I had been eating everything, and it had still not been enough. Hunger isn’t hunger when it is portioned. I can only eat what I have. I don’t have much.

Telephone lines all across the road, with poles punctuating their length, got wet in the rain. The cars flashed past us on the sharp curve, reflecting as shiny droplets on the wires going in the opposite direction.

Every day I would look forward to getting out of the auto at that curve and sitting on a wonky wooden bench with my life right next to me. I’d save a cigarette for this. There would be rain, background chatter that meant nothing, and songs that we should have left behind in 2012, but we carried with us, making it ours, whenever a lyric would arrive dressed as a self-portrait.

Most nights were spent in a haze, but the kind that was woven out of patches of all the comfortable blankets you left back home. Once in a while, we would sit on rocks, by the rocky craters that got filled up come July every year. The moon would glimmer in it, the croaking frogs making the water vibrate long after the wind had stopped. On one such night, I felt like a ghost was following us, but I couldn’t be sure. I tried to not let it get to me, I walked faster, clutched the bike seat a little tighter, closed in a bit more. How do you situate something otherworldly in your vocabulary? We have managed to do so with love, but even then, sensation and words fail the emotions that grow all over you like moss, when distance, of any kind, in love prevails.

There would be things to do, piling on top of each other, melting into each other, until a statue of responsibilities started taking shape in the corner of my room. It looked a lot like the ghost that had been in hindsight. I stopped indulging in substances for a bit, to clear out my vision. I started wearing kohl. I took out the photo card my mother had given me of her god, lion headed, red eyes, protecting those who are true of heart, those who are devoted.

Come to think about it, I was devoted, just to not something tangible – another way in which my mother and I converged.

All attempts at clarity of vision failed. Each night I would sleep the same sleep, wake in the same rushed routine, work the same work, until I stepped out of the auto and was doing the same things of the kinds that I liked. The same chai, the same cigarette, it festered under the roof of greed, I wanted more, more, more.

The ghost seemed to not leave me. I did not try reasoning with it. The office elevator had the capacity of 23 people, yet when I entered alone, I felt like I was the last person in. When I looked up from work, the hum of the office’s skeleton would sound diseased. The coffee kept having a film of something on top, I could look in it and see myself clearly, but from years ago, when I was unaware of what all was coming my way.

I started believing in signs and symbols. I knew something evil was looming over me. It is one thing to doubt, one thing to believe, but it is something else to Know. It is so personal, you cannot even convey it in its entirety to somebody who is Most Personal to you. Just like love. You keep quiet, and you start hunting for physical indications of the haunting.

We were fifteen days into July when my cat fell ill. After Noorie, I was convinced that the ghost had come for Heera. I kept insisting we had to take action, but my neurotic tendencies have left people a little tired of me, they tend to take me as lightly as a sunny day’s prediction here July onwards.

I started connecting the dots in my head. July of last year is when I got them. Heera must have been hit by the affliction of missing her. He was heartbroken. He took off from the house one day. We looked for him in the school playground, behind the construction site, inside people’s houses. After half of the night had passed, or at least half my age, we found him, stuck in a pile of wood – akin to a funeral pyre. Nobody got it. I saw it clearly.

He grew weaker by the day. He started looking different. It worried me. We rushed him to the vet, who assured us that it was nothing. Why do we trust each other when there is an educated tag behind the opinion?

By the time our bedsheets were changed, he was well again. He was jumping around. He started sleeping on top of me again, just like I would sleep on my aunt when I was afflicted with chicken pox and had an ounce of divine within me.

Days went by. I thought the curse had been lifted. I placed the protective photo back in my wallet from the inside of the book I was reading. I thought I could stretch my limbs a little.

Only I fell into the moonlit pool, face first. The frogs jumped out in surprise.

I could still see things, which seemed to move nobody else. The tree that bats would circle by the big stage was cut down. I could hear some sort of wailing during the daytime. The army of bamboo by the grove creaked and bent a little lower than usual. The pond, shallow and nameless, refused to show up in photos; it was green, but all I could see was a light. Dogs kept crying at night – an omen of death – I kept informing my mother about it.

I believed I only had to hold on until the month was over. I braced myself for whatever was to come.

A fight broke out right outside in the street. Somebody’s head was split open, but the intensity was unclear from the terrace. Three days or so later, when August lined up by the glass curtain, no sound, only a heavy presence. Bags were packed, trains left the station, one of them carrying the shield I was clinging on to. I was overcome with a fever that stemmed from a nightmare I had – somebody was after me.

On the last day of July death occurred in the neighbourhood. A young woman, younger than me, but already a mother to two. Suicide. Coming back from work, I skipped the wooden bench, and was instead met with a glass coffin; the wailing closer to my house now. It went on for two days.

I cleaned my house to no music, only sounds that were tethered to the fine line between human and beyond. When I got to the unwanted statue, it felt like touching water. It looked like light. I dreamt myself, dragging it like a dead body, to the pond, and dumping it in. Dreams have no sounds, but they have sensations. My fever broke.

journaled 8 pages today. i think another fever will come and break with much more intensity soon.

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Do modern women need a friend to have fun?

Do modern women have considerably less fun than their peers out of choice that appears so, but is actually stemming from their inability to maintain strong female friendships? Do modern women have considerably less fun than their peers out of choice that appears so, but is actually stemming from their inability to maintain strong female friendships that last more than one job, one degree, one city shift? Do modern women have considerably less fun than their peers out of choice that appears so, but is actually stemming from their inability to maintain strong female friendships that last more than one job, one degree, one city shift, or is it because modern women have forgotten to have fun?

Why have modern women forgotten to have fun?

Why have modern women forgotten to have fun and become too busy with the boring aspects of life that pay bills and help them stay afloat? Why do modern women, who are looking for adventure in all places, right and wrong, face the inability to have fun through their screens?

What do these screens contain?

Texts from others living on the internet, in a different city, in a different tax bracket. These screens also contain texts from women who have come before modern women, who have written predictions, systemic explanations, and their own wishes, all in regard to a woman and her ability to indulge in fun.

Why do women fail?

august is an active practice in doing More.

Those were the days of CDs. My uncle got me a collection of SRK films to watch while I was bedridden, but I had been seeing visions then. I dreamt of gods, big and small, who were all coming to save me. I was dreaming of being underwater and feeling like I belonged there.

