The Roaches Are Here

At around 1.45am I stumble out of bed and make my way to the bathroom. I turn the light switch on before I enter, like I always do (it gives whatever djinns and animals roaming inside fair warning that a human is approaching). I open the door and the biggest cockroach I have ever seen walks out. He (I assume...they?) freezes. I freeze. I'm startled but not scared. Despite being bitten by wasps and regularly cleaning lizard poop off my floors I'm not easily freaked out by anything besides rats.
My reason for freezing is I'm polite. I'd like to give the cockroach a chance to gather its wits and make its next move.

At this point, I should mention I haven't really had a human in my home for a couple of weeks. It takes me a while to tell myself that having roaches in the house is not good. In fact I haven't seen one in my house since 2016. I scroll through my database of insect knowledge - why exactly are cockroaches bad? They don't bite or chew through stuff. They don't carry life-threatening viruses (well...they might). Why am I supposed to take my chappal off and squash this guy?

I really don't want to take my chappal off and squash this guy. The cockroach-chappal-squash move is something we've all grown up with and somewhere it's become the automatic Darwinian response of south asians to all pests. But who said that's the only way to deal with cockroaches? What if we let them walk away? What would happen?

I must google this, I think, as the cockroach remains frozen, contemplating its power move. I must also add 'Cockroach killer' to my shopping list although I'm not decided whether to use it or not. Have I mentioned that no human besides me has entered my home in weeks?

Two weeks ago I was attacked by a swarm of wasps. It's not their fault, I'd barged in on them quite suddenly as they were building their nest on disputed property. According to the Indian constitution, I have rights over this building. According to natural law, the Indian constitution can go suck it. It was painful as sin. My arm and back swelled up to theatrical proportions and everything was very tragic looking (and feeling) for a week. The wasps got it worse. The ones that stung me died. The rest had to deal with me for the next 2 weeks as I set upon a daily routine of breaking whatever nest they'd built through the day.
Wasps are exceedingly persistent. To the point of being, in my opinion, stupid af. They will build no matter what. Like robots programmed to execute code with no regard for value of labour or consequence. Despite the fact that I break their construction every single day they return to rebuild. I've taken hits too. The glass lampshade they decided to construct on got smashed to bits because of my indelicate stick manoeuvres. As of today, they continue to build through the morning. At around noon, most of them will disperse (lunch break?) leaving one poor sod behind (to guard the fortress?). I will then sneak up with my stick (curtain rod) and poke at the nest until it falls. That poor guard wasp, the shit it must have to listen to every afternoon when the others return to find their hard work undone. GO SOMEWHERE ELSE, YOU FOOLS! I want to scream every single day. Do you think I enjoy destroying your homes and your chance to build a future, I yell at them like a serial gaslighter. But they never listen. It doesn't matter I guess. Soon the nesting season will be over and the problem will take care of itself.

Roaches, I can tell even without googling, are not seasonal. I suppose at some point I'll have to do something violent to them. I'm still standing outside the bathroom, waiting for Big Guy to decide where he wants to go. Just go anywhere please, I won't do anything to you tonight, I plead. I really need to go to the toilet. The bastard doesn't care (does he know what I did to the wasps? Is this revenge?) so I stomp my foot. Perhaps its Darwinian response is to scuttle when it feels the south asian chappal approaching. It makes a beeline for the living room. For now there is truce.

It's summer in a pandemic. The wasps will soon leave. The roaches are here.

The Image of Saffiyah Khan

First off let’s face it, this is straight up hilarious - this Chihuahua of a man nipping at the ankles of human decency. You can just about hear his ridiculous yelps (like our ruling party’s goons but with an accent) growing more and more hysterical as the mistress of bindi stares him down. “Should I swat him now?…Now?” I imagine her wondering which Louis Vuitton handbag he leaped out of. Bigot want a biscuit?

Look at her power stance – does she walk around like that, with her body angled for battle, her back ramrod straight, chest out, neck stretched, face relaxed yet ready to get into just about anybody’s face? Is this her normal life-condition*? I slouch, always have. That’s my normal life-condition. I have a weak core. My back is sick & tired of being sick & tired.

