कि ज़लीलों में बस जाएँ;
आग वो दूसरी कहती है,
कहीं फिर न तरस जाएँ.
Raham ko panah na denge ab,
ki zaleelon me bas jaayen;
Aag vo doosri kehti hai,
kahin phir na taras jaayen.
Showing posts with label identity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label identity. Show all posts
Missing
Look, what I say means nothing,
or less than nothing —
among the native Americans nothing is an entity.
We in the Orient invented the zero, it seems.
To call my words nothing is to give them shape.
The feeling that a child must have
when he wants to say something and simply has no vocabulary
(or worse, we cannot recognise his language)
for it.
But you know Ghalib might be on my side,
it’s easy to attribute avant-garde feminism to writers
who are dead.
That gha’ib-e-gha’ib,
the absence of an absence,
is the world.
If I am an absence
that makes me kind of
omnipresent,
doesn’t it?
Haha!
(Oh I must hide this before he gets h
or less than nothing —
among the native Americans nothing is an entity.
We in the Orient invented the zero, it seems.
To call my words nothing is to give them shape.
The feeling that a child must have
when he wants to say something and simply has no vocabulary
(or worse, we cannot recognise his language)
for it.
But you know Ghalib might be on my side,
it’s easy to attribute avant-garde feminism to writers
who are dead.
That gha’ib-e-gha’ib,
the absence of an absence,
is the world.
If I am an absence
that makes me kind of
omnipresent,
doesn’t it?
Haha!
(Oh I must hide this before he gets h
Resolutions
It's been about a year since I wrote anything new on this blog, and it was a strange, slightly ghostly feeling to sift through old posts, and even older ones, which had passed the test of previous weeding-out sessions, which I force myself to undergo (and inflict on most of what I own) periodically.
The last year has been, well, tumultuous.
A lot of things have changed, a lot of ideas I held dear have been destroyed, but then again, equally many have been affirmed.
New friends have been made, love lost and found, many times. A new home has been reconciled to, a new field of study, new tastes.
Some old demons are dead now, some new ones have found shape.
Things have become addictive, been renounced, and come back again.
What are resolutions for? To promise to do something? Not really. Perhaps, rather, to take stock, and that from a comfortable point of view, when a year is over and life is slightly slower than usual.
To come back to old writing is in one sense a homecoming, and in another like making an acquaintance.
Either way, it's good to be back.
The last year has been, well, tumultuous.
A lot of things have changed, a lot of ideas I held dear have been destroyed, but then again, equally many have been affirmed.
New friends have been made, love lost and found, many times. A new home has been reconciled to, a new field of study, new tastes.
Some old demons are dead now, some new ones have found shape.
Things have become addictive, been renounced, and come back again.
What are resolutions for? To promise to do something? Not really. Perhaps, rather, to take stock, and that from a comfortable point of view, when a year is over and life is slightly slower than usual.
To come back to old writing is in one sense a homecoming, and in another like making an acquaintance.
Either way, it's good to be back.
[Work in progress - II]
To woo a footsoldier had never been her ambition. It had always been the pilot who had captivated her, the great myths of flying aces. She was in Paris in 1919, when Charles Godefroy flew under the Arc de Triomphe. She would never forget the sight; his face became a constant object of her conjecture. The face she had never seen, that of the buoyant audacity that came, perhaps, with the knowledge that it was all over. But that was long ago, even longer in fact than the chance meeting with the boy’s father in Marseille many years later. He was a footsoldier; in the strangest sense of the word – he saved her feet. It was socks. When she was dying of cold and hunger. He fed her a yellow soup and had red woollen socks made for her naked feet. She wore wooden soles in the days that followed, everyone did. Leather would have been considered a luxury. They were all over the place, feeding on the moneys that belonged to everyone but them. It had become a War of hunger and bare feet, of German soldiers and French food previously unpalatable to them. The audacity of her faceless pilot had been misplaced, as had been the confidence that it was all over. The War became a term reused, in all its morbid appropriateness, for a second War of heinous proportions, more even than the previous.
Who was she? She had herself lost track, all her identities confused in the drawing, redrawing of boundaries everyday. She was anyone, she was no one. He had never asked where she was from, she had never said. In all the silences was conceived a child, a boy, who never asked who or where his father was. But she told him anyway that he was killed in the War. Thus subsumed by the great universal persona of the War Hero, the identity of his father perhaps ceased to matter to him. Or perhaps he too, a child of war, was trained to look at the larger picture and be a stoic rather than dwell on personal effects.
She wore the shoes he had got her, wooden like everyone else’s; weren’t those his personal effects as well? The child itself was, in a way, a personal effect of his. But the child, the boy, never wore out. He kept growing, and growing more and more (according to his mother) astute. He began, early in his life, to see the poetry in her gestures. The worn out soles of her shoes became an emblem to him of her longstanding suffering at the hands of some mysterious Fate that seemed to have struck all the men and women in Les Pennes-Mirabeau some years ago.
Or so she thought. Who knew what was really in the mind of this boy, fatherless in a war ravaged land, with a mother who seemed not ordinary, less or more than the norm, he couldn’t decide.
When she looked at the ruins whenever they travelled a little further inland – and there were still plenty in those days when he was growing up, a provincial boy as yet unaware of his mother’s urban and even international exploits in her day – he would catch an odd expression in her eyes, not wistful like some of the other mothers, not sad like some of the older crowd, not angry like some of the menfolk. One day he asked her, Why do you like ruins so much?
Never thought about it, I don’t know, she said.
As he looked at her, as she only half answered his question, as if the ruins meant something to her that he would never understand, it came to him like poetry can come only to a ten year old: Because the walls are crumbling.
The boy knew nothing of her shoes or her socks, other than that the sole was worn. Yet, prophet-like, he seemed to know that the ruins and the shoes on her feet were siblings of a sort, born of the same parents: the un-knowledge of a future, the uncertainty of the present which made her wear her shoes as if they were her most prized possession. The boy would grow out of his provincial upbringing, joining history less dangerous than that of his parents but as exciting to him nevertheless. In 1968 his mother thought the world had forgotten what War was, Every generation needs a War. They never know the value of a loaf of bread, a pair of woollen socks.
For the next generation, 1968 was a war. Having collectively lost from their collective memories the experience of death, hunger, squalor and fear, they became a generation of l’academie. Death was no longer real. It was the death of the author now, more than anything else that the youth of France, yet another mythic body, would worry about in the evenings, over coffee or a glass of wine in the Quartier Latin, a single glass of wine no longer manna out of heaven, no longer a luxury paid for with the family jewels or a painting or two.
Who was she? She had herself lost track, all her identities confused in the drawing, redrawing of boundaries everyday. She was anyone, she was no one. He had never asked where she was from, she had never said. In all the silences was conceived a child, a boy, who never asked who or where his father was. But she told him anyway that he was killed in the War. Thus subsumed by the great universal persona of the War Hero, the identity of his father perhaps ceased to matter to him. Or perhaps he too, a child of war, was trained to look at the larger picture and be a stoic rather than dwell on personal effects.
She wore the shoes he had got her, wooden like everyone else’s; weren’t those his personal effects as well? The child itself was, in a way, a personal effect of his. But the child, the boy, never wore out. He kept growing, and growing more and more (according to his mother) astute. He began, early in his life, to see the poetry in her gestures. The worn out soles of her shoes became an emblem to him of her longstanding suffering at the hands of some mysterious Fate that seemed to have struck all the men and women in Les Pennes-Mirabeau some years ago.
Or so she thought. Who knew what was really in the mind of this boy, fatherless in a war ravaged land, with a mother who seemed not ordinary, less or more than the norm, he couldn’t decide.
When she looked at the ruins whenever they travelled a little further inland – and there were still plenty in those days when he was growing up, a provincial boy as yet unaware of his mother’s urban and even international exploits in her day – he would catch an odd expression in her eyes, not wistful like some of the other mothers, not sad like some of the older crowd, not angry like some of the menfolk. One day he asked her, Why do you like ruins so much?
Never thought about it, I don’t know, she said.
As he looked at her, as she only half answered his question, as if the ruins meant something to her that he would never understand, it came to him like poetry can come only to a ten year old: Because the walls are crumbling.
The boy knew nothing of her shoes or her socks, other than that the sole was worn. Yet, prophet-like, he seemed to know that the ruins and the shoes on her feet were siblings of a sort, born of the same parents: the un-knowledge of a future, the uncertainty of the present which made her wear her shoes as if they were her most prized possession. The boy would grow out of his provincial upbringing, joining history less dangerous than that of his parents but as exciting to him nevertheless. In 1968 his mother thought the world had forgotten what War was, Every generation needs a War. They never know the value of a loaf of bread, a pair of woollen socks.
For the next generation, 1968 was a war. Having collectively lost from their collective memories the experience of death, hunger, squalor and fear, they became a generation of l’academie. Death was no longer real. It was the death of the author now, more than anything else that the youth of France, yet another mythic body, would worry about in the evenings, over coffee or a glass of wine in the Quartier Latin, a single glass of wine no longer manna out of heaven, no longer a luxury paid for with the family jewels or a painting or two.
Taqwacores: Young Muslims Build a Subculture on an Underground Book
CLICK HERE TO READ THE ARTICLE
from New York Times, 23rd December 2008
This article appeared in Hindustan Times today, back page; and got me wondering whether the usual sports news there was a better way to fill that space, or was this?
Why am I linking it here? What does that say about me?
My friend is doing a project on Islamophobia. We were talking about this prescribed topic and its appearance in a course on Conflict Studies;
Is discoursifying this making it worse or better?
More real or less?
It's all very murky.
But meanwhile, I don't think the average Big Mac-eating American would see this book as a good thing.
from New York Times, 23rd December 2008
This article appeared in Hindustan Times today, back page; and got me wondering whether the usual sports news there was a better way to fill that space, or was this?
Why am I linking it here? What does that say about me?
My friend is doing a project on Islamophobia. We were talking about this prescribed topic and its appearance in a course on Conflict Studies;
Is discoursifying this making it worse or better?
More real or less?
It's all very murky.
But meanwhile, I don't think the average Big Mac-eating American would see this book as a good thing.
A Day In The Life: Moving - 2
My parents were married in August 1980. My grandfather was in Sudan just before that, the next posting in line for him was Srinagar. His boss told him,
Dekho, being a South Indian you may not want to live in Srinagar, but that is the only vacancy just now. Your son is to be married, you take leave for a few months. I’ll sanction three-four months leave for you.
After the marriage, Thatha was restless, and unused leave is encashable. So he went to Srinagar, with my grandmother and their two daughters, one of whom went to school there then, at Presentation Convent, and the other, who had a Masters degree by then, had nothing to do at home till come next posting (Cuttack, in Orissa) and joining a B.Ed. and then a teaching job.
Thatha had promised Patti (Dadi) that he would take her to Srinagar when he got back from abroad. It was inadvertently prophetic.
The bulk of their saamaan was on its way, by long, winding roads up mountains and down them again. They had some ten-odd suitcases, and stood around at the busstop;
Saab, houseboat? Houseboat? Haan, saamaan hum le lenge.
Before they found the bungalow they later moved into, they lived in a houseboat.