I requested this one song by Pawan Singh, over and over. It became popular overnight and played all day and night in the temple with the megaphone on its dome, and had entered my consciousness wherever the chicken pox ate me away. It was a bhajan, set to rhythms and beats akin to a Govinda song. The repetitions of the lyrics made it easier for everybody to sing it throughout the day.

The video was the kind of VFX which was popular in Indian weddings when a videographer was hired, whose name was something along the lines of Chandu, Bablu, Raju, Rajesh, and so on. It was just Durga ma, in her palanquin, going along hills and valleys and rivers, away and away, floating. I kept watching it, over and over, and the dreams kept getting worse.

Mai doli chadhi chalali sewak gharwa

O hee doliya ke baghawa kahaar

Duniya mein shor bhayil ba

माई डोली चढ़ी चलली सेवक घरवा

ओही डोलिया के बघवा कहार

दुनिया में शोर भइल बा

Mother goddess is on her way to her servant’s house, in her palanquin

The palanquin-bearers are the mighty tigers

The entire world is talking about it

O hee re doliye pe lalka oharwa

Okare chamak se bhayil ujiyarwa

ओही रे डोलिया पे ललका ओहरवा

ओकरे चमक से भईल उजियारवा

The palanquin is decorated in her red fabric

That lights up the entire world

Chaal runuki jhunuki chalela baghawa

Sange sange bhairo bhaiya rakhwaar

Duniya mein shor bhayil ba

चल रुनुकी झुनुकी के चलेला बघवा

संगे संगे भैरव भइया रखवार दुनिया में शोर भइल बा

The tiger sways ahead

Bhairo, our big brother is keeping guard

The entire world is enthralled

Acharaj mein padal baade dekhi sab devata

Kawan bhakt maai ke pethawale ha nevata

अचरज में पड़ल बाड़े देखी सब देवता

कवन भक्त माई के पेठावाले हो नेवता

All the other gods are baffled

Which devotee has sent such an invite

Saj dhaj ke chalali mai beta gharwa

Kehu karata kahin pe intezaar

Duniya mein shor bhayil ba

सज धज के चलली माई बेटा घरवा

केहू करता कहीं पे इंतज़ार दुनिया में शोर भइल बा

The goddess donned her finest to go to her son’s house

There is somebody out there, waiting for her

The entire world looks on

Ten days, or at least nine circles of hellish nightmares later, I broke into sweats one night and woke up patchy and well the next day. A crevice formed on the left side of my nose, and my mother promised to get my nose pierced soon so that it could be hidden. I bathed in the river Ganga, walked miles with my naani, and watched Badhshah that night.

Pawan Singh is now notorious for making songs that are blatantly disrespectful to everything, especially women; and on a personal level, everything he could have been. He got a ticket from BJP recently, and has over five cases of domestic violence, assault, harassment, etc against him. His first wife killed herself, and the second one lives separately, while battling a dirty and highly publicised divorce battle with him.

thank u for reading.

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Grief will have you looking up things like how old was that racist writer’s cat when he died. Grief will have you looking at photos on your phone while in public, waiting for your food, and suddenly you want to turn into the dust that rests on her grave. Grief will make you walk a mile, and then some, to just sit by her, and put flowers all over her tender, gentle, dead body that you cannot believe is dead, even though you saw it all happen. Grief will ask you whom to pin the blame on, and you will turn inwards. You will think of all the things you could have done differently that day, to feel even worse than you did before. You will think about all the stages, and wonder if they could all just coalesce into one and melt off your back like this unpredictable and wretched heat. You were planning to buy a cooler; you were going to fix the table fan. All to make it better for her. You wonder when you will get the other, messyweirdgirlfiction grief experience – the one where you feel horny, and messy, and miserable, and hot. But none of it comes in the way it was promised on paper. It arrives as a personal design, a specific pain curated just for you.

Last year, the first adult “purchase” was her – a kitten for free, attached to another. A pair of babies, our own. The first investment of my youth and my romantic endeavour that was set for life. I thought she too, was set in stone, in my life. Now all I feel is the same stone choosing different parts of my body to nest in, making it hurt at times and places that are inappropriate. But when has death arrived with an RSVP? When do you chalk out time in your calendar for mourning?

I used to be a teacher a couple of years ago, and I insisted that the love I felt for those children was the purest kind. But kids are still within the realm of human understanding, still have the power to wield their words in a manner that can be ugly, demeaning, and hurtful.

Cats don’t. They sit by the door and wait for you. They hold on to your jeans to ask you not to leave for work. They sit on the kitchen sill while you cut onions, and now you’re both crying.

And then there was one – just me, crying. No onions, no cat.

Noorie was her name, is her name, will always be her name. Light. Where does light go? It doesn’t. You do. You go. You go everywhere and find her. A small pink dress. A little girl swinging her feet. A small tomato. A cloud shaped like her sleeping. A garden. Everything was Noorie for us. We would be away and still find her with us. Now we are trying to convince each other, Chin Chin and Muck Muck, that she is still here. In us. In Heera.

She was Heera’s soulmate. They came as a pair. Now he is looking for her under the table where she napped all day. He is jumping on shelves and sniffing my purse on which she had her alone time. We did not let him see her body hardening up. We hid her in one of the numerous paper bags the working population accumulates in a Tier 1 city. I ordered her cat food a lot, many of these delivery bhaiyyas knew me now, as the lady with three cats.

I am not religious. I am not superstitious. Until.

Maybe we shouldn’t have gone walking that day. Maybe we should have eaten at that specific place. We should have paid heed when two cats turned up dead in our neighbourhood. Maybe the news I told you over our evening coffee about a person I know was a warning sign. Maybe we shouldn’t have gone on the terrace that night, something I never do, but that day I asked for. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

All freezing and hard between us, our differences, all melted away. Now it feels like nothing matters. Every moment feels like it is bringing us closer to when she will pop her head in the room and be like, did you guys seriously leave me out there? But the truth is, every moment is turning her body colder than ever, in the soft, damp earth, chosen with care despite being under the influence of numbing grief. I had taken a fork from one of these fancy hotels a while ago, something I tend to do – we all have a house to run, guys. It was used to dig up her final bed. You said, even in death, she was pretty. Even in death, she held her grace.

Noorie had become a nominal adjective for us. Whatever pleased us, whatever was the most beautiful was/is Noorie. She was/is everything on her own.