When I was 12 there were two Chihuahuas that would accost us on the way to our school bus stop. I remember being terrified in anticipation before I stepped out of my house. I’d pray they wouldn’t be let loose on the street that morning. If I saw them scurrying to get at our ankles, I would panic and slouch-run across the road. Maybe if I’d known, like Saffiyah does, that Chihuahuas live in handbags, I wouldn’t have been so afraid.

By her own account, when the image was taken, Saffiyah Khan was protecting another woman who’d been surrounded “360” by the same yelping thugs. Reports have interpreted Khan’s demeanour as ‘unfazed’. That’s bullshit if you ask me. She had to have been fazed, most fazed. You don’t get to stand like that if you haven’t been similarly fazed time & time & time again. You get to a point where the fucking Chihuahua has barked at you one too many times and you’re like fuck it, if it even bares its toothpicky teeth in the direction of your ankles, you'll swoop down, scoop it up and lob it into the stratosphere before its keepers realise that their dildo-themed pet has gone missing.

One might ask, why didn’t you swoop & scoop before? Why did you endure years of intimidation at the hands of these canine hobbits? Can’t speak for Saffiyah but when I was 12 they seemed bigger. Everyone at our bus stop was afraid of them, even the 16 year olds. Over years, they’d acquired mythic status and the stories had been handed down from seniors to juniors. ‘Did you know they bit so-and-so and they had to amputate his foot?’ ‘Their owner is a tantric yogi. His dogs have secret powers.’ (Ok that one I made up, such was the terror unleashed by these unleashed beasts.)

Obviously I don’t know what Saffiyah Khan is really thinking in these images but to me she has become the Monalisa of pussy power. She has run out of fucks to give and this fuck-deficit has allowed her insight into the Chihuahua’s handbag world. Sure it’s Vuitton (and that’s nothing to scoff at) but it is, at the end of the day, a dank handbag, made even danker by dwarf-dog sweat. Does Saffiyah Khan find this realisation amusing? Or did the Chihuahua pee in the bag just a little, its stench reaching everyone’s nostrils? Is that why Saffiyah is smiling? 

I’m no longer haunted by the Chihuahua twins from my school days but I have new challenges. The apartment where I live comes with neighbours, whom I would term ‘distinctly asshole-ish’. I realized this the day I moved, when the movers decided to use the elevator to transport a heavy sofa up two floors. My neighbour stood at the entrance of the elevator and threatened to let loose Jack – her 350 kilo vicious-looking dog. She knew the men were terrified of Jack, they’d asked her to keep him leashed. But she didn’t like ‘those men’ using ‘her lift’ and she let Jack loose. I slouch-stepped in and blocked Jack in a friendly embrace. Jack was confused. The men laughed. He jumped again. I slouched towards him again. This time Jack’s tail went insane, whiplashing his human-shaped asshole. She yelled “JACK! No!!”. I held out my hand. Jack held out his paw. We shook like adults who had no beef with each other. As we retreated to our corners, the men grinned and I thanked god that Jack didn’t live in a handbag.

Check out this beautiful Twitter thread:

Just a wee thread of women who truly don't have any time for your shit.

1) Tess Asplund, Borlänge, Sweden - 2016 (Photo - David Lagerlöf) pic.twitter.com/xjRmHfc3h5

— Xas (@_Xas_) April 10, 2017

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* Incidentally, her stance has been described as an “improbably calm stance – smiling, slumped shoulders, hands in pockets” – I view the image very differently.

Your 30s Are For...

...realizing that while you possess the intellectual capacity to contemplate the deeper puzzles of life and pursue them to their artistic, philosophical or academic conclusion (on or off social media), you actively choose not to, instead devoting much of your free time to constructing penis & fart jokes.
Until you are confronted with a situation that demands you summon your highest self and act from a place of reason, nuance, kindness and empathy. In which case, you influence outcomes as positively as you can (from voting mindfully in an election, to helping an old person cross the road or being kind to a telemarketer) so that you can go back - as soon as possible - to your raison d'être i.e. constructing penis & fart jokes.

https://edwardsheridan.wordpress.com/2014/04/21/raison-detre/

Playing Dice

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I was raised by a man, whose love translated into elaborate soliloquies on physics and the wonders of the material world. As kids, we were initiated into Newtonian mechanics, the idea of multiple dimensions beyond our conception and the Einsteinian insistence that God “does not play dice”.