God knows where they got water from, Anyway there was one tap... There is an island in Dal Lake. We were parked near the island. We were going to a Gujarati place to eat; after a few days a Kashmiri woman started to come and make roti for us, cook for us, on the houseboat itself.
Yesterday I bought a book of Agha Shahid Ali’s poetry. For a change, I found a book I was looking for in one shot. Telling S, I find that a Kashmiri friend of his had discovered the poet a few years back, and was ecstatic by this find.
What is it that binds us to our roots? I feel a rush of oldworld pride when I say we are Palakkad Iyers, makes me feel like I belong to some ancient clan, older than living memory, older than time and place can say. I feel a tug, like the tug of a kitestring, when I am home, in Lucknow; to fly away and be tied down.
As I crossed a bridge today, on the way home
Flying over a sabji mandi
I spied a kite
Stuck flapping dustily
between two wires, power lines,
And below me a train flew into my line of vision.
Symbolism washed over me,
a wave to drown in;
Patang-baazi is this:
Being stuck gathering dust
between two strings.
Thatha spent ten days in Jammu once, long ago. The river, he says, is cold; it comes from the mountains, from frozen peaks. And Jammu is hot in the summer. This is what you do in summer in Jammu, he says; you sit on the riverbank, buy a mango or two (there will be people selling mangoes right there, just for you; and you can take the office car and go with the Assistant Engineer for company), wrap it in a handkerchief and toss it into the river.
Cold mango, hot day.
I don’t live in the part of the city, or inhabit the world of patang-baazi, kiteflying. I am an urbanista, it seems.
I opened a book of poetry by Anurag Mathur, of all people; having read only The Inscrutable Americans, I was curious.
It's not a new sentiment. In 2006 or 2007, I was writing:
Meanwhile, it doesn’t matter that much to me, in real terms where my family, “split establishment” lives, since I don’t live at home now anyway.
It's never a new sentiment; but a story only becomes your own when you've worn it for a while, broken it in, and had corns on your feet to remind you.
Dekho, being a South Indian you may not want to live in Srinagar, but that is the only vacancy just now. Your son is to be married, you take leave for a few months. I’ll sanction three-four months leave for you.
After the marriage, Thatha was restless, and unused leave is encashable. So he went to Srinagar, with my grandmother and their two daughters, one of whom went to school there then, at Presentation Convent, and the other, who had a Masters degree by then, had nothing to do at home till come next posting (Cuttack, in Orissa) and joining a B.Ed. and then a teaching job.
Thatha had promised Patti (Dadi) that he would take her to Srinagar when he got back from abroad. It was inadvertently prophetic.
The bulk of their saamaan was on its way, by long, winding roads up mountains and down them again. They had some ten-odd suitcases, and stood around at the busstop;
Saab, houseboat? Houseboat? Haan, saamaan hum le lenge.
Before they found the bungalow they later moved into, they lived in a houseboat.
God knows where they got water from, Anyway there was one tap... There is an island in Dal Lake. We were parked near the island. We were going to a Gujarati place to eat; after a few days a Kashmiri woman started to come and make roti for us, cook for us, on the houseboat itself.
Yesterday I bought a book of Agha Shahid Ali’s poetry. For a change, I found a book I was looking for in one shot. Telling S, I find that a Kashmiri friend of his had discovered the poet a few years back, and was ecstatic by this find.
What is it that binds us to our roots? I feel a rush of oldworld pride when I say we are Palakkad Iyers, makes me feel like I belong to some ancient clan, older than living memory, older than time and place can say. I feel a tug, like the tug of a kitestring, when I am home, in Lucknow; to fly away and be tied down.
As I crossed a bridge today, on the way home
Flying over a sabji mandi
I spied a kite
Stuck flapping dustily
between two wires, power lines,
And below me a train flew into my line of vision.
Symbolism washed over me,
a wave to drown in;
Patang-baazi is this:
Being stuck gathering dust
between two strings.
Thatha spent ten days in Jammu once, long ago. The river, he says, is cold; it comes from the mountains, from frozen peaks. And Jammu is hot in the summer. This is what you do in summer in Jammu, he says; you sit on the riverbank, buy a mango or two (there will be people selling mangoes right there, just for you; and you can take the office car and go with the Assistant Engineer for company), wrap it in a handkerchief and toss it into the river.
Cold mango, hot day.
I don’t live in the part of the city, or inhabit the world of patang-baazi, kiteflying. I am an urbanista, it seems.
I opened a book of poetry by Anurag Mathur, of all people; having read only The Inscrutable Americans, I was curious.
He who belongs everywhere,
Belongs, I fear, nowhere.
Where do I belong?
It's not a new sentiment. In 2006 or 2007, I was writing:
I belong everywhere
And so I belong nowhere.
Who am I?
Meanwhile, it doesn’t matter that much to me, in real terms where my family, “split establishment” lives, since I don’t live at home now anyway.
It's never a new sentiment; but a story only becomes your own when you've worn it for a while, broken it in, and had corns on your feet to remind you.
Memoirs: The One And Only work of mine that ever went into print
Click on images to read. Text not typed out for copyright reasons.
I wrote this short story for an on-the-spot thing in 2004, it got selected in a national contest and happened to win.
Sigh. I still bask in old glory. Drat it. No new glory!
And please excuse the couple of typos. No editing allowed, you see. Click on images to enlarge to readable size.
Samina Mishra's original article: Being Muslim in India
This is a piece I wrote for India Today but the version that has appeared in the magazine is an edit that I did not agree to. It's not clear to me how that happened since I edited the longer article down to this final version and sent it in to them. But the magazine is out and I am both angry and saddened at their careless editing of ideas that are particularly under siege at this point of time.
So, here is my edit and I would be glad if it was circulated widely on the net - more widely than the magazine!
Samina
Not far from L18, in the posh part of Jamia Nagar, is a house on a tree-lined avenue that will always be home to me. But my life, with all its easy privileges, could not be more different from Atif and Sajid's, the two young men shot as alleged terrorists at L18. I contain multitudes, Whitman so eloquently said. But we live in a time when even multitudes are forced to lay claim to a singular label. And so by writing this, perhaps, I will forever be labelled the voice of the liberal secular Muslim. A voice that is accused of not speaking up. Ironically, it is this very tyranny of labels that grants me this space in a mainstream national magazine.
As someone with a Muslim first name and a Hindu surname, I suppose I have always swung between labels - a poster girl for communal harmony or a confused, rootless individual, depending on who was doing the labelling. I went to a public school and have never worn a burkha. I might escape being thrown in the big cauldron with "Islamic Terrorists" but I will certainly be added to the one for "misguided intellectuals". While there is no mistaking that it is zealous nationalists who seek to light the fire under the first cauldron, the other is a bone of contention between those who seek to define for me how to be Indian and those who seek to define for me how to be Muslim. My condemnation of the demolition of the Babri Masjid, Imrana's rape or the media circus around Gudiya will always be seen in the context of my privileged background, my gender, my religious identity. Perhaps, it can be no other way.
In this rhetoric of binaries of "us and them", it is difficult to find the space to create a new paradigm of discussion. And so, in conversations that throw up Islamic terrorists, rigid religious beliefs, Pakistan and madrasas, the response is inevitably another set of questions - why is the Bajrang Dal not labelled a terrorist outfit, why is the growing public display of Hindu festivals like Navratras and Karva Chauth not considered rigid religious beliefs, why should Muslims in India be answerable for what goes on in Pakistan, what spaces other than madrasas are available for thousands of believing Muslims who choose to get educated and still retain their Muslim-ness. As a Muslim in India today, not only are you fighting to shrug off the label of fundamentalist- if not terrorist - but you are also succumbing to a paradigm of dialogue which has been set for homogenous communities with clear markers of identities.
But how does one fight that when shared cultural spaces, other than those created by the market, shrink? How does one speak of the diversity of being Indian when Diwali is celebrated in schools and Eid just in Muslim homes? How does one avoid a singular label for experiences that are diverse and yet have a common thread running through them - the experience of a tailor in Ahmedabad whose Hindu patrons have stopped giving work to, the butcher in Batla House who couldn't get a bank loan, the software professional who will now have to watch every single byte that leaves his computer.
Being Muslim in India today means many things to many people. But how easy it is to forget that one fundamental reality. How easy it is to say, as someone said to me after the Delhi blasts - "These are all educated Muslims. Don't they know that their bombs can also kill their own?" As if everyone with a Muslim name is a terrorist's very "own".
So, here is my edit and I would be glad if it was circulated widely on the net - more widely than the magazine!
Samina
Not far from L18, in the posh part of Jamia Nagar, is a house on a tree-lined avenue that will always be home to me. But my life, with all its easy privileges, could not be more different from Atif and Sajid's, the two young men shot as alleged terrorists at L18. I contain multitudes, Whitman so eloquently said. But we live in a time when even multitudes are forced to lay claim to a singular label. And so by writing this, perhaps, I will forever be labelled the voice of the liberal secular Muslim. A voice that is accused of not speaking up. Ironically, it is this very tyranny of labels that grants me this space in a mainstream national magazine.
As someone with a Muslim first name and a Hindu surname, I suppose I have always swung between labels - a poster girl for communal harmony or a confused, rootless individual, depending on who was doing the labelling. I went to a public school and have never worn a burkha. I might escape being thrown in the big cauldron with "Islamic Terrorists" but I will certainly be added to the one for "misguided intellectuals". While there is no mistaking that it is zealous nationalists who seek to light the fire under the first cauldron, the other is a bone of contention between those who seek to define for me how to be Indian and those who seek to define for me how to be Muslim. My condemnation of the demolition of the Babri Masjid, Imrana's rape or the media circus around Gudiya will always be seen in the context of my privileged background, my gender, my religious identity. Perhaps, it can be no other way.
In this rhetoric of binaries of "us and them", it is difficult to find the space to create a new paradigm of discussion. And so, in conversations that throw up Islamic terrorists, rigid religious beliefs, Pakistan and madrasas, the response is inevitably another set of questions - why is the Bajrang Dal not labelled a terrorist outfit, why is the growing public display of Hindu festivals like Navratras and Karva Chauth not considered rigid religious beliefs, why should Muslims in India be answerable for what goes on in Pakistan, what spaces other than madrasas are available for thousands of believing Muslims who choose to get educated and still retain their Muslim-ness. As a Muslim in India today, not only are you fighting to shrug off the label of fundamentalist- if not terrorist - but you are also succumbing to a paradigm of dialogue which has been set for homogenous communities with clear markers of identities.
But how does one fight that when shared cultural spaces, other than those created by the market, shrink? How does one speak of the diversity of being Indian when Diwali is celebrated in schools and Eid just in Muslim homes? How does one avoid a singular label for experiences that are diverse and yet have a common thread running through them - the experience of a tailor in Ahmedabad whose Hindu patrons have stopped giving work to, the butcher in Batla House who couldn't get a bank loan, the software professional who will now have to watch every single byte that leaves his computer.
Being Muslim in India today means many things to many people. But how easy it is to forget that one fundamental reality. How easy it is to say, as someone said to me after the Delhi blasts - "These are all educated Muslims. Don't they know that their bombs can also kill their own?" As if everyone with a Muslim name is a terrorist's very "own".