We had plans for her. We were going to take her to the city that gave us each other, we were going to take her to Vietnam. I had a silly dream that if I ever publish a book, I would put Heera and her as my author’s photo. I pictured her on my shoulder, as I walked through the world, both of us curious, but not scared, because we had/have each other.

I have lost people in my life, but death arrived as a phone call, a text message, an afterthought from my mother. There was always a distance. This time it was right on my doorstep, quite literally too. This time it is a double edged sword; this time, there was collateral damage.

Misery loves company. In a weird way, I was glad that I did not face her death alone. I was also scared that I would be blamed for it, had I been the bearer of the news over a phone call, a text, or on your doorstep. I am relieved we both witnessed it together. I wouldn’t have been able to walk that night, with a paper bag full of life that once was, alone. I wouldn’t have found the right soil, and I would have simply collapsed next to her.

What angers me is how sudden it was. What angers me is how divine this punishment feels. I don’t know whom to turn to for answers, and I don’t know what to ask. Is she okay? Is there an afterlife? Did she know we did our best for her?

I have spent alternate hours crying. I have gone to the office, and will continue to do so tomorrow, and then after. As soon as I return home and climb the stairs where I would stand calling her back home, the tears start. I have always loved a routine, but I don’t like what this one entails. It hurts. Physically too.

With each passing moment, Heera is morphing into her. Suddenly, he is sleeping like she used to. He is grinning like she used to. How do you console a beast of nature, an element so free and untainted? How do you explain grief to a cat who only understands that something important is amiss? But this is where all Translation Theory fails, this is where all dissertations on Language do a disservice to the field itself. Of course he knows, of course he understands. Why else would he hold my face? Why else would he sleep a little closer to us? Why else would he imitate everything she used to do? Don’t we all form rituals, don’t we all pay our respects?

There’s so much to say, but I feel like the more I put down here, the more this delicate fabric of life gets torn. This isn’t enough. But I don’t want to let anything else come loose from within, lest I forget.

The point is, I had a cat. I loved her to death. I love her beyond that, too. Noorie was my first love, in the way love explains itself to you when you are still a child, boundless. This grief is not going anywhere, but I have to.

Oh baby, baby, it’s a wild world

It’s hard to get by just upon a smile

Oh baby, baby, it’s a wild world

I’ll always remember you like a child, girl

You know I’ve seen a lot of what the world can do

And it’s breaking my heart in two

Because I never want to see you sad, girl

Don’t be a bad girl

But if you want to leave, take good care

Hope you make a lot of nice friends out there

But just remember there’s a lot of bad and beware (wild world, cat stevens)

Where does the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act Amendment bill No. 79/2026 come from? What is the ideology that leads to it?

A careful examination of the history and present of anti-trans currents in India and globally can reveal parts of the answer. A friend from the Centre for Policy and Legal Research mentions that while it has mostly been a shock to both the known progressive voices in the community and the known rabble-rousers, in terms of timing and phrasing and action plan, the overall intent of the amendment has been clear to him ever since a throwaway statement made by the Indian Government’s Solicitor-General Tushar Mehta. Tushar Mehta, a significant voice in arguing that the Shaheen Bagh peaceful protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act were divisive acts of sedition, had mentioned this in 2023 court proceedings about social justice, welfare, and reservations: the primary reason why the Government had not yet taken serious steps to implement the reservation mandated for transgender persons is the vague and overly broad definition, in the government’s view, that the word “transgender person” has in the current legislative framework set up by the 2019 TG Bill.

What is the problem? In my opinion, it is that the Central Government recognises the subject-making power of juridical processes and outcomes[1]. There has been a particular legal history and legislative follow-up to the transgender question in India - who are the transgender people, how do they become legible subjects under law and the state machinery, and how do we govern/develop/control/empower this class of citizen? The act of a government body issuing an identity card is a significant act in a democratic setup like ours - one identity card, when issued, can lead to a cascade of potential name, gender changes in other documents, and a gradual modification of every aspect that makes a trans woman like me a ‘male’ under the law.

This is significant because to name something is to give it the consideration of being discussed as a community, a denomination, a stakeholder. This is also significant because one of the potential welfare benefits to which the TG identity card is connected is reserved seats in educational institutions, government postings, and competitive exams. On the surface this is comparable to the ‘caste certificate’ - a document that is uniquely difficult to procure and serves as the basis for availing welfare schemes as genuine recipients. This comparison leads to one of the legible reasons why this amendment exists: it is another proposed acid rain in the erosion of what reservations mean in our country. In fact, this can be seen as a successor to the efficient and rapid implementation of the ‘Economically Weaker Sections (EWS)’ reservation, a move meant primarily to weaken the intent of reservations and provide fuel to the argument that it is a poverty alleviation scheme, and secondarily to bring dominant castes into the purview of reservations. The argument underpinning the EWS is the existence of a ‘genuinely oppressed’ class of people, those who are not in any scheduled or notified ‘backward’ class but can prove that their annual family income is below a particular threshold (egregiously a lower threshold than the limit for the ‘creamy layer’ of OBC reservations).

This argument carries on into the proposed Amendment: its officially stated intent is the perceived mismatch (no evidence provided) between the broad definition of a ‘transgender person’ under the 2019 TG Act and the existence of a smaller, genuinely oppressed subset of the transgender community. Arguments about who doesn’t deserve reservations are a popular false flag in discussions like these, since caste is a fiercely contested system that is central to so many aspects of our everyday economic, social, family, and even personal lives. Most of these arugments are started by people who are ideologically invested but do not consider themselves as potential recipients of reservation. It is not that the upper caste opposer of reservations wants them for himself - what he wants is a cunning redrawing of boundaries so that only those he considers as genuinely oppressed are benefiting from them.

Thus there needs to be a narrative of a subset of the community to valourise as the most oppressed of the oppressed and it necessarily comes with the scapegoats (like the metaphorical iPhone-owning Dalit) who are undeservedly benefiting from the provisions of the TG Act. The chosen subsets for both of these ideological classes are significant: the communities chosen as ‘genuinely oppressed’ are the communities that have religio-cultural identities like Hijra, Kinnar, Jogti, and the intersex community (but only those people with intersex variations distinguishable at birth). The subtle sleight of hand at play here is that there is no accepted definition of a ‘hijra’: in fact most non-community people and cis people do not have any idea what makes a person a hijra. This has been the subject of much colonial and colonial-inspired ethnography and subject to the usual anthropological imperialism of understanding complex postcolonial subjects as “ancient third-gender communities,” a discussion for another essay, but suffice it to say researchers balk at properly characterizing the hijra community out of respectful ignorance.