Strict causality was my father’s life philosophy. He imparted it to us via physics and through his deep suspicion of ‘randomness’. A+B must always lead to C. It couldn’t, for example, result in ‘oooo what a pretty flower’. His world was – and is – ordered into neat little compartments, each one precisely labelled according to content and function.

Growing up in this ethos, I too acquired a Newtonian outlook on life. And like this brand of physics, the rules seemed to work in my context, keeping my surroundings functional. There was great comfort in knowing that things follow from what came before, that every action had a specific consequence and that one could predict outcomes rather confidently. But I never learnt about the realm where these rules fall apart.

My father never taught me about quantum theory. I would see the Feynman Lectures on his bedside table but was never initiated into what it was all about. I learnt about Bohr and Heisenberg in school but never had a sense of what their theories implied in a larger sense. The grounding I had in classical, deterministic science was never shaken by the new consciousness of an unpredictable universe. Nor did it occur to me to wonder why my father left out such an essential chapter in the history of physics.

It is only now as I sit in my own home, separate from my father’s that I conjecture why that is. I wake up every morning in a panic, with every muscle in my body wound up tight, for reasons I don’t understand. I lie in bed in the pre-dawn hours, trying to dissect this anxiety and shortness of breath. I’m not afraid of ghosts or monsters. I’m not afraid of being single, female and living alone. I’m not afraid of what the world will think of me. I am afraid of something entirely different.

My father and mother were the essential cogs in the wheel of causality that kept my day-to-day existence functional. They were the A+B that allowed my life C to operate with precision and structured consequence. I have enjoyed the freedom that comes from having systems in place, with rules to follow. But at some point I began craving something more.

Now I am in my own home with no one else to set the rules. I have no pre-determined formula, no A+B=C. I can predict nothing beyond what I know of my self and my nature. The world I live in now is fraught with randomness and for the first time I begin to guess why my father never taught me quantum theory.

It was perhaps about fear and the unknown realm of worst-case scenarios. The terror of knowing you are at the vortex of all things uncertain. That bad things happen to good people and things go wrong in spite of best intentions.

Because, chance.

I try to breathe through the panic but it doesn’t always work. So last night, I turned to physics again and found this buried in the biography of Albert Einstein – a nugget explaining the shattering idea of uncertainty in the quantum world:

“It is impossible to know, Heisenberg declared, the precise position of a particle, such as a moving electron, and its precise momentum (its velocity times its mass) at the same instant. The more precisely the position of the particle is measured, the less precisely it is possible to measure its momentum…

…The very act of observing something... affects the observation. But Heisenberg’s theory went beyond that. An electron does not have a definite position or path until we observe it. This is a feature of our universe, he said, not merely some defect in our observing or measuring abilities.

The uncertainty principle, so simple and yet so startling, was a stake in the heart of classical physics. It asserts that there is no objective reality – not even an objective position of a particle – outside of our observations.”

I allow this theory into me, not how a physicist might approve, but as the daughter of my father. I allow Heisenberg’s theory to show me a path out of panic to a place where chance is not necessarily a bad word.

In this world that I build, observation, or the way we are compelled to look at things around us, determines their nature. Just by our seeing, they acquire shape and form. Perhaps there is an objective reality somewhere out there – but I can’t reach it today. Neither could my father.

Perhaps we never needed to. Because what we missed was more relevant: the factor of our influence and the awareness that our personal power can impart to an idea, its reality.

The next time I meet my father I might ask him why he never told me the full version of the anecdote. Did he know it at all? Did he choose not to tell me? Or was it something he simply could not comprehend?

When Einstein said that God did not play dice, why did my father not tell me of Niels Bohr’s reply?

“Einstein, don't tell God what to do.”

                                                  

Make It Count

Big horror happens and we reel from the impact. Or we think we do.
We believe our hearts bleed so much for those who suffer that we can't wholly comprehend it.
We allow the terrible events unfolding outside to make us feel safe and grateful on the inside.

We tweet, blog and weep in our private corners.
Our sympathies are real, they express solidarity with an honesty of intention that eases our own anxieties just a little bit.
Nothing can help, even the tiniest thing helps.
How do we make sense of it all? What can we do?