उन्होंने मस्जिद गिरा दी, ना
[
Much as I wanted this account to be as honest as possible, it didn't seem right to extend that transparency to the lives of those about whom I was writing. The details about my family are all true, anything marked with an asterisk (*) has been changed to protect the identities of those mentioned.
The issue of why I felt the need to make this change can fill many more posts!
]
Seher Khan* is a remarkable woman. I don't know her maiden name, in fact I don't know much about her at all; you wouldn't think she was anything special if you went to her house, because it just isn't done, talking about oneself, and one's experience(s) to strangers, especially if you are the lady of the house.
But even then, I know aunty is remarkable, because I know her daughter. To call Sabah* my best friend would be understating our relationship greatly. Sabah and I grew up together, both feeling slightly out of place in Lucknow; I had come from Lagos and she from Bombay. Our baby pictures look exactly the same, uncannily so; we were both born of displaced urban confusion, unlike most of our classmates here.
I knew some things: aunty knew how to make hummus, she used to watch Happy Days and The Bold and the Beautiful on TV, read novels before bed. When I went to their house for the first time I discovered a Turkish cook-book. She and her siblings had grown up in Saudi Arabia*, where her father was working then. As kids, things tend to become exaggerated in our heads, I always thought (until recently) that she was Arab*.
She was different, but not evidently so, she might have just been a cool mom. Meanwhile Sabah, her sister Sameera* (whom I have never managed to call baaji or aapa, she's just a year older than us), her younger sister Shazia* (who has played, literally, in my lap, when she was little) and I got to know each other.
I don't know how prudent it is to put up such an account on the internet, or whether I have any right to give details, but I cannot tell her story without her name, her identity.
[This post has subsequently been edited]
So let me put it this way; I know from Sabah's accounts (from the spoken or the unspoken?) that her mother has been a tower of strength and support for her daughters through some trying times as far as their education is concerned, and had managed to yet create and re-create herself: she recently finished her BA in Sociology by correspondence, she is more in touch with current affairs than most people from my generation or hers, she keeps herself on her toes, notwithstanding the trouble her back gives her.
Sabah is not home these days, she is in the second year of her BA at a reputed college* in Mumbai; we will not graduate in the same year, since she, like so many others, dropped a year to prepare for Medical. Needless to say, she is not in that line of work now.
Amma and I went to her house the day after Id, we didn't get a chance to go on the day of the festival. Aunty and Amma, we've always felt, (Sabah and I), have some connection - they seem to understand each other. Perhaps simply because two things not equal to anything else may be equal to each other...
On Id, your identity is so much more pronounced. It is not a simple matter of going to someone's house, Id milna for me (and I think Amma also feels this way) is a powerful statement, one that we will have failed in making if we do not manage to do. It was after the Delhi blasts too. I don't remember how the conversation started, or where it was heading, but she began to tell us of her days in Delhi right after she got married: she was talking about 1984, the riots. How it was unbearable, the stifling atmosphere, shops shutting at 7 pm, not a soul on the streets. How it could be me next.
We were in Nigeria when Babri Masjid happened, Appa had just been posted to Lagos, we had moved there in September, 1992. It didn't mean much to us, I think. I wouldn't know, I suppose, I was very young, but I think it's pretty telling that I hadn't so much as heard of the riots till I was maybe 14 or so, an certainly not of the demolition till a little later still. I saw Mani Ratnam's film Bombay I think in 2005, and couldn't believe my eyes. And Bombay is not, mind you, a very scary film, in that its ending is so very idealistic. Even Amma mentioned once that till they saw the movie, the magnitude of the massacre had not registered..
For the Khans, I cannot even begin to imagine what it was like.
I just phoned Sabah to ask her where they were in December '92, January '93, she remembers being in Bombay on vacation, they were living in Lucknow by then. They were at her naani's place, in Andheri. Sabah would have been about to turn 5 in a few months. She remembers talk of somebody's house getting burned down. She knows the stories of Hindus, the neighbours, going to camps at night, camps run by the Shiv Sena.
I don't know if I remember right, but I think Seher aunty was in Lucknow when she heard the news that the masjid had been broken; she and other women were supposed to stay indoors, at some safe place, in case things got out of hand.
In Saudia, she said, everybody was Muslim...your identity became "Indian". She never thought then that the kind of horrors that have been perpetrated in India now, were possible in India. It can't happen in my country.
When she heard what was happening, she thought, it can't happen in India, no, not if it's illegal, the law's in place, it can't happen.
उन्होंने मस्जिद गिरा दी, ना
It was a drastic loss of faith for me.
Later, she was talking about the visitors on Id, how they display their austerity, the stricter you are keeping every roza and praying religiously, the more your brownie points. You are looked down upon if the display in your house is less then that in your neighbours'. Tiny children are shown off if they keep fast.
I think my mother was a genius!
She says this laughingly, but the irony is not that her mother, Sabah's naani was a genius, but that she would never be ackowledged as one, not for her views. Her children were brought up learning the principles of Islam, they grew up following the tenets of Islam without knowing it. Then whatever rituals they choose to follow are that: chosen.
This does not mean Seher Khan is an iconoclast. I don't think she is. The customs in their house are not broken. But where is the scope for free thought within religion?
She fears she'll be next. My mother does too. They feel like targets, sitting ducks. Why? Because they are the liberals. They enemy within the home, the traitors. How does one have a balanced opinion without feeling threatened?
The Shiv Sena can catch me and put me in jail if I meet my boyfriend on Valentine's Day.
It seems to be hep to be an atheist. Or agnostic. Or one of those categories of unbelievers. What if I want to believe in GOD, and in a HINDU GOD, but still retain my relationship with my friends, people I love?
There are comments you hear, in your own house. There are BJP supporters in your workplace. There are Hindu children who know no better than to ape what they hear, and these children hate Muslims.
I remember a particularly self-righteous child, one year my junior, in school. I was in class 5, I think, so he would have been in class 4. We were in the choir group and the swimming team together. I was once (between song practices), describing दही चावल (dahi-chaaval, curd-rice, a quintessentially Tamil meal-ender) to somebody. Then for some reason I started saying that the South Indian Diwali is not on the same day as it is in Lucknow, because the culture is different there. In a way that only children can pronounce judgement, he said, snootily, "इनके तो cultures ही अलग होते हैं!"
Why have I never forgotten this? I know it is the nonsense of a ten-year old, but then I wonder. This is too silly to even be quoted, really. But I still wonder.
You are still a child at 14-15. There were children in the Bombay riots. Rioting. I'm not talking of the victims, although they are victims in a rather peculiar sense...it wasn't like only 50 year old पुजारीs (pujaaris, Hindu priests) were in the riot. It wasn't Hindu fundamentalists. They might have started it, but they didn't do it all. It was people like you and me.
Listen to your children. Watch out for what they say, because we often don't check ourselves before we make a prejudiced remark; we don't know we made it. Watch out for what they say, they say what we say. Catch yourself. Don't do it, don't look at the dashboard or the windscreen, from the inside of the auto-rickshaw, to see whether there is a 786 anywhere, or a Hanuman, a Jai Mata Di, or a Guru Nanak.
I don't know what my point is; or whether this was supposed to have a point.
The liberals, the fundamentalists, they're all the same. Bottomline, peer pressure doesn't happen only to teenagers. How far are we from being fundamentalists? How close to it?
I added this article [written by Samina Mishra] to my blog as an act of...solidarity? I don't know exactly how to say it. I didn't think the article was making any point. I told Sabah as much. But now I realise that it is incredibly difficult to make a point. To take a stand.
It has taken me years to write this; I have been wanting to write about my relationship with Sabah for so long. Why has is taken so long for me to write it? I'm a writer, after all!
When we were about 10-12, our group in school (it was a co-ed, but groups are one sex only!) had me (Tamil), Sabah (Muslim), Mouli* (Bengali) and Chanchal* (Punjabi). We were really proud of this. We knew we were different. We are, naturally. But we were happy about it. How strange it sounds now.
Why is Seher Khan a remarkable woman? I don't know exactly, but she certainly inspired me to write this.
Much as I wanted this account to be as honest as possible, it didn't seem right to extend that transparency to the lives of those about whom I was writing. The details about my family are all true, anything marked with an asterisk (*) has been changed to protect the identities of those mentioned.
The issue of why I felt the need to make this change can fill many more posts!
]
Seher Khan* is a remarkable woman. I don't know her maiden name, in fact I don't know much about her at all; you wouldn't think she was anything special if you went to her house, because it just isn't done, talking about oneself, and one's experience(s) to strangers, especially if you are the lady of the house.
But even then, I know aunty is remarkable, because I know her daughter. To call Sabah* my best friend would be understating our relationship greatly. Sabah and I grew up together, both feeling slightly out of place in Lucknow; I had come from Lagos and she from Bombay. Our baby pictures look exactly the same, uncannily so; we were both born of displaced urban confusion, unlike most of our classmates here.
I knew some things: aunty knew how to make hummus, she used to watch Happy Days and The Bold and the Beautiful on TV, read novels before bed. When I went to their house for the first time I discovered a Turkish cook-book. She and her siblings had grown up in Saudi Arabia*, where her father was working then. As kids, things tend to become exaggerated in our heads, I always thought (until recently) that she was Arab*.
She was different, but not evidently so, she might have just been a cool mom. Meanwhile Sabah, her sister Sameera* (whom I have never managed to call baaji or aapa, she's just a year older than us), her younger sister Shazia* (who has played, literally, in my lap, when she was little) and I got to know each other.
I don't know how prudent it is to put up such an account on the internet, or whether I have any right to give details, but I cannot tell her story without her name, her identity.
[This post has subsequently been edited]
So let me put it this way; I know from Sabah's accounts (from the spoken or the unspoken?) that her mother has been a tower of strength and support for her daughters through some trying times as far as their education is concerned, and had managed to yet create and re-create herself: she recently finished her BA in Sociology by correspondence, she is more in touch with current affairs than most people from my generation or hers, she keeps herself on her toes, notwithstanding the trouble her back gives her.
Sabah is not home these days, she is in the second year of her BA at a reputed college* in Mumbai; we will not graduate in the same year, since she, like so many others, dropped a year to prepare for Medical. Needless to say, she is not in that line of work now.
Amma and I went to her house the day after Id, we didn't get a chance to go on the day of the festival. Aunty and Amma, we've always felt, (Sabah and I), have some connection - they seem to understand each other. Perhaps simply because two things not equal to anything else may be equal to each other...
On Id, your identity is so much more pronounced. It is not a simple matter of going to someone's house, Id milna for me (and I think Amma also feels this way) is a powerful statement, one that we will have failed in making if we do not manage to do. It was after the Delhi blasts too. I don't remember how the conversation started, or where it was heading, but she began to tell us of her days in Delhi right after she got married: she was talking about 1984, the riots. How it was unbearable, the stifling atmosphere, shops shutting at 7 pm, not a soul on the streets. How it could be me next.