It is somewhat clear how one becomes transgender: at some point in life, a human being starts noticing a dissonance between the way they are treated as a gendered body and the way they would like to be treated. Gender is fundamental to how we move about the world, how we position ourselves in it, what kind of interactions we have with people, places, objects, and systems, and so eventually it becomes clear that there is an incongruence, that I do not want to be frisked by this security guard on this side of the metro station but by that security guard on that side, and this affects something as simple as which bathroom I use to something as profound as who gets to sign a consent for invasive surgery when I’m unconscious. Different people talk about this as being different levels of voluntary - in my personal experience, I thought it was a choice I made, but every day as I grow more comfortable in my transsexual body, I’m realising that it is a choice I’d been blocked from making and I should have had the courage to make this choice a lot earlier, because my body has known for a long time even though my rational mind took time to catch up and recognise that in this world, a tranny is what I am. Others grow supremely uncomfortable having a particular puberty - school life becomes difficult, it is hard to repress and suppress your gender feelings, and you eventually either get harassed out of school or find yourself at the receiving end of corrective violence from your family, and this leads to a large number of transgender individuals leaving home with no safety net. Most of us take some kind of action to dissociate ourselves from being perceived in the gender we were assigned at birth, and look and act and be perceived otherwise.

It is not clear to the outside world how one becomes a hijra. I will say this much frankly - I am not an ethnographer and am not bound to such ethics. The hijras are predominantly transfeminine, androphilic, matriarchal, and follow syncretic (Hindu and Muslim) religious and cultural practices. Anybody can become a hijra by paying a certain amount of money to a ‘guru,’ an influential house (gharana) mother in the community. This payment of money is in return for her protection and entry into her house of transfeminine individuals. It also comes with an obligation to earn money - often either through begging or through sex work - and give your guru the entirety of your earnings from the day, in exchange for food, shelter, beatings, and most importantly, the chance to one day get approved for ‘nirvanam’ or bottom surgery or castration. There is a price set for you, and if you want to leave this bondage or join another gharana, you or your sponsor from the other gharana have to pay. This is enforced by gang violence and semi-organised crime. These are strictly and fiercely hierarchical systems - the head of a gharana is a nayak, and under her are a few gurus, and under each guru is her jamaat of essentially bonded individuals.

Why does this exist? Although I have made a serious effort not to romanticise what is very clearly familial abuse within found/chosen family, the reason such a system exists and thrives is because nobody wants to employ transgender individuals. Trans folks are severely ostracised in education, housing, and employment, and the hijra gharana is often the only choice for many trans people who have not been able to finish their education, or find a job, or keep one. It is a community formed by bloody circumstances and keep together by blood, desperation, and hierarchy. It is time we stopped romanticising it. I write this at the risk of being targeted by gharanas near me, but they already despise me for not wanting bottom surgery, and worse, being attracted to women. It was going to be a matter of time, but somebody has to write something counter to academia’s romanticisation and the center’s distortion and name it for what it is.

This much is very very clear: a government identity card is free for anyone to obtain if they can prove that they satisfy the criteria. A community identity is not free for anyone to obtain, and is very much a way to gatekeep whether or not you are allowed to hold this identity. The jamaat are, to drop any pretense of wokeness, intensely regressive, violent, and hierarchical. I write this in the knowledge that younger, bleeding-heart individuals may consider me heartless and ever-compromising activists and NGO representatives may consider me divisive. The topmost layer of nayaks is incredibly wealthy and politically powerful. Political power in this context means that their assent is needed before welfare can trickle down to their chelas. And traditionally, they have been patriarchal, conservative, and violently opposed to transmasculinity, gender nonconformity, and any sexuality that doesn’t center and worship men.

Trans men and transmasculine individuals are uniquely scapegoated in this amendment. It has long been “accepted knowledge” in trans activism circles that if you have to get anything done, you have to let go of and allow the extreme transphobia the jamaat has towards trans men. The ‘invisibility’ of trans men is often given much academic treatment, but this invisibility is not inevitable; it is manufactured hatred, it is the concerted power-grabbing effect of one trans community having been given certain recognitions and turning around and burning the bridge. Unless transmasculinity is proactively and wholesomely accounted for in any future definition of a transgender person, we cannot move forward.

Many people have written about what there is to be opposed in this amendment, and how to go about opposing it - these are very valuable resources and I’ll be linking to them as I update this post. But having traveled with and been a part of hijra groups to a small extent, I know some aspects of hijra existence that have been done a brutal disservice by academic romanticisation. Now that a parliament bill has been proposed naming hijras as the real transgenders and the rest of us as self-mutilating freaks, it is time that we looked at a community whose violence seems inescapable. If it is a choice between letting go of my transmasculine brothers and saying the inconvenient truth about the jamaat despite knowing that cis people will use this to divide us further, I choose the latter. Push has come to shove. The jamaat must fight for the inclusion of our trans brothers, or where I morally stand is in the opposite side.

Addendum

It is not clear that this bill outright benefits the Hijra community, or even a set of its most powerful members that can be named. As it stands, the amendment has very devious double-bind: where it has reduced transgender identity to a few socio-religious communities, it also mentions “any person or child who has been by force, allurement, inducement, deceit or undue influence, either with or without consent, compelled to assume, adopt, or outwardly present a transgender identity, by mutilation, emasculation, castration, amputation, or any surgical, chemical, or hormonal procedure or otherwise.” It leaves no provision for these procedures to be done voluntarily without inducement or deceit. In the clause meant for delineating punishments for crimes against transgender folks, also includes serious punishments including imprisonment for five to ten years for performing this coercion. As it stands, a coherent reading of this bill criminalizes every hijra guru and nayak.

While ideologically the figure of the hijra is used for moving the goalposts of trans identity, materially the hijra is criminalized for merely existing, and only children born intersex can be inducted into this community without someone falling foul of this law. In summary - only the hijra is the genuinely oppressed transgender person, and it is not possible to induct someone into the hijra community without performing a crime according to this bill. The attack is on self-perceived gender incongruence: this amendment inescapably mandates you to live life as your gender assigned at birth, and anyone who helps you transition is seriously criminalized alongside the gravest crimes in this country.

