I had to leave the streets where men prey on us. I am ugly but I have these breasts, you see.
I don’t have breasts but I have this skin, you see.
I cover my skin from head to toe but I have this stare, you see.
I don’t stare but I have seven decades on me, you see.
I am 12 but I have this un-policed gait, you see.
I have eyes, teeth, feet, nose, mouth, hair, ears. I have nails, you see.
There is nothing you could have done, Moumita. I want you to know you lived bravely till the last second. Because when did being scared ever save us? There’s nothing we could have done for you either, Moumita.
And so I entered the forest to find you. I sang loudly so that you would hear me on the tops of trees, where they kiss and weave into each other. I looked up at the sky and then I looked at the wet moss below. You were everywhere and nowhere all at once. I think you were at peace. I think you were with me, your parents and everyone who loved, cried & raged for you, all at once.
The grace of god by which it was not-me, brings no comfort today, Moumita. Because, here in this forest as we walk together, you whisper into my heart that you actually are me. You are me in this forest. I was you in that seminar room.
"How could you not be", you whisper from the highest branches of the trees I pass, "We are all together in this aloneness now, Purnima. I will never not be a part of you...don’t you know what my name means? Moumita - sweet friend.
Very gently, before he realises what he’s agreeing to, she has sought and received permission to lay him down and swing one leg across his torso so that he's safely scaffolded between her thighs. Then she lays her palms down on his bare chest.
“Will you do something for me?”
“What?” he asks, his face grimly professorial, wondering how this moment qualifies as a valid, logical experience.
“Will you let me rest my hands on your heart? Will you close your eyes and listen - really listen - to what I’m about to say?”
“Hmm”
“Is that a yes?”
“Yes, yes,” he says, annoyance already creeping into his body. She can feel it between her legs.
“Ok, close your eyes. Listen.”
The heat from her palms warms his chest. He draws comfort from it. He feels trapped.
“What if I’m not a mad woman? What if there's a world filled with people like me, who feel deeply and live by that? Where people rage when they’re angry and love when they’re truly ready to love? What if in that world, you are the mad man? What if your words & performances fall flat, lacking the weight of sentiment and truth?
“What if I’m not actually overthinking? Or underthinking? What if I am thinking the exact amount required for the moment? What if it’s ok to be this person? Not just ok, but rational, sensible and good? What if it's a superpower which allows me to see everything you struggle to understand? What if this way of being, and my appearance in your life, was designed to help you heal?”
His lips curl up into a smirk. He is indulging her, she knows. But her palms are warmer now.
“Stay open, love. Just a little while longer.”
He stops smirking.
“You're missing out on the best of me when you discard me as a mad woman. Maybe mad women are who you need. I am proud of my madness, I cultivated it with love and fought to keep it alive. It allows me to see your heart, how hard you try, how tired you get sometimes and also how strong and steadfast you are. It allows me to see how fiercely you love your son.
“Understand this - the part of me that unsettles you the most is what'll make me your faithful ally. Trust me, this is the woman you want to be loved by”
Her thighs tighten around him. He squirms.
“Why does a woman showing you her full self, make you angry? When did me being me, become an offense to you?
“And what if it’s just me, love, showing up for you?”
He opens his eyes. He is angry. She knows she doesn’t have much time left.
“Close your eyes. Just a little bit more.”
He shuts his eyes again. His jaw is rigid. She wants to hold his face in her palms and kiss him. But not yet. She can feel his heart beat in her hands.
“So listen. This could go two ways.
You could choose to continue calling me crazy as though it were a disease. You could choose this moment to run out of patience with me. With us.
OR you could choose to listen to that one, lonely voice inside you that wonders if I’m right. That maybe, just maybe, trusting this mad woman might bring you relief. Choose this and I promise to protect your heart with every fibre of my being.
“But if you pick option ‘a’...,” she relaxes her grip around his body, “then you’re free to go. We've reached the end of our time together.”
She lifts her hands off his chest.
“You can open your eyes.”
She touches his face gently. There are storms raging in him. She is nervous now.
“So what will it be, my love?”
He takes a long breath. She feels him rise and fall under her. He opens his mouth to answer.
Somewhere there is someone for this ugly girl. Someone who speaks completes sentences containing feeling words and honest truths. Somewhere there is someone who remembers to stop, breathe and listen. To her. Somewhere there is someone who remembers how she said she was sad, she was sick, she needed time. Somewhere there is someone who wants to be unbroken before they reach for her. Somewhere there is someone who sees her ugly and because of it, calls her beautiful.
1. Inference One: Undiagnosed Problem with Alcohol & Gymming
Men posing with boot-shaped beer mugs
Men posing with 2 boot-shaped beer mugs
Men posing with boot-shaped beer mugs against a backdrop of a boot-shaped-beer-mug neon sign.