We were in Nigeria when Babri Masjid happened, Appa had just been posted to Lagos, we had moved there in September, 1992. It didn't mean much to us, I think. I wouldn't know, I suppose, I was very young, but I think it's pretty telling that I hadn't so much as heard of the riots till I was maybe 14 or so, an certainly not of the demolition till a little later still. I saw Mani Ratnam's film Bombay I think in 2005, and couldn't believe my eyes. And Bombay is not, mind you, a very scary film, in that its ending is so very idealistic. Even Amma mentioned once that till they saw the movie, the magnitude of the massacre had not registered..
For the Khans, I cannot even begin to imagine what it was like.
I just phoned Sabah to ask her where they were in December '92, January '93, she remembers being in Bombay on vacation, they were living in Lucknow by then. They were at her naani's place, in Andheri. Sabah would have been about to turn 5 in a few months. She remembers talk of somebody's house getting burned down. She knows the stories of Hindus, the neighbours, going to camps at night, camps run by the Shiv Sena.
I don't know if I remember right, but I think Seher aunty was in Lucknow when she heard the news that the masjid had been broken; she and other women were supposed to stay indoors, at some safe place, in case things got out of hand.
In Saudia, she said, everybody was Muslim...your identity became "Indian". She never thought then that the kind of horrors that have been perpetrated in India now, were possible in India. It can't happen in my country.
When she heard what was happening, she thought, it can't happen in India, no, not if it's illegal, the law's in place, it can't happen.
उन्होंने मस्जिद गिरा दी, ना
It was a drastic loss of faith for me.
Later, she was talking about the visitors on Id, how they display their austerity, the stricter you are keeping every roza and praying religiously, the more your brownie points. You are looked down upon if the display in your house is less then that in your neighbours'. Tiny children are shown off if they keep fast.
I think my mother was a genius!
She says this laughingly, but the irony is not that her mother, Sabah's naani was a genius, but that she would never be ackowledged as one, not for her views. Her children were brought up learning the principles of Islam, they grew up following the tenets of Islam without knowing it. Then whatever rituals they choose to follow are that: chosen.
This does not mean Seher Khan is an iconoclast. I don't think she is. The customs in their house are not broken. But where is the scope for free thought within religion?
She fears she'll be next. My mother does too. They feel like targets, sitting ducks. Why? Because they are the liberals. They enemy within the home, the traitors. How does one have a balanced opinion without feeling threatened?
The Shiv Sena can catch me and put me in jail if I meet my boyfriend on Valentine's Day.
It seems to be hep to be an atheist. Or agnostic. Or one of those categories of unbelievers. What if I want to believe in GOD, and in a HINDU GOD, but still retain my relationship with my friends, people I love?
There are comments you hear, in your own house. There are BJP supporters in your workplace. There are Hindu children who know no better than to ape what they hear, and these children hate Muslims.
I remember a particularly self-righteous child, one year my junior, in school. I was in class 5, I think, so he would have been in class 4. We were in the choir group and the swimming team together. I was once (between song practices), describing दही चावल (dahi-chaaval, curd-rice, a quintessentially Tamil meal-ender) to somebody. Then for some reason I started saying that the South Indian Diwali is not on the same day as it is in Lucknow, because the culture is different there. In a way that only children can pronounce judgement, he said, snootily, "इनके तो cultures ही अलग होते हैं!"
Why have I never forgotten this? I know it is the nonsense of a ten-year old, but then I wonder. This is too silly to even be quoted, really. But I still wonder.
You are still a child at 14-15. There were children in the Bombay riots. Rioting. I'm not talking of the victims, although they are victims in a rather peculiar sense...it wasn't like only 50 year old पुजारीs (pujaaris, Hindu priests) were in the riot. It wasn't Hindu fundamentalists. They might have started it, but they didn't do it all. It was people like you and me.
Listen to your children. Watch out for what they say, because we often don't check ourselves before we make a prejudiced remark; we don't know we made it. Watch out for what they say, they say what we say. Catch yourself. Don't do it, don't look at the dashboard or the windscreen, from the inside of the auto-rickshaw, to see whether there is a 786 anywhere, or a Hanuman, a Jai Mata Di, or a Guru Nanak.
I don't know what my point is; or whether this was supposed to have a point.
The liberals, the fundamentalists, they're all the same. Bottomline, peer pressure doesn't happen only to teenagers. How far are we from being fundamentalists? How close to it?
I added this article [written by Samina Mishra] to my blog as an act of...solidarity? I don't know exactly how to say it. I didn't think the article was making any point. I told Sabah as much. But now I realise that it is incredibly difficult to make a point. To take a stand.
It has taken me years to write this; I have been wanting to write about my relationship with Sabah for so long. Why has is taken so long for me to write it? I'm a writer, after all!
When we were about 10-12, our group in school (it was a co-ed, but groups are one sex only!) had me (Tamil), Sabah (Muslim), Mouli* (Bengali) and Chanchal* (Punjabi). We were really proud of this. We knew we were different. We are, naturally. But we were happy about it. How strange it sounds now.
Why is Seher Khan a remarkable woman? I don't know exactly, but she certainly inspired me to write this.
Standard Issue
[I would hesitate to call this verse. Khair,]
The drawing room is clean now
Little dolls' sofas
the mandatory glass-top coffee table
piles of scattered books have become
rows in a shelf
I know this house inside out
My mother phones me to find things
even with bifocals.
The first grating sound in the morning
is my grandfather's bathroom door.
Appa honks once, very softly , politely.
The doodhwaala and presswaala
are usually late
When Amma needs to leave
for work,
teaching at the school
where I spent nine years
searching for an identity,
learning stereotypes.
I can hear the squeal of the TV
before the sound comes on,
the yell of the Aquaguard.
I think I can hear dog-whistles too.
I could always hear better than most.
I conduct a choir,
is it a wonder?
But then there are places in the city
I have never seen
Places I have even heard of.
Places not too far either.
I know this house
(which belongs to our landlord)
inside out
But I managed to speak to
the boy next door
only this summer.
I have been
to the corner to buy bread, eggs, butter
to the chemist to buy an emergency dose
of sanitary napkins
to the shop to buy the supplies
that ran out,
noted on our tab; no cash required here.
I can count these times on my fingers.
One hand, mind you.
There was a boy in school
Whom I was not allowed to meet
My father was not posted here,
My mother ran the house,
In fear.
I still don't know why it was not allowed.
Last year
(which was my second in college)
I went out on Diwali
to meet face to face
a man from Hyderabad,
a Muslim I had met online.
On Orkut.
It was allowed,
a faute de mieux
(This is a fancy term I came across
while researching for a compulsory essay
on Jane Austen-
it means "a decision for want of a better choice").
That time, I informed my father,
I did not ask for permission.
That boy from school-
Now that the burden of years
is on our shoulders
he has been crushed enough to be permitted,
I suppose.
He has an off day on Thursday.
Ten years of confinement,
not solitary confinement,
maybe that would have been worse;
Now I can recognise stereotype
like a font size too small or too big
in which my sentence was written.
In India
(and perhaps elsewhere in the world as well,
I wouldn't know)
it is not when a girl starts
menstruating
masturbating
becomes sexually active
gets married
has children
runs a household
goes to college
goes to work
rebels
acquiesces
that she grows up
It's much earlier-
The day she begins to fear
is the day she becomes Woman.
The drawing room is clean now
Little dolls' sofas
the mandatory glass-top coffee table
piles of scattered books have become
rows in a shelf
I know this house inside out
My mother phones me to find things
even with bifocals.
The first grating sound in the morning
is my grandfather's bathroom door.
Appa honks once, very softly , politely.
The doodhwaala and presswaala
are usually late
When Amma needs to leave
for work,
teaching at the school
where I spent nine years
searching for an identity,
learning stereotypes.
I can hear the squeal of the TV
before the sound comes on,
the yell of the Aquaguard.
I think I can hear dog-whistles too.
I could always hear better than most.
I conduct a choir,
is it a wonder?
But then there are places in the city
I have never seen
Places I have even heard of.
Places not too far either.
I know this house
(which belongs to our landlord)
inside out
But I managed to speak to
the boy next door
only this summer.
I have been
to the corner to buy bread, eggs, butter
to the chemist to buy an emergency dose
of sanitary napkins
to the shop to buy the supplies
that ran out,
noted on our tab; no cash required here.
I can count these times on my fingers.
One hand, mind you.
There was a boy in school
Whom I was not allowed to meet
My father was not posted here,
My mother ran the house,
In fear.
I still don't know why it was not allowed.
Last year
(which was my second in college)
I went out on Diwali
to meet face to face
a man from Hyderabad,
a Muslim I had met online.
On Orkut.
It was allowed,
a faute de mieux
(This is a fancy term I came across
while researching for a compulsory essay
on Jane Austen-
it means "a decision for want of a better choice").
That time, I informed my father,
I did not ask for permission.
That boy from school-
Now that the burden of years
is on our shoulders
he has been crushed enough to be permitted,
I suppose.
He has an off day on Thursday.
Ten years of confinement,
not solitary confinement,
maybe that would have been worse;
Now I can recognise stereotype
like a font size too small or too big
in which my sentence was written.
In India
(and perhaps elsewhere in the world as well,
I wouldn't know)
it is not when a girl starts
menstruating
masturbating
becomes sexually active
gets married
has children
runs a household
goes to college
goes to work
rebels
acquiesces
that she grows up
It's much earlier-
The day she begins to fear
is the day she becomes Woman.
Untitled, 27.11.07
I never fought in a war
I never even saw one
My life never knew hunger
Or having no roof over my head
I complain
No one understands me
The kid on the street
Asks me for my Pepsi
And I laugh
My children will be callous
More than me
They will be smart, though.
They will know all there is to know
And will not ask me
Loudly
"What's a condom?"
They will not grow up and say
"Every generation should have a War:
it gives you perspective, you know."
They will have learned
by then.
I never even saw one
My life never knew hunger
Or having no roof over my head
I complain
No one understands me
The kid on the street
Asks me for my Pepsi
And I laugh
My children will be callous
More than me
They will be smart, though.
They will know all there is to know
And will not ask me
Loudly
"What's a condom?"
They will not grow up and say
"Every generation should have a War:
it gives you perspective, you know."
They will have learned
by then.
Kutti Papa Part 1
My friend SK and I were pretty jobless these hols. Well, I had my opus to compose, but let's not count that right now, that merits a fresh post!
It's in vogue to work with an NGO, isn't it? Social Work.
What?
I didn't do anything last year because I was a big fat yellow liver. I was scared that I would not be able to change the world. So I didn't do anything at all. In the last couple of years, due to drastic changes in scenery, I'm learning, slowly, to shed inhibitions that I've had so long they seemed irrefutable. I've been trying to befriend the keerhe [insects] that my mind houses!
Anyway, SK happened to hear of an NGO in Lucknow (where our families are, where we come home for hols). All we knew about it was that it was called Ehsaas and worked with kids.
For the longest time, I've been terrified of kids in the same absurd, inexplicable way that you can feel about somebody you have a crush on. When my cousin A was born (when was that, now...1997?) I wasn't allowed to hold her. Heck, I was only 9 if it was 1997! No surprises there. When A was about two, I guess, that's when I saw her next and played and played endlessly with her, fell in love with her, the new sister baby, pretty little thing, smart as hell, making little toddler-quips all over the place. When we got back from Bangalore (where the Family Reunion had been), I couldn't remember her face.