Practically speaking, this leads to the question of how we oppose this bill and how the Jamaat might. This is a moment where transmasculine people, gender non-conforming people, unaffiliated trans women, and the hijras can come together to define and understand transgender identity in a way that isn’t tied to religion and the jamaat.

The material conditions of an average hijra are a far cry from the opulence of the average nayak, and there is no convenient moment to bring this up, and thus this inconvenient existential threat is when I choose to speak about it.

[1]: Judith Butler talks about this when asking the question ‘what is a woman?’ and wondering how legislative and legal procedures answer this question.

This is not my place to say anything, but this is a place where something must be said. So here it is, from somebody I have looked up to for a while now, and from whom I learn a lot, even if it is via an offhanded, funny instagram story.

And if you haven’t yet, please sign this. The hearing is slated for tomorrow.
Email your Member of Parliament | Reject Trans Bill 2026

REJECT TRANS BILL

– Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson

I was deprived as a child. Not really, I am lying. I went to school, had parents who fought once in a while, had family gatherings where we were allowed to sip on alcohol in hiding. Here’s a basic outline of my life. I have a cousin, or have been that cousin, who has been abroad, either to study, or to travel. I probably had a room of my own even before I had autonomy of any kind. So on, and so forth.

The crux of it all is, I have lived in a city all my life. One of The Cities, where people come from all over the country, and create traffic jams, and cause disruptions by dreaming a little too big. My elbows bump into theirs, and I don’t know what to make of it. I don’t know how to hold a conversation with somebody who hasn’t lived a life parallel to mine. I scroll on Instagram and feel proud of people from villages and small towns who have access to the Internet and are Speaking Up about things. I reshare it, I repost it. I like it all. I am aware of the world, at least enough of it to justify my educational qualifications. Well-educated people have civic sense. Well-educated people have good jobs, independence, and go on to do good things. Well-educated people understand the Importance of Mental Health. I can cite my mental well-being as an issue to take a day off from work. I like to exit conversations that my brain flags as anxiety-inducing. I judge people based on the colour of their flag. You would think I would be talking about The One, which has become the colour that seems to cover all the violence done in the name of protecting the people who identify with what the colour stands for. Orange. Red. Not much of a difference; it all returns to dust anyway. I have trauma responses of my own, self-diagnosed descriptors of my Selfhood, in the same manner that imitation crab has the actual crustaceans, or how soybean and jackfruit can be a replacement for chicken.

So you can understand how important it is for me, somebody who had the privilege of growing up on the Western facet of the internet, to accommodate everything I learnt on it, more than I ever learnt in school, within myself. bell hooks might have talked about love, and the importance of it to come from within and to spread outwards in a direction that values collective growth, but all I could understand was – I am important in my life, and my life is the most important to me.

I learnt enough on the Internet University to strengthen my delusions. As an adolescent, all you want to do is belong, and when you grow up, all you want is to be the best version of you. I learnt what the best way for me to exist is, but of course, by best, I mean comfortable. My parents probably paved the way; I just decided to sprinkle some flowers along the way. My own comfort means my optimum performance. Ease of life means betterment of my own, for my own. This is a dog-eat-dog world, did nobody teach you that? Each morning, we sharp-toothed beasts (a sign of strength, I hope?) walk out of our kennels, but there’s a length to the chain. What do you mean it’s stopping me? I chose the chain. The chain keeps me safe; it allows me to buy comfort. Stop it, you are making me nervous. I don’t know how to carry on this conversation. I must go home. By home I mean the box I pay rent for, more than necessary. But there’s a lift. It’s semi-furnished. I have a soft bed. I have food on the table. I buy clothes every month. Isn’t that what you all are always cribbing about? Roti, kapda, makaan? Then why are you being a hater when I managed to come to this position, all by myself? I am an independent, Self-Made (closer to the rest than a) Millionaire in making. I take care of myself. I get in situationships. I pay for my share of everything. I think you are just jealous of this all, but hey, man, you can get it all too; you just need to hustle harder. Have you thought of incorporating AI into your existence? I sometimes talk to it when I am feeling lost, sometimes the entire world feels like your enemy, you know. Have you tried freelancing to make some extra bank? I think you need to upskill yourself. And then, you will be able to do everything that I am able to do.

What all, you ask? I get to open an app, order groceries AND a person, both delivered to my house at the same speed, and the same rate, almost. The person (he/she/they) unpacks my groceries and cooks me something. They can iron my clothes too. Some days, when I am extremely tired, I can even ask them to give me a head massage. It is like having your own personal – I am not sure what the politically correct term is actually… Basically, it is like hiring a therapist for your house, by the hour, and it is cheaper than a pack of cigarettes, you know? I am paying for it, so of course I deserve to use it the way I want. Did you not break your toys when you were young? It is the age for that; every age has a shiny new toy for your amusement. Anyways, this, this is IT, trust me. I hustle all day, and come home to comfort, just like how my mother did it all for me when I was young. That’s when I know I have made it. This kind of security allows me to meet my friends over the weekend, to pamper myself, and to spend more time bettering myself. The cost of freedom is at the expense of somebody else’s entire existence, but hey, if you can afford it, nobody can stop you, right? It is my money after all.

Did you hear about the gas issue by the way? I already got an induction, ordered it straight to the office. I hope my cook knows how to use it, man.

hi, i have kind of reached a burnout, slump in my life, and it has been due to a lot of factors, some which we share as a part of the same world we live in. i don’t know why i am telling you this. the point is, i have been blank blank blank and also angry and also confused and everything is jarring. i wish you a good weekend. sorry if this one reads too angry, or too cocky, or i appear holier than thou in some sentences, but then, this is my page you are on, i just hope you removed your shoes before coming in. also, new mitski album, new mitski essay.

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After that came sturdy, durable plastics. City life. Blue, mostly. Rarely purple, or peach, like right now. It is a thing being reused, passed down from one friendship to another. Sustainability practices permeate all aspects – friendships and conscious practices alike.