Men posing with muscles (their own & others')
Men posing with sweat
1. Inference Two: Aspirational Poachers
Men posing with tiger on leash
Men posing with white tiger on leash
Men posing with dead tiger on wall
Men posing with one leg on dead-tiger carpet
2. Inference Three: Good Morning Afficionados
Posters of red roses and 'Good Morning'
Posters of yellow roses and 'Good Morning'
Posters of 'Good Morning Life Is Too Short For *fill in the blanks*'
3. Inference Four: Lovers of Simplicity
Men who desire 'simplicity'
Men who want 'non-judgemental' partners
Men who want 'transparency'
Men who use Hritik Roshan's face as profile pictures
4. Inference Five: Seekers of Domestic Bliss
Men who pose with unidentified children
Men who pose with their own children
Men who pose with their wife and children
5. Inference Six: Highest Education
Men from IIMs want clean nails
Men from MIT want to fight misandry
Men from IIT
So 12 and something years ago, I decided this would be how I would live: https://aquaticstatic.blogspot.com/2009/12/ritual.html and then I forgot about it. Or, I went about living my life with this tucked away in the back of my mind, not really invoking it as life began to nudge me, tongue-in-cheek, into uncomfortable spaces rife with fun shit like crossroads and existential dilemmas.
On my 43rd birthday this year, as wishes poured in, a dear friend called me courageous. In the last couple of years, I’ve been hearing versions of this characterisation and it’s left me confused. Because for much of my early life the word most used for me was ‘nice’. A safe and bland word said when people didn’t know how else to describe me. General decency and a compliant nature was what people associated me most with. Woohoo. What a legacy. She was….nice.
Bravery of any kind is not what I’ve ever felt on the inside. I am, if anything, an encyclopaedia of fears seen & unseen. Every worst case scenario is my reality. Everyday I make decisions to not pick them as I get ready to go out into the world. If that makes one brave, then ok, the Decade of No Fear did its job.
I’m 3 years late to the next decade - or at least blogging about it - but hey, the last one turned out alright so do I dare paint a dream for the next one? I’m 43 and the downhill express is picking up momentum. They make you fill up with hope for 40 and to be honest, if you’ve lived a relatively healthy life, it feels like anything is possible. At 43 shit gets real. The body slows, you’re working with people 20 years younger and no you cannot keep up with them. Or dream like them. Dreams change when you’re 43.
Dare I make this a Decade of Love? Of loving and being loved? The core work remains the same as it did when I turned 30. To trust. I feel like I've let more and more people and ideas into my circles of trust recently and now just the last fence remains - the one around the most intimate parts of my heart, where I am my most woman, my most child, my most sacred and pristine. If I don’t do the work or delay things, this part will wither and rust. Nothing I do then, will be able to protect it. New awareness is beginning to flood me - I can’t protect this place by hiding it away. It just doesn’t work anymore. I have to dismantle the fence. Or else, whatever it protects will die.
Just like when I started the Decade of No Fear, I honestly don’t know how to make the Decade of Love work. I have no roadmap. I’m riddled with uncertainty and the wounds of the last many years loving people who didn’t love me back. Maybe I start with honouring all the love that comes at me. Maybe I start with not measuring love but allowing it to exist. I meet children & people everyday who make my heart burst with unbearable joy just by the mere fact of their existence. Maybe I start with believing that I can do that for someone too.
Very early into COVID-19 ’s second wave and before the images of funeral pyres began to make international headlines, like so many of us, I too tried to arrange oxygen for someone I’d never met. The patient was alone at home with a nurse, in the middle of a lockdown, with an SPO2 level of 30 (later, we would learn all about SPO2 values as we performed our own triages). No assistance was reaching them. I was 15 km away, yet confident I could help. Having been cushioned by a lifetime of privilege, it never occurred to me that this was unfixable, until many enquiries later, I had to inform them that there was no oxygen to be had. Could she wait till the morning? The daughter, who was on the other side of the globe, sent a message to stop searching. I put the phone away and wept for a stranger who was about to lose her mother.
Weeks on, anyone deemed non-essential to our city is locked in at home. Everyone except those who are running from pillar to post looking for beds, for air. Then the funereal photographs start coming in. A city engulfed in smoke and dust from mass cremations and burials. Pyres burn non-stop for weeks. We’ve never seen anything like it. People living near cremation grounds report that everything is covered in a grey film, an unholy scattering of ashes across a city stuck in an unending nightmare. The state refuses to count the dead but the smoke is everywhere. It’s getting harder and harder to breathe.