For a while after that I tried to memorise faces; while going in a tempo with Amma to school sometime then, I saw a mountainous man with a craggy red-splotched face and sombre expression. I promised (myself?) never to forget his face. See, I can still remember it. Actually, that's not true. I can only remember my decription of his face. My mind also does useless things like attaching a likely red-and-white cotswool shirt to this person. Who knows, maybe it's not faces I'm good at remembering, maybe it's words.
Of course then there's the language thing. (Boy, I should be my own shrink!) When I came to Lucknow straight after Lagos, I spoke only English, and knew no Hindi to speak of, despite having begun Hindi at the Indian school I went to in Nigeria. I realised I spoke differently from the other kids, and so I probably thought differently too. I couldn't decide, at school, whether to try to mingle and become one of the crowd, or to be different. (I was chatting online with my oldest friend RR a few days ago; she is also an Indian whose early memories are of Lagos, and then the relocation from There to Here, to a home country as alien as any other. Funny, she and I both felt that we were so convinced we were oddballs that we never gave ourselves a chance to be normal!)
In senior school, during a free period, loitering around the grounds with other pubescent girls from my class, we'd often run into littler schools of small fry, scuttling along adorably to and from the swimming pool or the auditorium or the library. The other girls would invariably pet the little kids, coo in their ear, play with them. I wanted to sometimes, but never did more than once or twice ever, because I was convinced I spoke a language they didn't understand. For the record, by then my Hindi was certainly as good, if not better, than the average kid in my class who had trouble with comprehension, of any language, mother tongue or no mother tongue.
It's funny, when I think about it, it was only worse with Tamil-speaking kids we'd run into at big community functions that my mother and I would attend in those days; stuff like Ram Navami (the day Lord Ram was born, and the end of the Navratri fasting period of nine days). I stopped going to these things soon enough. When I discovered that you can be asked to sing. Bhajans, of course, what else. On a religious function obviously it's got to be a devotional song. I knew none. I knew only the school prayer songs. In Hindi. Which I was anyway not so confident of then, and would not be appreciated in a gathering of Tamil/Malayalam and the odd Telugu/Kannada speakers; a gathering which was the biggest Home Away From Home South Indian Social Reunion of the year in Lucknow, capital of the Hindi-speaking Northern Heartland.
I didn't know enough grammatically adequate Tamil even to speak a few sentences to the Tamil kids. So that was that.
Meanwhile, I loved kids!
After Nigeria, I don't remember going out to play with the neighbourhood kids (yes, there were some) or going to friends' places to play, barring a few stray playdays with NR or with that girl I didn't like, who stole my Hamley's toys and whose name I think was Anam.
Anyway, I really don't know why I am delving so deep. All I wanted to talk about was my relationship with children now.
Last year, I had a bright idea. I wanted to give back to my juniors in school all the musical gyan [knowledge] I had gained in the year I had been pert of the Western Music Society (WMS) in college. And I had learnt more in that year than I had in the last two or three put together. So I went to see my ex-Principal with my proposal. I had printed an ad and all, nice and catchy. For amateur voice lessons in the summer vacation, at school, free of charge. I was just something I wanted to do. I was really excited to teach 13-15 year-olds the next level of harmony; I remembered the laboured two-parts that we would devise when we were that age, and I thought it would be great to show them what real, beautiful, rich melodies could be woven together.
The Principal thought I was planning to teach primary school kids. I don't know why, it was just a miscommunication. She said, Ok, shall I put you through the In-Charge for Class 3? I just agreed. I'm not such a wimp now, but even a year ago, I was pretty wimpy. Ok was all I ever said.
Suddenly, my target age group went down from 14 to 8.
I had a class (a parody of one) of a floating population (literally, they went swimming and then came for Music Class) of five, plus minus two. And it wasn't always the same five either.
I was bugged at first, but then I was ok when I realised the only thing different is that I can't teach music to them in the same way as I had planned. What the heck, I was no slavedriver. I like to let kids play around. So after finding that trying for discipline in a random vacation camp-type environment was just stupid, everything went just fine.
So I pretended to teach, had fun with them. One day I saw a little dog of some pomeranian-esque yappy breed in the arms of a lady who had come to drop off her charges, two sisters (ages 5 and 7) at the Music Class. By the time I could ask her to wait, she had left. I asked the seven year old (I don't remember her name, but boy do I remember her face! And her voice, a very sweet voice. Very conscientious kid. Always looking out for her 5 year old sister, and, I later found, her baby brother as well) to bring her dog the next day, after asking for permission at home, of course, and laying down the disclaimer (that if her parents said no, she shouldn't get me in a soup).
So the two sisters turned up the next day, with this dog (a bitch who was called I think Lucy) that was very fit and frisky as hell, and what d'ya know, a St. Bernard pup called Rex, bigger than his full-grown friend, and a lazy lump. Then there was the baby brother, a sweet three year old who tried to lift the lumpy Rex to his feet, and was shorter than the puppy held up by its front paws.
We had our great Lessons in the empty auditorium, a veritable heaven for music, it has the most stage-y echoes when it's empty. I've spent countless lunch-breaks alone on that stage, imagining. I have always loved the stage. We go far back, you see. So when this dinky circus turned up, it was Play Day. We raced around the hall, slipping on its smooth floor, Lucy finally outrunning the overweight singers-to-be who were my pupils that day.
Another character showed up when it was time to go; she was a girl who looked my age, but I wasn't sure. So I used polite speech; she was the girls' aunt, just out of first year college, like me. She said now she understood why the girls liked my classes so much. I couldn't even believe it. It was such a strange, wonderful feeling, to realise that these kids could take to me.
It's in vogue to work with an NGO, isn't it? Social Work.
Yeah, you know the prerequisites for that scholarship aren't specific at all, they just say the applicant should have a well rounded personality and care for the welfare of his fellow being. That means NGO work, yaar. Kuch kar lena idhar udhar, likh dena [Do some little here and there and then just write] Worked with so-and-so for two months.
What?
I didn't do anything last year because I was a big fat yellow liver. I was scared that I would not be able to change the world. So I didn't do anything at all. In the last couple of years, due to drastic changes in scenery, I'm learning, slowly, to shed inhibitions that I've had so long they seemed irrefutable. I've been trying to befriend the keerhe [insects] that my mind houses!
Anyway, SK happened to hear of an NGO in Lucknow (where our families are, where we come home for hols). All we knew about it was that it was called Ehsaas and worked with kids.
For the longest time, I've been terrified of kids in the same absurd, inexplicable way that you can feel about somebody you have a crush on. When my cousin A was born (when was that, now...1997?) I wasn't allowed to hold her. Heck, I was only 9 if it was 1997! No surprises there. When A was about two, I guess, that's when I saw her next and played and played endlessly with her, fell in love with her, the new sister baby, pretty little thing, smart as hell, making little toddler-quips all over the place. When we got back from Bangalore (where the Family Reunion had been), I couldn't remember her face.
For a while after that I tried to memorise faces; while going in a tempo with Amma to school sometime then, I saw a mountainous man with a craggy red-splotched face and sombre expression. I promised (myself?) never to forget his face. See, I can still remember it. Actually, that's not true. I can only remember my decription of his face. My mind also does useless things like attaching a likely red-and-white cotswool shirt to this person. Who knows, maybe it's not faces I'm good at remembering, maybe it's words.
Of course then there's the language thing. (Boy, I should be my own shrink!) When I came to Lucknow straight after Lagos, I spoke only English, and knew no Hindi to speak of, despite having begun Hindi at the Indian school I went to in Nigeria. I realised I spoke differently from the other kids, and so I probably thought differently too. I couldn't decide, at school, whether to try to mingle and become one of the crowd, or to be different. (I was chatting online with my oldest friend RR a few days ago; she is also an Indian whose early memories are of Lagos, and then the relocation from There to Here, to a home country as alien as any other. Funny, she and I both felt that we were so convinced we were oddballs that we never gave ourselves a chance to be normal!)
In senior school, during a free period, loitering around the grounds with other pubescent girls from my class, we'd often run into littler schools of small fry, scuttling along adorably to and from the swimming pool or the auditorium or the library. The other girls would invariably pet the little kids, coo in their ear, play with them. I wanted to sometimes, but never did more than once or twice ever, because I was convinced I spoke a language they didn't understand. For the record, by then my Hindi was certainly as good, if not better, than the average kid in my class who had trouble with comprehension, of any language, mother tongue or no mother tongue.
It's funny, when I think about it, it was only worse with Tamil-speaking kids we'd run into at big community functions that my mother and I would attend in those days; stuff like Ram Navami (the day Lord Ram was born, and the end of the Navratri fasting period of nine days). I stopped going to these things soon enough. When I discovered that you can be asked to sing. Bhajans, of course, what else. On a religious function obviously it's got to be a devotional song. I knew none. I knew only the school prayer songs. In Hindi. Which I was anyway not so confident of then, and would not be appreciated in a gathering of Tamil/Malayalam and the odd Telugu/Kannada speakers; a gathering which was the biggest Home Away From Home South Indian Social Reunion of the year in Lucknow, capital of the Hindi-speaking Northern Heartland.
I didn't know enough grammatically adequate Tamil even to speak a few sentences to the Tamil kids. So that was that.
Meanwhile, I loved kids!
After Nigeria, I don't remember going out to play with the neighbourhood kids (yes, there were some) or going to friends' places to play, barring a few stray playdays with NR or with that girl I didn't like, who stole my Hamley's toys and whose name I think was Anam.
Anyway, I really don't know why I am delving so deep. All I wanted to talk about was my relationship with children now.
Last year, I had a bright idea. I wanted to give back to my juniors in school all the musical gyan [knowledge] I had gained in the year I had been pert of the Western Music Society (WMS) in college. And I had learnt more in that year than I had in the last two or three put together. So I went to see my ex-Principal with my proposal. I had printed an ad and all, nice and catchy. For amateur voice lessons in the summer vacation, at school, free of charge. I was just something I wanted to do. I was really excited to teach 13-15 year-olds the next level of harmony; I remembered the laboured two-parts that we would devise when we were that age, and I thought it would be great to show them what real, beautiful, rich melodies could be woven together.
The Principal thought I was planning to teach primary school kids. I don't know why, it was just a miscommunication. She said, Ok, shall I put you through the In-Charge for Class 3? I just agreed. I'm not such a wimp now, but even a year ago, I was pretty wimpy. Ok was all I ever said.
Suddenly, my target age group went down from 14 to 8.
I had a class (a parody of one) of a floating population (literally, they went swimming and then came for Music Class) of five, plus minus two. And it wasn't always the same five either.
I was bugged at first, but then I was ok when I realised the only thing different is that I can't teach music to them in the same way as I had planned. What the heck, I was no slavedriver. I like to let kids play around. So after finding that trying for discipline in a random vacation camp-type environment was just stupid, everything went just fine.