We cling to hashtags and social media outpourings. Against our best instincts we look and re-look at photographs. We read and re-read grisly testimonies.

But how do we make it count?
Last evening, I fell asleep with the heavy knowledge of what happened in Peshawar, of what takes place every day in Syria, Iraq, Kashmir, Manipur, my own hometown of Delhi and too many other places on this planet. I wondered what I could do to make the horrific knowledge count.

The only answer I could come up with was to wake up.
To not make it about things that happened Over There but wake up to what I am complicit in Over Here.
Every moment that I am intolerant, or so wounded that I lose the ability to empathize.
Every time I see a child, a grown up or an animal in distress and do nothing.
Every time I allow injustice to happen in front of my eyes - no matter how tiny or how big.
Every time I am blind to injustice because my privilege allows me to be.
Every time I choose my comfort over doing what my heart knows is the right thing - I am complicit.

We wonder how men can look into the eyes of an innocent child and shoot point blank.
We must also wonder how we look at a shivering beggar child at a traffic stop and roll up our windows.
We wonder what makes people so ruthless they can set fire to a teacher in front of her students.
We must also then wonder what allows us to look away when we see a woman being molested in broad daylight.
These horrors are not equivalent, I know, but it is where we can begin to make them count.
Otherwise it's all empty, like a headline, a status update or a hashtag.

Dear India, sound familiar?

I've finally gotten around to reading The Millenium Trilogy, which is shockingly not fluff (goes to show what an illiterate I am). 
The passage below quotes a character, who visited Germany in 1941 and describes the ethos of that time. 
For anyone who's ever asked in a judgy tone (me): "But why didn't the Germans stop Hitler? Couldn't they tell he was a sociopath?", here, Tinker Bell, is a possible response. 
And colour me paranoid, but it sounds & feels a lot like what's going on in India right now:

"I won't tire you with the details but when I went there, Hitler and Stalin were still good friends and there wasn't yet an Eastern Front. Everyone still believed Hitler was invincible. There was a feeling of...both optimism and desperation. I think those are the words. More than half a century later, it's still difficult to put words to mood. Don't get me wrong - I was not a Nazi, and in my eyes Hitler seemed like an absurd character in an operatta. But it would have been almost impossible not to be infected by the optimism about the future, which was rife in the ordinary people in Hamburg. Despite the fact that the war was getting closer, and several bombing raids were carried out against Hamburg during the time I was there, the people seemed to think it was mostly a temporary annoyance - that soon there would be peace and Hitler would establish his Neuropa. People wanted to believe that Hitler was God. That's what it sounded like in the propaganda."


(I don't wish to compare any one person to Hitler but I do find it fascinating to read about that precarious moment in history right before Hitler became so obviously and famously 'Evil'...coinciding with the moment of brainwashing/ disastrous lapse in individual judgement/ herd mentality that the public suffered.)

 

I wake up with a shortness of breath and tightness of chest, the kind of panic some 20th century philosopher or analyst must have described in great detail, and it occurs to me more and more each day that the island of peace and calm I live on is growing smaller and smaller and that too many of my fellow inhabitants on this planet are living lives, where everything they thought was 'normal' is routinely destroyed. As the panic rises, I keep clicking 'Add To Cart' until I feel hopeful again but, of course, I don't. I wonder if this concern for my fellow inhabitants might have something to do with the fact that each day I find something 'normal' inside me getting routinely destroyed and no matter how many times I click 'Add To Wishlist' to feel hopeful, of course, I don't.


 

Selfies

You know what?
We need to take more selfies.

I've been in the dumps lately. Thinking I have no life, no friends, no social calender, no 'these-are-the-days-of-our-lives' moments anymore. And then I look at selfies of people in restaurants, eating a burger and I'm like: I go to restaurants. I eat burgers. Why, I did it last week. With friends, too.
I look at photos of people with pets, babies & boyfriends and feel sad for myself. Till I realize: I don't want pets, I don't want babies and I have a boyfriend, who is very nice.

The key then is, take selfies. Take lots of fucking selfies. 

 

The Ryan Gosling And Macaulay Culkin T-Shirt Meme Is The Best Thing On The Internet