Spring has skipped a little too many steps for now, and summer is holding the fort here. It is extremely hot. There is no ac, no cooler. There’s a ceiling fan, and a table one – another thing passed down as an act of love and care. No matter how much you try to not sweat, there are things you are supposed to do. Walk a mile for a thing or do, lay down together enough that it is worth running a couple more. There’s sweat, so much sweat. Two nights ago I came down with the heat, unable to bear it. I was told to sit, with water dripping down my body. Shampooed, conditioned hair went down the drain, along with the products, as I sat dying, a bit, just a bit. I let the scalp cool off. Smoked a cigarette. Let the tap fill the bucket in a slow manner, so that the rush didn’t drown the music playing outside. I was told to go underwater and put my face in the bucket. Take a big breath, go in. Feel like all those people in the movies who go through something that alters everything in their lives. You know which ones I am talking about. The song felt different underwater. Jo aadat pad gayi peene ki, to aag bujhi mere seene ki. Now that drinking has become a habit, the fire in my chest is satiated. That’s how I felt at the moment, the fire within me was trapped, and I needed to cool it off from the outside, as much as I could. Internal matters could be dealt with later, they weren’t big on the agenda, when you took the entire current affairs in perspective.

I have been taking two baths per day, sometimes more, depending on how big of a migraine I have been nursing, or if I have been over my daily cigarette limit. This heat is unbearable in ways that cannot be dealt with easily.

Years ago, I was drowning myself in a bucket to not hear screaming and fighting right outside the bathroom. To move to a place where it is just you, and to be able to find leisure in acts that were one’s protective measures, helps bear the brunt of everything.

Even before that, some essence of hysteria had made itself valid within my sense of self by showing me a hallucination when I took a dip in our village’s part of Ganga. I saw the same three idols that my mother has kept in her home, but the reason it meant something Bigger to the Big People in my life is because I had never seen those idols. Maybe I have dreamt my entire life and now I am reliving it, exactly the same, for the perverted pleasure of somebody out there. There is always somebody out there.

Last week I was in Mumbai, a city akin to New York (I say begrudgingly, being from New Delhi), and it was a tiring event. I walked more than necessary, talked more than I allowed myself, and what followed was a sleep that carried me through a painless night. I woke up to aching joints, and took a hot shower, washing away everything that would have meant something if I was still grasping at straws to feel something. But I had a home to go back to. I mean something to somebody now. I have something that means a lot to me now.

When we were young, my mother would mix the dettol antiseptic liquid in the water, and watching the white disappear into the blue transparency of the bucket was fascinating. The smell, something that still moves with me, no matter which city I dock myself at. Before going out for the night, to just sit and see the moon, the still water, the concrete turning into a puddle of nightlife, I took another bath. Dettol. Sandalwood soap. Scrubbed the places my ma would be harsh on, leaving me red, but clean and scented. My bathroom has bandaids stuck on the wall tiles, sometimes they feel like lizards from the corner of my eye, reptilian manifestations of some of my most irrational fears. I remember running around half naked as a kid, refusing to bathe in my naani’s bathroom, because of a beige phantom terrorising me to my gut. I remember my cat recently killing one, and nibbling on it by the foot of my mattress, and how I screamed, but the cause was dead, the proof in front of my eyes. The head was thrown along with the rest of the trash the next day. There was nothing to fear in the house for now, even if the bandaids seem to change their places every other day. A thing that covers your wounds should be allowed to be, even if it scares some other part of you. Painful moments pass easily, if you ease yourself into the water. Sit in the cold, sit in the room (temperature), sit with life dripping down you. There’s always a new, clean day for you to work upon.

I don’t know how to end this. It IS too hot.

booker prize

Everything starts Over There and makes its way here. When I got unrestricted access to a computer with the internet, during the half-ripe adolescent phase of my life, I went crazy. I learnt about English songs. No, did not just listen to them, but learnt about them. Rehearsed the lyrics, wrote them down in my notebook, a habit passed down from my mother, only with the language changed. I spent nights on forums, websites, and in comment sections, learning about the American way of living and fantasising about it. If I listened to these songs, I would be closer to them. I would strain my ears watching a movie on Romedy Now, and try to remember even one lyric so I could google it. Cher. Celine Dion (when I heard about Sunny Leone, I had already become a little hard of hearing, and was appalled for a hot second). Madonna. Wu Tang Clan. A Tribe Called Quest. Eminem. Snoop Dogg. Soulja Boy. Jay Z. So on and so forth.

It was also the perfect time for me to be a teenager. Lana Del Rey. Marina and The Diamonds. Skins UK. Supernatural. Arctic Monkeys. The Strokes. Grunge fashion — stockings, denim shorts, boots, flannel shirts. All of it was accessible to me via the screen, and nothing else. Our house was built upon prioritising survival and sustenance, not cultivating a sense of style and curating an aesthetic. I was an unpaid teenager with no autonomy, so all I could do was doodle in my notebook, put on my wired earphones, and cry to some of the music sometimes. The words got to you, and sometimes the sadness did. The Secret Life of An American Teenager was bland, but it was a respite from The Sad Life of An Indian Teenager. Everything was far off, shinier, and unachievable.

This formula stands true for everything. Computers came from there. Coffee as a necessity. Self Care. Self Love. Therapy Speak. Shein came from there, after being exported from Bangladesh. Then the website got banned in India. But the products kept coming. In landfills. When the influencers were done with their 30-second reels and sold you a new aesthetic to chase after, they sent the packages back, or threw it all out, in the guise of spring cleaning. But the US is not known for its all-encompassing, welcoming spirit. It likes to deport. It joined hands with private ports in India and sent its hand-me-downs back. India. Bangladesh. Pakistan. Aren’t we all the same? Who cares where it all ends up, as long as it is not on the land of the free?

Same for electronics. Candy Wrappers. Flamin’ Hot Cheetos reaches India either via NRI relatives or containers that end up in our landfills. If you are a little off beat, it might have reached you via Clairo.

Everything reaches here a little too late, a little too damaged. When the Whole World is done with Something, they send it back home, how our mothers would give our clothes to our cousins and neighbours back in the village. They would accept it gladly, clothes from the sheher, the city. It would be new to them, it would be shiny to them still, but for us, the charm had faded off, we were already distracted by something new. These Unfortunate counterparts of us in the village would also get distracted, from the beatings their mothers would rain on them, because gentle parenting has not even reached New DelhiMumbaiBangalore yet, at least not the single income families.