So I pretended to teach, had fun with them. One day I saw a little dog of some pomeranian-esque yappy breed in the arms of a lady who had come to drop off her charges, two sisters (ages 5 and 7) at the Music Class. By the time I could ask her to wait, she had left. I asked the seven year old (I don't remember her name, but boy do I remember her face! And her voice, a very sweet voice. Very conscientious kid. Always looking out for her 5 year old sister, and, I later found, her baby brother as well) to bring her dog the next day, after asking for permission at home, of course, and laying down the disclaimer (that if her parents said no, she shouldn't get me in a soup).
So the two sisters turned up the next day, with this dog (a bitch who was called I think Lucy) that was very fit and frisky as hell, and what d'ya know, a St. Bernard pup called Rex, bigger than his full-grown friend, and a lazy lump. Then there was the baby brother, a sweet three year old who tried to lift the lumpy Rex to his feet, and was shorter than the puppy held up by its front paws.
We had our great Lessons in the empty auditorium, a veritable heaven for music, it has the most stage-y echoes when it's empty. I've spent countless lunch-breaks alone on that stage, imagining. I have always loved the stage. We go far back, you see. So when this dinky circus turned up, it was Play Day. We raced around the hall, slipping on its smooth floor, Lucy finally outrunning the overweight singers-to-be who were my pupils that day.
Another character showed up when it was time to go; she was a girl who looked my age, but I wasn't sure. So I used polite speech; she was the girls' aunt, just out of first year college, like me. She said now she understood why the girls liked my classes so much. I couldn't even believe it. It was such a strange, wonderful feeling, to realise that these kids could take to me.
Where association stops and synaesthesia begins
Where does association stop and synaesthesia begin?
While listening to music, something often experienced in isolation (as with headphones on), it seems to me a natural reaction to imagine the video which should go with the song. When I saw American Beauty, I was very young, I don’t remember much more of the film than one scene in which a misfit boy is showing his girl a video he shot. There’s a polythene bag swirling around in a shifting whirlpool on the sidewalk. That’s all. That video was, for years, my definition of the ultimate in cinematography. It was like there was music coming out of it.
A few months ago, I had the good fortune of being able to watch the renowned Maria Pagés and her Flamenco troupe perform in New Delhi dance which was all at once of cobblestoned streets and the furnaces of hell. Maria Pagés dances to unfamiliar beats, I am a musician, but I could not keep time; the language is alien, I do not speak Spanish.
And yet as she danced, words were rushing out of my mouth; no, not words, formless ghosts burst out of me as if my soul would explode. The only form I knew to put them into was word. If I could recall what I thought (if you could call it that), faster than my own mind could process, at the time, I have no doubt that it would have produced some of the best I have ever written.
Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata always conjures up in my mind the image of afternoon sun coming in through a window. Nothing to do with moonlight at all, actually. I heard Chopin’s Waltz in A Minor for the first time recently, and that day I listened to it at least thirty times, again and again. To me it sounded like a man in a battered overcoat, in a grey scene, walking at times briskly, almost breaking into a run, and at times shuffling; always hugging himself tight, trying fruitlessly to keep the driving rain from running down his neck and onto his back. I asked my friend S, over the phone, to tell me what it looked like. “Looks like or sounds like?” he checked. But I knew what I meant. Anyhow, what he saw was totally different. It was a man arranging for a birthday party outdoors, in a garden. It’s strange to reconstruct what was described, phone conversations force one to colour them with one’s own perception. But there were sepia flashbacks in his picture. The music lends itself to flashback, going distinctly from minor sounds to major sounds and back. S saw it as a filmmaker would, a structured and bounded view. I saw it as a torturous road; I was like the wildlife cameraman, following my fellow, not knowing what he would see next. He saw children playing. He saw destitution. He saw despair. He saw survivors. But overall the scene was never released from the grey downpour.
Even the distinctions between minor and major chords or scales seems to be questionable. I can certainly feel the sadness of minor notes, but I really wonder what the average non-musical person hears and feels. I tried this with my roommate last year, she has no particular musical inclination except the intermittent interest that all teenagers must have. I played her Romanza on the piano (electric keyboard, actually) and asked her if she could see where the mood changed. She could, it’s a good piece to start out with, very easy to pinpoint the changes (I don’t know if these are what are called movements). Even so, a hundred per cent statistic on a one person test is not exactly a fair sample. I was not convinced.
I really don’t know where normal associations end and synaesthetic ones begin; isn’t, say, BLUE=COLD or RED=HOT? Or are even these associations culture-specific? When you’re decorating a room, you are advised to choose colour schemes wisely, appropriate to the feel of the room. You wouldn’t paint a nursery red, would you?
You feel happy when you see/hear something, sad when something else. But wait, that’s not a synthesis of senses at all. I can’t figure this out, though. Is seeing in the mind’s eye seeing?
Sometimes I feel like I’m cheating. Is it all in my head? Does synaesthesia even exist? Or is it because I have never felt the real thing that I am a sceptic?
It’s tough being a sceptic and also being creative and a romantic. And considering that every synaesthete’s experience may differ vastly in strength and nature from the next, it makes it even harder to explain.
Great. One more to add to the identity crises.
While listening to music, something often experienced in isolation (as with headphones on), it seems to me a natural reaction to imagine the video which should go with the song. When I saw American Beauty, I was very young, I don’t remember much more of the film than one scene in which a misfit boy is showing his girl a video he shot. There’s a polythene bag swirling around in a shifting whirlpool on the sidewalk. That’s all. That video was, for years, my definition of the ultimate in cinematography. It was like there was music coming out of it.
A few months ago, I had the good fortune of being able to watch the renowned Maria Pagés and her Flamenco troupe perform in New Delhi dance which was all at once of cobblestoned streets and the furnaces of hell. Maria Pagés dances to unfamiliar beats, I am a musician, but I could not keep time; the language is alien, I do not speak Spanish.
And yet as she danced, words were rushing out of my mouth; no, not words, formless ghosts burst out of me as if my soul would explode. The only form I knew to put them into was word. If I could recall what I thought (if you could call it that), faster than my own mind could process, at the time, I have no doubt that it would have produced some of the best I have ever written.
Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata always conjures up in my mind the image of afternoon sun coming in through a window. Nothing to do with moonlight at all, actually. I heard Chopin’s Waltz in A Minor for the first time recently, and that day I listened to it at least thirty times, again and again. To me it sounded like a man in a battered overcoat, in a grey scene, walking at times briskly, almost breaking into a run, and at times shuffling; always hugging himself tight, trying fruitlessly to keep the driving rain from running down his neck and onto his back. I asked my friend S, over the phone, to tell me what it looked like. “Looks like or sounds like?” he checked. But I knew what I meant. Anyhow, what he saw was totally different. It was a man arranging for a birthday party outdoors, in a garden. It’s strange to reconstruct what was described, phone conversations force one to colour them with one’s own perception. But there were sepia flashbacks in his picture. The music lends itself to flashback, going distinctly from minor sounds to major sounds and back. S saw it as a filmmaker would, a structured and bounded view. I saw it as a torturous road; I was like the wildlife cameraman, following my fellow, not knowing what he would see next. He saw children playing. He saw destitution. He saw despair. He saw survivors. But overall the scene was never released from the grey downpour.
Even the distinctions between minor and major chords or scales seems to be questionable. I can certainly feel the sadness of minor notes, but I really wonder what the average non-musical person hears and feels. I tried this with my roommate last year, she has no particular musical inclination except the intermittent interest that all teenagers must have. I played her Romanza on the piano (electric keyboard, actually) and asked her if she could see where the mood changed. She could, it’s a good piece to start out with, very easy to pinpoint the changes (I don’t know if these are what are called movements). Even so, a hundred per cent statistic on a one person test is not exactly a fair sample. I was not convinced.
I really don’t know where normal associations end and synaesthetic ones begin; isn’t, say, BLUE=COLD or RED=HOT? Or are even these associations culture-specific? When you’re decorating a room, you are advised to choose colour schemes wisely, appropriate to the feel of the room. You wouldn’t paint a nursery red, would you?
You feel happy when you see/hear something, sad when something else. But wait, that’s not a synthesis of senses at all. I can’t figure this out, though. Is seeing in the mind’s eye seeing?
Sometimes I feel like I’m cheating. Is it all in my head? Does synaesthesia even exist? Or is it because I have never felt the real thing that I am a sceptic?
It’s tough being a sceptic and also being creative and a romantic. And considering that every synaesthete’s experience may differ vastly in strength and nature from the next, it makes it even harder to explain.
Great. One more to add to the identity crises.
[Untitled]
I was watching a kite as he desperately flapped his wings for a breath of warm air to lift him up; someone asked me why I was standing there. He escaped, and in that split second I knew, once again, nothing about him and his flights of futility, searching, anguish in his heart, for a whisper of the familiar truth.
"Metaphore, metaphore", they cried to him, and no avail.
***
Neruda wrote of love, war and the unreachable heights of Macchu Pichu.
Dali painted compositions exquisite: never had a rose been so filled with latent potency, poisonously floating above a matte lanscape of clocks, cesspools and slow decay in a desert land. The man in the bowler hat stood still at that mysterious threshold, the murky sea roaring silently behind him, never spraying his suit, time never slowing enough to let that apple fall from its suspended place. Monet held the light in his hands, letting it fall by degrees on the grass, the trees, the sky. David stood alone, the sadness in his eyes invisible to anyone who could not see past his sinews. The spark from the Creation of Adam came and rent his heart to the very core. Cambell's soupcan said silently to him, "Metaphore, metaphore".
***
Massimo stood before his mirror and wondered. What was it that made him fall in love with these things? They were so different. No, disparate, he corrected. Dark eyes looked out from the glass but not at him. Everything was like everything else. But they were called by different names. What was this Surrealism? Even the sunset on the shingled beach off the chalk cliffs was surreal to him. What was this Renaissance? Was not everything ever created a re-naissance of something else, something older?
These categories defeated him. He did not know what to do. When he wrote prose, it came out in iambs and turned into poetry. When he wrote poetry, it emerged in long, torturous lines which coalesced spontaneously into paragraphs and indented the first in every one.
Massimo scratched the front of his old jeans. He loved that sound, the feeling of that friction under his nails. The ginger cat came and went yet again, always returning in its constant emaciatedness to remind him - you eat, I get nothing. You make money, I get nothing. You are educated, you have access to Art, Culture, Music. I have nothing.
The cat was everything that was wrong with the world. Gripped by the old, inexorable guilt every time he saw the cat, he shut it out of sight but could not shut it out of his mind. He grimaced at the automatic pun that hit him. Maybe he was out of his mind. After all, he just realised that his sneaking suspicion had been confirmed, yet again. This cat was no ordinary cat. "Metaphore, metaphore", it called out to him in his language.
Schrödinger kicked in his grave. Any moment now, thought Massimo, I will realise that all the things in the world I had not attributed to Schrödinger's ephemeral cat also came from nowhere else, and will also conglomerate into one hideous heterogeneous ball of energy, only to Big Bang into the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which is really the First Law of Everything: "Entropy Increaseth".