Or maybe, it is history wrapping her hands around our throats. You’ve been here before, she screams as her grip tightens. This isn’t the first time you’ve witnessed institutional murder.
But those of us who won big in the sweepstakes of caste and class have mastered the art of denial. We have anointed intellectuals and ‘thought leaders’ to construct dangerous mythologies. Headlines, full page advertisements, op-eds in The Washington Post and TIME magazine, the Dutts, Dhumes and Mehtas. We have enabled not just one or two, but an army of sociopaths. We have made a business out of dismissing history’s smoke signals. The marketing of fake messiahs, the vice-like grip over police, media and the courts, the buying of bureaucrats, candidates and votes and the willful abdication of Constitutional duty as minorities are brutally culled. Go further back, history urges us, follow the trail of your pathological apathy. We watch vacantly as our farmlands get looted and workers betrayed. We look away as the brightest minds of our generation are locked away behind bars. We cheer as private profiteers hollow out public education and healthcare. But we always preserve our fragility. God forbid someone stored beef in their fridge.
The thing with a million pyres is, when the smoke rises, no one can tell where exactly it came from. Was it the pregnant 25-year-old who breathed her last at the threshold of a hospital that had nothing left to give? Or a young Dalit girl, full of promise, burnt like trash in the middle of the night by thugs in uniform? Was it our father, mother, son or daughter? Or was it the young man ‘disappeared’ into the Kashmir night?.
This is our moment of reckoning. We must ask why we turned away from self-evident truths. And why we rendered a million voices, unheard. In our deafness, we lost the ability to discern between right and wrong, the cruel and humane. Like religion and culture, we allowed the virus to be weaponised.
Now the pyres burn as history engulfs us in unforgiving fury. She rages like a forest fire that consumes everything in its path. Let us hope it annihilates the hate that courses through our veins, rendering us criminally useless when we need each other the most. May the hatred in our belly, as poet Joopaka Subhadra called it, be extinguished so that we may breathe. What will it take to start afresh?
The defeat of one political party won’t be enough, nor will the toppling of the current regime. We will have to remove the rot from the system, from ourselves. These recent years of darkness have also put a spotlight on our greatest resource, the Indian Constitution. It offers hope in spirit and word and a roadmap out of this hell we have built on communal and caste hatred. It is remarkably compassionate in its essence and committed to equity at its core. And although it has been singed badly in the last few years, it hasn’t burned out yet.
No, history isn’t the fumes that clog our lungs. It is the fire that burns in our hearts, urging us not to betray this moment in time. Those who merely wring their hands and despair will be pushed out of the way, making space for the children of Ambedkar to create new history. The Umars and Azads, the Nodeeps and Devanganas, the Sudhas and Sharjeels, the farmers, workers and nurses will claim this country. It is theirs to inherit. But make no mistake, the debris to clean up is ours.
When the smoke clears, let us hope to hear history’s whisper again, those words we long to hear: Don’t be afraid. There is still time.
Sanju is 12 going on 30. He walks into the library with a swagger that’s picked up from the older boys. I find it hugely irritating, “Just be 12 na!” I mumble to myself. Sanju’s fulltime job is being impressed with Sanju. He is consumed with his own brilliance: I’m so smart, I’m the best. I came first in class, I’m the best. I can read in English, I’m the best.
He demands too much attention and is regularly surprised to discover that the rules also apply to him. His high-pitched complaints about other library members are not endearing.
This kid requires energy. The kind that a decidedly single and childless-by-choice woman resents giving. But he loves the library and spends all his time there. He reads well, he teaches his younger siblings to submit perfect book reports and is always buzzing like a bee around this space.
At The Community Library Project (TCLP) in Delhi, all are welcome. No fee, no kaghaz. Read, think, take books home, surf the internet, attend workshops, make art, make friends. I sometimes wonder if the library matters as much to me, as it does to him. I wonder if he thinks about it when he goes back home, as much as I do. Despite our differences, we have one thing in common - the library is our anchor.
On 25rd March, 2020 at 8PM, everything is unmoored. A deadly plague has travelled around the world to reach us. Deadlier still is the lockdown imposed suddenly by the Indian state. We have barely 4 hours to prepare for a new reality. Alone in my south Delhi apartment, dread fills me from head to toe. I am afraid for myself and my elderly parents. My fridge is stocked. I call my domestic help and tell her not to come. And then I reconcile to waiting.
For thousands of families connected to our library, the next few days, weeks & months are a trainwreck and the losses pile up. Daily wage & job loss, evictions and then the food runs out. Sanju’s school is shut. I don’t know it then but his family decides to leave the city like millions of other working class people. Not everyone at the library has the luxury to wait.