The disease that has ridden India’s current youth is the Need To Be Cool. We want to show the world we are not dirty, filthy, or behind them in any way. We listen to good songs, we have indie bands, we have our hip hop culture too, just like yours, complete with the pedophiles and shit beats and misogyny. We, too, discard our coolness, as soon as it becomes accessible across classes. A guy from Bandra, Gurgaon, Bangalore can wear baggy jeans with a colorful shirt, only until the outfit does not reach the bastis, the MC Stans, the “chhapris.”1 We don’t have to outsource trash collectors; we are the nation of Ambedkar, and everything he stood against, but that still prevails.

Lollapalooza came. So did Rolling Loud. They brought Coldplay, Linkin Park, Travis Scott, Playboi Carti. INDIA IS BEING RECOGNISED DUDE, BRO THEY NOW KNOW OUR VALUE. INDIA’S HIP HOP CULTURE IS THRIVING NOW. CRAZY! This was the narrative, mostly of men, my age, a little over and under. We still thrive on the external validation from the bade sahabs from pardes, the big guys from foreign lands.

Now roll all of this into a fat joint, the one you might smoke before going to JLN on 29th March. Think of it all. Whatever the West is done with and whatever it wants to hide under the pile of shiny dirt is sent to us, because we are a population that is easily amused and has very low self-esteem.

Everything is Kanye.

People talkin’ shit, but when the shit hit the fan

Everything I’m not made me everything I am…

My fifteen seconds up, but I got more to say

That’s enough, Mr. West, please, no more today

Author’s Note: I have listened to Kanye for over a decade now. I have had pretentious discussions about bipolarity in university hostels over substances. I have found friends due to queueing a song that established us to be on the same wavelength. I have cried to a lot of these lyrics. You will not believe how similar my arc is to his, and not in the mentally ill manner that turns you evil– simply the whole college dropout, late registration, and graduation way (if a real-life friend is reading this, perhaps this inside joke at my life’s expense will amuse you a bit). But I am not my decade younger self anymore. My conscience is not rotten yet. I don’t think I am being too woke when I refuse to attend his concert, even though somewhere in me, I do feel a little bit of that missing out feeling. Then I think of the ticket price, and how my entire friend group can probably pool in to send one of us there. I think of the kind of crowd that will be there. This is not the kind of “treat yourself” that would sit easy on my conscience, in a lot of obvious ways. But a lot of things are not obvious to people lately, and that is scary, to say the least.

I could not visit her, despite the fact that I was not showing. If I were showing, it would mean it was too late. It wasn’t. I was known to delay things to such an extent that even I would have to sit and hope for divine intervention. I had delayed living my entire life, and now was the time for the cruel joke’s punchline – the more I delay, the livelier It became.

What could I refer to It as, how do you define a sensation that grazes the definition of a tumor? I slept on my right side, so as to not stress my heart, and I would wake up in the middle of the night, with a lopsided feeling in my gut. I would wake up to the sound of the night, the refrigerator I could finally afford, the sound of somebody’s mobile from the construction site nearby, dogs crying – a sign that somebody was about to die. It made my heartbeat ring everywhere within me, which doubled the fear that It had grown beyond repair.

I tried writing letters to people I no longer talked to. Simply to say the scandalous thing I was nursing as my own Life Event Presently. I tried walking out at odd hours, hoping I would end up falling, or getting hit by a car – a convenient accident that would hit exactly where it would hurt. When your leg gets sawed off, do you feel the pain of the limb that no longer exists? When you hurt yourself and you feel that pain, are you strong, or are you weak?

I walked around the house, my feet heavier than usual. It reminded me of how I could hear him moving around the house, even when I was sitting on the bed, him out of sight. I could hear him approaching me, I would worry that the downstairs neighbour might be bothered. I was worried about everything, things that didn’t even concern me. I was always jittery and nervous and scared. I am sure he got tired of it all, at least on some days, but he never complained. He never said anything, even when I was at my worst. I could never explain myself to him fully; in some stubborn sense of romance, I wanted him to figure it all out.

That is what he left me to do. To figure It out. When I went out to the market, I still bought cigarettes — to appear Normal. I would stare at women, past the cusp of motherhood, past the cusp of the ability to bear something capable of hurting them in the future and instinctively put my hand on my stomach. I would stare at little kids and see my younger self staring back at me. Stupid girl, stupidest girl on the block. Who asked you to go looking, go living? Why are you so greedy? Why did you think you would be lucky and be loved in a way that mattered?

I would shake that feeling off, but it would serve as a reminder to call my mother. She was the juxtaposition of it all – beyond motherhood, but not beyond the ability to critique her life’s biggest project. I would tell her what I saw in the market, what I was planning on cooking, and she would maybe whisper a sentence or two, but I would understand nothing. I would proceed to apologise about not being able to visit her, but that I would, soon. Soon. Once I sorted my days. This activity occurred every day.

I would go back home and stare at my phone screen, gathering courage. I was lonesome, I was sad. I was everything. I was about to be. I was expecting. I was courageous. I was the most important woman in somebody’s life once.

Mother was not getting better. She didn’t even pick up the phone anymore.

I set a date to visit her, but I knew it wasn’t for that.

I let a week pass. Monsoon was in full swing now. I walked on the terrace in slippers, deliberately. I wanted to slip. Slip down the stairs, like I did one summer, and ended up with a gash on my thigh. I felt possessed, but it wasn’t parasitic. It was symbiotic to the point of sustenance. I felt hungrier. I felt lethargic. I had a personal reason, a secret, to delay living further. I would eat all the fruits I could find on the fruit carts in the market. I would sometimes not even wash them. The rain was doing its job. I would slice open anything that I could, so that I didn’t do it to myself. I was possessed but I was possessing It too, I was letting it in on all my innermost secrets, without even having to speak.

It was time to end it all. I knew I wasn’t going to find a hand to hold through it all. I knew I was too old to think of romance, of “through thick and thin,” of “in sickness and in health.”

It rained pretty heavily that night; I was set for an appointment the next day. It was a little daunting to figure it out, but I had emailed a friend, a doctor friend, who was patient, kind, and asked no questions. He set it up for me. I just had to reach there, which wouldn’t be tough. I always knew how to end up in places.

It took an hour, or maybe a month, but I woke up with nothing changed. I was recommended less strain on my body, some rest, and was asked a couple of questions skirting around the edge of knowing where the other party was, My Other At Every Party. I just stayed quiet. I was my mother’s daughter.