Massimo looked down at the newspaper which had carried his first review. "Postmodern" was there even in the title. That word irked him no end. It had been a year since that review and he had not been able to shoot himself. The gun lay in the drawer silently, as before. To shoot himself, he reflected, was to make too strong a statement. His grave, he continued to reflect, should carry an epitaph - monument. A single epigram would not do for his epitaph. How would he explain all his multiplicity of contents?
In a flash, the gun was out, two sharp reports were heard, and Massimo's brains were found spattered all over the Edwardian furniture, Warhol reproductions and his own prosetry.
His epitaph has one line on it: "And all for want of a horseshoe nail".
The cat lies buried at his feet, conquered.
Conquered? Massimo's life is over. The cat has nine to go.
***
Neruda wrote of love, war and the unreachable heights of Macchu Pichu.
Dali painted compositions exquisite: never had a rose been so filled with latent potency, poisonously floating above a matte lanscape of clocks, cesspools and slow decay in a desert land. The man in the bowler hat stood still at that mysterious threshold, the murky sea roaring silently behind him, never spraying his suit, time never slowing enough to let that apple fall from its suspended place. Monet held the light in his hands, letting it fall by degrees on the grass, the trees, the sky. David stood alone, the sadness in his eyes invisible to anyone who could not see past his sinews. The spark from the Creation of Adam came and rent his heart to the very core. Cambell's soupcan said silently to him, "Metaphore, metaphore".
***
Massimo stood before his mirror and wondered. What was it that made him fall in love with these things? They were so different. No, disparate, he corrected. Dark eyes looked out from the glass but not at him. Everything was like everything else. But they were called by different names. What was this Surrealism? Even the sunset on the shingled beach off the chalk cliffs was surreal to him. What was this Renaissance? Was not everything ever created a re-naissance of something else, something older?
These categories defeated him. He did not know what to do. When he wrote prose, it came out in iambs and turned into poetry. When he wrote poetry, it emerged in long, torturous lines which coalesced spontaneously into paragraphs and indented the first in every one.
Massimo scratched the front of his old jeans. He loved that sound, the feeling of that friction under his nails. The ginger cat came and went yet again, always returning in its constant emaciatedness to remind him - you eat, I get nothing. You make money, I get nothing. You are educated, you have access to Art, Culture, Music. I have nothing.
The cat was everything that was wrong with the world. Gripped by the old, inexorable guilt every time he saw the cat, he shut it out of sight but could not shut it out of his mind. He grimaced at the automatic pun that hit him. Maybe he was out of his mind. After all, he just realised that his sneaking suspicion had been confirmed, yet again. This cat was no ordinary cat. "Metaphore, metaphore", it called out to him in his language.
Schrödinger kicked in his grave. Any moment now, thought Massimo, I will realise that all the things in the world I had not attributed to Schrödinger's ephemeral cat also came from nowhere else, and will also conglomerate into one hideous heterogeneous ball of energy, only to Big Bang into the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which is really the First Law of Everything: "Entropy Increaseth".
Massimo looked down at the newspaper which had carried his first review. "Postmodern" was there even in the title. That word irked him no end. It had been a year since that review and he had not been able to shoot himself. The gun lay in the drawer silently, as before. To shoot himself, he reflected, was to make too strong a statement. His grave, he continued to reflect, should carry an epitaph - monument. A single epigram would not do for his epitaph. How would he explain all his multiplicity of contents?
In a flash, the gun was out, two sharp reports were heard, and Massimo's brains were found spattered all over the Edwardian furniture, Warhol reproductions and his own prosetry.
His epitaph has one line on it: "And all for want of a horseshoe nail".
The cat lies buried at his feet, conquered.
Conquered? Massimo's life is over. The cat has nine to go.
Rebecca and the Dargah
Last term we had a New Girl in the hostel. It's easy in a hostel of 300 to spot a newbie. She was tall, lanky and not pretty, but nice looking. Oh, and did I mention she was white?
Rebecca and I got talking because when I said Hi and she noticed I was reading George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four. She turned out to be a well read, fairly well travelled Tasmanian with a British father and passport, interesting to talk to. She was rather reserved, though. She was older than most of us and I think a little reticent to begin with; our strange accents and the small things which to us are so commonplace must have been scary to her - she couldn't leave the hostel for a week because the din of the traffic was too much for her
I had been telling her that I attend every music/theatre/anything performance I possibly can, and she seemed interested, so I said I would tell her the next time I found something worth attending. As it happens, I was making plans with P and G to go to Nizammudin (just outside the Dargah) to eat some sinfully delicious desi food, so Rebecca was asked if she would like to join us, and she said ok. Those two got tied up somewhere else, and in the end it was just Rebecca and me.
Now I love exploring, so even though it was around seven in the evening and I had never been to Hazrat Nizamuddin ka Dargah, I didn't have any qualms about going there alone, as it were, with her. But when we got there I think the multitudes of men in the narrow lane got to her a little. And well, she is white. People are bound to stare, to comment. Hell, in India (at least in Delhi, Lucknow) people would yell lecherous comments at a woman even if she were covered from head to toe in a burqa!
When we finally made it through the gali, at the end of which was, presumably, the dargah, but I was beginning to wonder how a largish building (I expected) could possibly be there (conveniently forgetting, of course, places like Kashi Vishwanath ka Mandir, the most famous temple in Varanasi, which is reached by winding up a torturous and filthy little alley). We crossed lots of tiny shops selling garlands and things, offerings that people buy there; we also crossed a very hippie looking fellow who seemed to have smoked his day's quota of pot (or something stronger, perhaps) just a minute ago, and could not help falling over himself.
There was a small enclosure to our left, just before the dargah, something like the aangan, or courtyard, of a house. There we were supposed to take off our shoes.
Later I kicked myself for not remembering; of course you had to take off your shoes, it's only a matter of common sense in India to know that 99 percent you will have to go in barefoot. I guess I was so used to it that it did not strike me as out of the blue to be asked to take my shoes off.
Anyway, Rebecca had not done her homework on India, apparently. It was winter, she was wearing jeans, boots, and under them hose, the kind with the continuous sock at the end. I was just thinking when I saw her expression, that her nylon leggings were going to have major ladders if she walked around in them. But then I realised that wasn't what was bothering her.
I was really taken aback by what she said: her doctor back in Australia had told her never walk barefoot in India, or else she would catch hookworm or ringworm or some worm. Now, with the blind faith of the tourist, she was absolutely positive she would get ringworm there. I had a tough time convincing her; in fact I don't think I managed to all.
The thing is, I wanted to go in, I wasn't about to ruin a new experience for the sake of white man's fear. I know how this sounds, I know I sound rabid, but I'm just being honest, I was genuinely amazed at how adamantly she refused to take her shoes off. Finally she said I should go in, and she would wait outside. Like hell I would let that happen. I wasn't about to desert her and walk off; it's ok, I live in Delhi, I can always come back later.
I just assumed that an educated, well read and travelled person (as I have said) who came to India out of choice for an exchange program, would be open minded. I suppose it isn't that simple. I wanted to try one last time; all along I had been trying to calm her down, telling her not to worry, that there were lots of people, but it was safe, she had a local with her, it's not so dirty, I wouldn't advise going into a loo without chappals, but this place would be fine, just see; ad infinitum. Because I didn't want her to feel scared, I wanted this to be an illuminating experience, not a harrowing one. Now all I said was, Look, you decide. Do you want to take the plunge or not?
She came in finally, in her leggings and all. Once we were inside, it was my turn to feel weird.
All along I thought, I'll be able to mingle, I can mingle anywhere. But inside, I felt like a stranger. I had not done my homework either. I realised I should have read up a little on the place before coming. There was a man reading out something in Urdu (it could have been Arabic or even Persian, for all I know). I don't know, maybe it was from the Quran Sharif, I had no idea. I only knew the Bollywood story: you go there, make a wish (ask for a mannat), tie the red thread on the grill.
In Hazrat Nizamuddin ka Dargah, I was just as much a foreigner as she was, and I knew just as little as she did about the place or the customs. The dargah in itself is supposed to be a secular shrine now (oxymoronic, isn't it?), a Come One Come All. But the entire atmosphere is Muslim, like most of Old Delhi and Old Lucknow tend to be, both architecture-wise and in demographics. I felt like a fish out of water, but not really because I am not a Muslim, but because I entered a non-believer. I didn't believe even in the thread-tying. It was just some banal desire for quaintness that prompted that. I am an outsider even in a Hindu temple, for the same reason. It has nothing to do with religion.
It's faith I'm talking about.
It's easy to label the white man, saying he's the Imperialist who thinks India is all snake charmers; who comes to India loaded with preconceived notions. But what was harder was to realise that
1. we are ourselves the most clueless of all: even the customs we do know about, or follow, we follow cretinously.
2. we probably have the most prejudices in our own heads, which is why they make an appearance whenever something is new or different. 3. we Indians are racist too (oh no, I'm not even getting started on Indians in Nigeria, where I lived before: a later post perhaps).
I still don't know what stand I should take; what is right, or if there even is a "right". Do I need to know anything about my own culture? What then is "my" culture? To learn how to speak Tamil well? To wear a bindi? To know how to cook rasam? To know that on Visu (the New Year) I was supposed to make a visukanni?
What is all this? Even if I know all this, Hazrat Nizamuddin ka Dargah would still be a mystery to me. Do I learn the Quranic verses my Muslim friends learnt at home when they were children? The bare minimum is that I speak Hindi. And it feels inexplicably good when people tell me I speak it like a Lucknavi. It's the only kind of Hindi I know!
I don't know how to belong. There are just so many things you want to belong to, how do you keep your identity from getting fractured? On second thought, why should it even be bad for identities to be fractured? Surely that means people can mix more easily, if they are less rigid, more fluid?
I went to Aliganj the other day, a colony in Lucknow. Ten years in this town and I felt like a tourist still. My world is a world cordoned off by "uppermiddleclassHinduTamilBrahminwomanoncelivedinAfrica" sensibilities. All these are parts of my identity. But that leaves out so much!
Is it always going to be No One vs Everyone? What if I neither want to be devoid of all identity, (the purest, most honest identity of all being the lack of it) nor a hideous pastiche of every culture, and become a living endlessly hyperlinked, cross-referenced Wikipedia page?
Where does that leave me?
Rebecca and I got talking because when I said Hi and she noticed I was reading George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four. She turned out to be a well read, fairly well travelled Tasmanian with a British father and passport, interesting to talk to. She was rather reserved, though. She was older than most of us and I think a little reticent to begin with; our strange accents and the small things which to us are so commonplace must have been scary to her - she couldn't leave the hostel for a week because the din of the traffic was too much for her
I had been telling her that I attend every music/theatre/anything performance I possibly can, and she seemed interested, so I said I would tell her the next time I found something worth attending. As it happens, I was making plans with P and G to go to Nizammudin (just outside the Dargah) to eat some sinfully delicious desi food, so Rebecca was asked if she would like to join us, and she said ok. Those two got tied up somewhere else, and in the end it was just Rebecca and me.
Now I love exploring, so even though it was around seven in the evening and I had never been to Hazrat Nizamuddin ka Dargah, I didn't have any qualms about going there alone, as it were, with her. But when we got there I think the multitudes of men in the narrow lane got to her a little. And well, she is white. People are bound to stare, to comment. Hell, in India (at least in Delhi, Lucknow) people would yell lecherous comments at a woman even if she were covered from head to toe in a burqa!
