wielding sharp instruments-

And when I was nine, she would
borrow books for me from the library
books that I had no real right yet to read
because I was only a child
but my mother didn't particularly care
because it kept me quiet and occupied
on the evenings when she wanted
to do nothing more than curl up
with a book herself
in our tiny flat that had two rooms
and no tv then, just an old radio,
a peace would reign till it was time
for me to eat whatever it was she had made-
bhindi, usually, because that was the only thing
I would eat
and I think back now on how tired she must have got
eating the same thing every day-


Once when I was so ill that I needed to be admitted
in a hospital with a needle shoved in my arm
she left me with a family friend
because she had to go to work that day
and nobody would give her a day off
to be with her sick child
when she came back that day
she put her hand on my brow and said
are you okay
and I said yes
and she said okay
and then sat in the chair next to me
and pulled out a book to read
while I pretended to talk to the faces in the white ceiling

another time I woke up in the morning
with my throat hurting and my face puffed up
and she laughed and said, you look like a frog
and then, as an afterthought, we better go to the doctor

I knew what sex was before she told me-
her voice dry and business like,
a bit impatient, as though she had something else to do,
and she probably did,
but she taught me new words
vagina and penis
I had no idea until then, even though I'd already had
an (admittedly) theoretical understanding of what an orgasm was
it involved lots of kissing and perhaps shoving into walls
her hair spread over the pillow, his hands grabbing her hips-his mouth on her breasts-
but- penis and vagina- that felt- simpler
and also- boring?- surely, she was-wrong-

When I was almost sixteen I told her
I wanted to wax my legs and hands
I was already, then, beginning to feel
unfeminine (unfuckable)
the rules were changing so fast around me
like one day my hips suddenly had curves
but my breasts remained flat
and I didn't know much,
but I knew that hair on legs
was considered
not acceptable
-so- waxing-
my mother laughed incredulously-
she'd never waxed any part of herself-
where, she said, did you get this idea
and then, more sharply,
You look fine-
but of course, I knew the truth already-
I didn't look fine (fuckable)-
but that was that-
I had to try and convince myself
that smartness was a (fuckable) quality-
that worked as well as you'd imagine
in the years just after Aishwarya Rai
had won Miss World
and Pamela Anderson was still
Somebody Hot


On the day I started my tenth class board exams
she asked, as we walked to school,
did you study
as though it had suddenly occurred to her
that this might have some relevance
yes, I lied
and she nodded

I don't think she ever knew when I was
lying to her
I don't think she ever expected it-
she never
laid a trap
to find me out-
She'd never, in all the time I'd known her-lied
even when it would have been better for her to-

but she had one of those faces
that showed every emotion,
requiring no translation-
like the time she'd gotten a fancy hair style-
her lovely,long hair, shortened to just over her shoulders-
and my aunt walked into a roomful of people
gathered for a wedding and said-loudly-
What have you done with your hair-
my mother went crimson from embarassment-
the colour of her rich magenta sari-


My mother let me choose my own clothes
from when I was eight:
when a cousin asked about it, she said, vaguely,
It's easier that way.

When I was seventeen, she let me buy
the most expensive pair of shoes
anybody in my family had ever owned.


When I was fifteen I told her I was going for a movie
with my friends.
Okay, she said, but be back by eight.
When I came back at 8.15, she said,
what did we buy you that watch for.

Is that what you're wearing she'd ask
Just as I had one foot out the door,
and then go back to whatever she was doing.

When I was nine, an older friend picked up a book
I was reading and quoted
Bess goes on a blind date- she stopped-
looked at me, and then at my mother-
and asked- do you know what a blind date is-
Sure, I said, Bess doesn't know whom she's going to meet-
My mother said, oh, that's all, ok.
And then perhaps remembering
that she was supposed to set the rules-
Are you sure you should be reading this?
I shrugged, it isn't one of the good ones anyway,
the mystery isn't that good-

These days -some days- she tells me
I never looked after you properly
Like all the others did
I should have-

And I ask, half joking, half scared
I turned out ok, didn't I?
Yes, mostly, she says,
with half a smile.
So I put my arms around her,
because it doesn't occur to her
that we're having a Moment,
and after a half minute she says, hopefully,
is this enough?