In the early days of the lockdown, my reality is virtual. If it weren’t for Twitter I wouldn’t know what’s happening outside the gated colony where I live. Op eds, breaking news and the endless march. Refresh. Refresh. Refresh. In what feels like forever, I have no real responsibilities. For now I have money in the bank and my landlord has said I could go six months without paying rent. I post this on Twitter, it goes viral - my landlord is a hero.
As the days get hotter, I turn on my AC and refresh.
Social media is flooded with photos and videos of working class families making the unbelievably long journey. How much panic does one need to feel to set out on foot, for thousands of kilometers? Imagine knowing that no one in this city, not even the people whose homes you built, waste you collected or deliveries you made, would look after you in a crisis.
May 2020. Many families from our library community are in deep distress. Children I’ve known for years are witnessing the unravelling of their lives. Everyone who works at TCLP receives an excel sheet of phone numbers. We each call at least 100 members to check how they are. We try and aswer their concerns as best as we can. Our librarians become hubs of information, we make videos about how to get tested for Covid in order to get on a ‘shramik’ train or bus. Others connect with food relief organisations to distribute food packets in our areas and visit ration offices to find answers. We find every public service collapsing.
When one has never known material adversity before, a crisis like this is paralysing.
But as a library worker who is part of a collective, there is immense power as well. Library leaders search for ways to continue reaching readers. TCLP has never wanted to go digital but for the first time, it begins exploring online library resources that work in poor internet areas and don’t hog expensive data packs. Public school kids are ‘back to learning’ with Zoom classes. Ours will probably lose the year. They can’t lose their library too. We try to get as many members onto WhatsApp channels to send them read-alouds thrice a week. It is called Duniya Sabki.
We are in October now. I have no idea where Sanju is or if he’s receiving any read alouds. And I’m ashamed to say it’s because I haven’t thought about him in months. I’ve been swept up in the pandemic too. Family members have fallen sick with the virus, some seriously. Income streams have dried up. Everyday, we hear more stories of despair from the library. I’m too scared to hit refresh on social media. My library colleagues discuss what to do with all this frustration. We decide to build a ‘Justice Doctrine’ - a chronicle of our community’s distress, made of snippets of conversations we’ve had with each & every member-family. It is not just a place to park our rage, it is a scathing testament of how our systems failed us.
I have taken up yoga but not baking sourdough. There is still food in my fridge and I have even confessed, with zero self-awareness, that “jhadoo-poncha is fun yaar, so great for the glutes.” There’s another trip to the ration office. After November the free-ration scheme, meant for food-relief in the lockdown, will end. What will happen after that? The officials can’t answer. We are hurtling into the worst of the pandemic. November in Delhi is deadly. We hit an all-time high with new infections & deaths.
On 16th December 2020, I receive a Facebook message:
Hello
Mam
Give me reply
Just
I squint at the profile picture. No! It can’t be. Sanju! But not 12-going-on-30 Sanju. He looks like a proper teenager now. A bit more serious, with a more serious haircut and just the last dregs of boyishness on his face. He must be posing, pretending to be an older man, I think.
Hello
Mam
Give me reply just mam
Call
Karo
Mam
And just like that, as if the months of deadly lockdown never happened, I feel that old familiar annoyance rise up again.
Hello
Mama
Oh sorry
Mam
Purnima mam
Give me reply
I reply to him and apologise for not responding earlier. He asks if he can call me and another ‘mam’ sometime soon. I say yes of course. I want to know how he is, where he is. But then he vanishes again and the call never comes.
10 months after the lockdown began, TCLP’s libraries begin reopening. First at Khirki, then South Extension-Kotla and soon after, Gurgaon. As old members and new admissions begin streaming in, we exercise as much covid-control as we can. Our programs are running at half mast, we sanitise a lot and at any given time you can hear some adult saying “Beta, mask theek se pehno...naak par.”
Sanju messages once more. I figure he’s seen all the photos of the new libraries on social media.
How are you mam?
This time I ask him: Aap kahan ho? Aapka message dekh kar mai bahut khush hoon
Library kab khulegi maam?
Khul gayi hai. Aap kab aaoge?
Mai nahi aa sakta mam, gao me hoo.
Oh! Wapas kab aaoge?
Pataa nahi mam.
I don’t know what to say to that. The 10-second delay is characteristically too much for impatient Sanju.
Mam?
Aap theek ho mam?
Haan, mai theek hoon. Aapko miss karti hoon. Saare ma’am aur sirs aapko miss karte hain.
Ok mam.
Ab mjhe jana hai mam.
….
The cursor blinks as if someone is typing furiously on the other end. But the message, when it finally comes from this boy whom I haven’t thought about in weeks, is short.