When we finally made it through the gali, at the end of which was, presumably, the dargah, but I was beginning to wonder how a largish building (I expected) could possibly be there (conveniently forgetting, of course, places like Kashi Vishwanath ka Mandir, the most famous temple in Varanasi, which is reached by winding up a torturous and filthy little alley). We crossed lots of tiny shops selling garlands and things, offerings that people buy there; we also crossed a very hippie looking fellow who seemed to have smoked his day's quota of pot (or something stronger, perhaps) just a minute ago, and could not help falling over himself.
There was a small enclosure to our left, just before the dargah, something like the aangan, or courtyard, of a house. There we were supposed to take off our shoes.
Later I kicked myself for not remembering; of course you had to take off your shoes, it's only a matter of common sense in India to know that 99 percent you will have to go in barefoot. I guess I was so used to it that it did not strike me as out of the blue to be asked to take my shoes off.
Anyway, Rebecca had not done her homework on India, apparently. It was winter, she was wearing jeans, boots, and under them hose, the kind with the continuous sock at the end. I was just thinking when I saw her expression, that her nylon leggings were going to have major ladders if she walked around in them. But then I realised that wasn't what was bothering her.
I was really taken aback by what she said: her doctor back in Australia had told her never walk barefoot in India, or else she would catch hookworm or ringworm or some worm. Now, with the blind faith of the tourist, she was absolutely positive she would get ringworm there. I had a tough time convincing her; in fact I don't think I managed to all.
The thing is, I wanted to go in, I wasn't about to ruin a new experience for the sake of white man's fear. I know how this sounds, I know I sound rabid, but I'm just being honest, I was genuinely amazed at how adamantly she refused to take her shoes off. Finally she said I should go in, and she would wait outside. Like hell I would let that happen. I wasn't about to desert her and walk off; it's ok, I live in Delhi, I can always come back later.
I just assumed that an educated, well read and travelled person (as I have said) who came to India out of choice for an exchange program, would be open minded. I suppose it isn't that simple. I wanted to try one last time; all along I had been trying to calm her down, telling her not to worry, that there were lots of people, but it was safe, she had a local with her, it's not so dirty, I wouldn't advise going into a loo without chappals, but this place would be fine, just see; ad infinitum. Because I didn't want her to feel scared, I wanted this to be an illuminating experience, not a harrowing one. Now all I said was, Look, you decide. Do you want to take the plunge or not?
She came in finally, in her leggings and all. Once we were inside, it was my turn to feel weird.
All along I thought, I'll be able to mingle, I can mingle anywhere. But inside, I felt like a stranger. I had not done my homework either. I realised I should have read up a little on the place before coming. There was a man reading out something in Urdu (it could have been Arabic or even Persian, for all I know). I don't know, maybe it was from the Quran Sharif, I had no idea. I only knew the Bollywood story: you go there, make a wish (ask for a mannat), tie the red thread on the grill.
In Hazrat Nizamuddin ka Dargah, I was just as much a foreigner as she was, and I knew just as little as she did about the place or the customs. The dargah in itself is supposed to be a secular shrine now (oxymoronic, isn't it?), a Come One Come All. But the entire atmosphere is Muslim, like most of Old Delhi and Old Lucknow tend to be, both architecture-wise and in demographics. I felt like a fish out of water, but not really because I am not a Muslim, but because I entered a non-believer. I didn't believe even in the thread-tying. It was just some banal desire for quaintness that prompted that. I am an outsider even in a Hindu temple, for the same reason. It has nothing to do with religion.
It's faith I'm talking about.
It's easy to label the white man, saying he's the Imperialist who thinks India is all snake charmers; who comes to India loaded with preconceived notions. But what was harder was to realise that
1. we are ourselves the most clueless of all: even the customs we do know about, or follow, we follow cretinously.
2. we probably have the most prejudices in our own heads, which is why they make an appearance whenever something is new or different. 3. we Indians are racist too (oh no, I'm not even getting started on Indians in Nigeria, where I lived before: a later post perhaps).
I still don't know what stand I should take; what is right, or if there even is a "right". Do I need to know anything about my own culture? What then is "my" culture? To learn how to speak Tamil well? To wear a bindi? To know how to cook rasam? To know that on Visu (the New Year) I was supposed to make a visukanni?
What is all this? Even if I know all this, Hazrat Nizamuddin ka Dargah would still be a mystery to me. Do I learn the Quranic verses my Muslim friends learnt at home when they were children? The bare minimum is that I speak Hindi. And it feels inexplicably good when people tell me I speak it like a Lucknavi. It's the only kind of Hindi I know!
I don't know how to belong. There are just so many things you want to belong to, how do you keep your identity from getting fractured? On second thought, why should it even be bad for identities to be fractured? Surely that means people can mix more easily, if they are less rigid, more fluid?
I went to Aliganj the other day, a colony in Lucknow. Ten years in this town and I felt like a tourist still. My world is a world cordoned off by "uppermiddleclassHinduTamilBrahminwomanoncelivedinAfrica" sensibilities. All these are parts of my identity. But that leaves out so much!
Is it always going to be No One vs Everyone? What if I neither want to be devoid of all identity, (the purest, most honest identity of all being the lack of it) nor a hideous pastiche of every culture, and become a living endlessly hyperlinked, cross-referenced Wikipedia page?
Where does that leave me?
Starbright
I stood naked under the stars, swelling with the knowledge that no one could see me now - I was invisible, free, I was dust. Far from feeling aroused, I felt as if a dead weight had dropped into my stomach. The night and I, we were the same. Both came out silently when no one was watching, and joined each other in a sordid embrace.
Himspeak
I can remember saying all this as if somebody else was speaking through me:
I could stand and light a cigarette on Chowpatti after dark, shut my eyes and try to listen to the sea over the traffic. And from inside my shut eyes I could see myself on four continents, feel the ocean lick my toes with its salty tongue, and lose myself to the endless water.
When would I ever find where I belong?
I couldn’t place myself on any continent, let alone in one house.
I could stand and light a cigarette on Chowpatti after dark, shut my eyes and try to listen to the sea over the traffic. And from inside my shut eyes I could see myself on four continents, feel the ocean lick my toes with its salty tongue, and lose myself to the endless water.
When would I ever find where I belong?
I couldn’t place myself on any continent, let alone in one house.
Trillions Apart
I weep when I hear John Lennon sing,
And I wept when George Harrison died.
I took out dad’s old tapes and listened to GH play Here Comes the Sun alone
And I cried.
I walked across Abbey Road.
I weep when I hear my mother’s old house in Gole Market has been demolished years ago.
I weep when my grandfather tells me of his days in Kalpathy, at Annamalai, in Cuttack, in Srinagar and in Sudan.
I wept when I read the stories my grandmother wrote in Tamil, in English
and were published after she died;
Stories about ourselves.
I jump for joy when I realise I live in the place that gave birth to Golgappa, Puchka, Panipuri and Batasha.
And laugh when I realise further that they are all the same thing
and delicious all.
I walked through the pines that rise on one side and fall on the other side of the road
in Ranikhet in the Kumaon hills.
I picked up pebbles from the bottom of Kempty Falls in Mussoorie
And sand from underneath my feet at Kanyakumari.
I have between the pages of my books
Maple from Toronto and Silver Oak from Lansdowne in Uttaranchal.
I walked barefoot on Eleko Beach;
that rests, on one side, on Lagos
and on the other, on the Atlantic.
I touched the Eiffel Tower at the foot because I could not afford to take the lift to the top.
I always put a coin in the guitar-case of a busker.
I fell asleep in Hyde Park,
The bright sun on my face
and the boys playing football - or is it soccer? -
teams of Shirts and No-Shirts.
Whenever I drive through Rajpath I crane my neck out of the auto-rickshaw
to see Parliament House on one side and IndiaGate on the other.
I get goosepimples whenever I hear the National Anthem
of India
of Nigeria.
Is Delhi - where I study - my home?
Or is Lucknow - where I live -?
Is Lagos - where I grew up - my hometown
Or is it Hyderabad - where I was born?
Am I an Indian?
A Palakkad Iyer?
Am I a traveller
Or just lost?
I belong everywhere
And so I belong nowhere.
Who am I?
Or can I never hope to answer that
while I sing
in Tamil, in English, in Hindi, in Spanish, in French, in Arabic, in Assamese, in Gujarati, in Bengali, in Italian and in every language singable.
I search for languages unknown
That everyone will understand
But no one can claim
And I search.
And I wept when George Harrison died.
I took out dad’s old tapes and listened to GH play Here Comes the Sun alone
And I cried.
I walked across Abbey Road.
I weep when I hear my mother’s old house in Gole Market has been demolished years ago.
I weep when my grandfather tells me of his days in Kalpathy, at Annamalai, in Cuttack, in Srinagar and in Sudan.
I wept when I read the stories my grandmother wrote in Tamil, in English
and were published after she died;
Stories about ourselves.
I jump for joy when I realise I live in the place that gave birth to Golgappa, Puchka, Panipuri and Batasha.
And laugh when I realise further that they are all the same thing
and delicious all.
I walked through the pines that rise on one side and fall on the other side of the road
in Ranikhet in the Kumaon hills.
I picked up pebbles from the bottom of Kempty Falls in Mussoorie
And sand from underneath my feet at Kanyakumari.
I have between the pages of my books
Maple from Toronto and Silver Oak from Lansdowne in Uttaranchal.
I walked barefoot on Eleko Beach;
that rests, on one side, on Lagos
and on the other, on the Atlantic.
I touched the Eiffel Tower at the foot because I could not afford to take the lift to the top.
I always put a coin in the guitar-case of a busker.
I fell asleep in Hyde Park,
The bright sun on my face
and the boys playing football - or is it soccer? -
teams of Shirts and No-Shirts.
Whenever I drive through Rajpath I crane my neck out of the auto-rickshaw
to see Parliament House on one side and IndiaGate on the other.
I get goosepimples whenever I hear the National Anthem
of India
of Nigeria.
Is Delhi - where I study - my home?
Or is Lucknow - where I live -?
Is Lagos - where I grew up - my hometown
Or is it Hyderabad - where I was born?
Am I an Indian?
A Palakkad Iyer?
Am I a traveller
Or just lost?
I belong everywhere
And so I belong nowhere.
Who am I?
Or can I never hope to answer that
while I sing
in Tamil, in English, in Hindi, in Spanish, in French, in Arabic, in Assamese, in Gujarati, in Bengali, in Italian and in every language singable.
I search for languages unknown
That everyone will understand
But no one can claim
And I search.
Pablo Nerudaspeak
"Algún día en cualquier parte, en cualquier lugar indefectiblemente te encontrarás a ti mismo, y ésa, sólo ésa, puede ser la más feliz o la más amarga de tus horas."
"Someday, somewhere— anywhere, unfailingly, you'll find yourself, and that, and only that, can be the happiest or bitterest hour of your life."
"Someday, somewhere— anywhere, unfailingly, you'll find yourself, and that, and only that, can be the happiest or bitterest hour of your life."
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