I went home, smoked a cigarette, packed a bag. I did not eat any of the fruits. They all seemed to be from a past life, seemed to be a part of the backdrop, a painting. They would have rotted by the time I returned.

I called my mother. She picked up. She told me she walked around on the terrace that day. She spent the previous night throwing up, nursing a migraine. Throughout the years, that was the sign that she was about to get better.

I went back to my bed to lay down on my stomach, just to feel a weight that had just started to feel familiar, at least in my heart.

The fruits rotted anyway. Everything felt disgusting for a few days. I consoled myself by stooping to desperation. At least I was loved enough once, even if I was alone in the consequences.

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I remember reading the book when I used to wear a school uniform – white and blue, checks and stripes. I remember reading it in stranded rooms. I remember it like another life of mine. The heat in the book is something I have lived through, in dusty colonies and enclaves of Delhi, in buildings that camber towards the illegal side, but just enough. If the rent is paid, and the noise is contained, no matter how vulgar or domestically abusive, it is all okay. I love the heat, I love that city’s face in its red, sunburnt bloom. I love the sweat, the sweltering, the blinding heat. There comes a moment when you are laying down your cards, and you realise you use the word love too freely, to the point of it being abusive to the Others, but it is the straightest way to let language convey the immensity of your notions and emotions. I love, therefore I allow myself to go on. If I could run back to Delhi right now, I would. Nothing is stopping me, except the Narrative that has been sold to me, for all I owe and am worth right now. Another summer of stepping into a warm, dusty room when you turn the fan on and the heat starts making its way out of the door – it feels like a moment of clarity akin to the one missing in one’s life.

There had never been an intention of becoming a grown up in relation to others. The whimsical, far off, yet plausible dream of Adult-ary during adolescence only involved me – a standalone figure in the vast world, the expanse of possibilities, a cave during a thunderstorm. Adolescence exists at the price of Uninnocence.

Yet here I am, a mimicry of an adult, still untainted in ways that change with each changing day. I am a little too gullible. When you are put in such a position, wherein there’s autonomy in your hands, it gets really threatening to your own concept of self-reliance. I know nobody else knows what’s good for me as much as they cannot live my experiences. So how am I expected to know about somebody else, even if it is my own kin, cut from the same fabric of upbringing?

I don’t want to feel this warped turmoil of Growing Pains inside of me, latched to my spine, making sleeping at night a conquest.

playlist for this book

click if rich. get a letter in return.

Chin Chin and Muck Muck had learnt how to make do, with luxuries punctuating their boredom. The weight of these luxuries were a burden they had decided to carry, for it was so easy to feel the illumination and glitter on their skin and on their tongues and inside their heads and then in each other’s eyes. They never deprived themselves of anything, for the World was already doing more than its share in that department. They had tried submitting the paperwork to reroute some of the deprivation to the Later Years, or at least space it out. Well, it was a trick you see. Chin Chin and Muck Muck knew they would be long gone before the Later Years caught up to them, so this was a loophole they were trying to jump through. But, you know how all the departments in the world work, so incompetent. They misread the form, even though both of them had such beautiful penmanship, and they never ran out of pens, or paper, or colours. They misread the “spacing out the deprivation” as “space between this invention.” This invention, of love, that had stuck to all of them, like greybackgolden bits of cat hair. The application got forwarded, and a stamp was put, in inky blue, just like their tongues in the middle of the night, when they would eat one of those horrid, salty candies to not smoke the last cigarette up.

So here they were. Chin and Muck and Muck and Chin. A bag was packed, jeans were untangled, and washed. No ticket was booked, so the journey felt like an open-ended punishment that looped back into a reward. The promise of return was unsaid; it clung to them, like all of the aforementioned things. Other things were said. Replace the blade after two shaves. You can keep the aftershave. You can take my perfume. Keep this shirt. Read this book. Come back, don’t go, stay, why, why not, how so. Chin Chin went ahead, still unable to tie his shoelaces. Muck Muck stayed back, still unable to make anything remotely edible after coming back from the Big Fight against The Agenda. The threads of their lives had gotten tangled into a ball, and it kept on unfurling as the train carried Chin Chin away, once more, but not for long. At each station, a tug was felt, with each sleepy turn on the mattress, the tug wrapped itself around them, a blanket, akin to the same sky they shared, no matter where they were. Each night, a reminder, the World was still working overtime, there was more of this depravity to come, but not for long.

सौ साल तक सनम की आँखों में डूब जाऊं

सौ साल और हो तो उसको गले लगाऊं

सौ साल फिर मिलन की

दुनिया नयी नयी दे

मेरे खुदा मुझे तू इक और ज़िन्दगी दे

For a hundred years, let me drown in my lover’s eyes

Then, if I am lucky, I get a hundred more for an embrace

Then ten decades of meeting

In worlds anew to us

The one I pray to, give me one more life of this all

- Dil Mein Sanam Ki Surat, from Phir Teri Kahani Yaad Aayi

pay under the table

sweetened tongues in summer, sweltering heat making the tshirts stick to our backs (circa waves - tshirt weather). my toenails painted, bright blooms in sand. ice cream sticks thrown after chewn to death. a haze took over all of us, we were all going crazy in our personal ways. but purple ran through it all — like box dye running down my scalp, like the fizz out of a cough syrup medley that we accidentally shook too hard, like the ink from a glitter pen that was stolen from a kid i tutored who had more than me at her smallyoung than i ever had. purple ran through the veins of an overdose, and then through the eyeballs when red just wasn’t worrisome enough. purple stained my eyelids too, whenever i’d have one of my cooler nightmares, the ones that would take place at nighttime, in terror that wanted to escape using my body as a medium.

more than a visual, it’s how the taste would make me surrender. it was how i imagined the velvety black shampoo in black bottles would taste like. the chilled lollies in plastic tubes, right after getting down the school bus. i tried the others — green, blue, pink, white (frank ocean - pink + white) and i could only taste betrayal. the cough syrups, in dark bottles, contained further in a brown paper bag. they would go down the throat as a prologue to all the liquids that were waiting for me in plastic cups, years later. and i would always sweeten the aftermath with something like a pill; a chewy skittle, a hard candy — my favourite. it was called heartbeat, and came in the shape of tiny hearts. i remember when i tasted my first, my father had been having a lucky few weeks, and they coincided with my birthday, so he got me the fancy confectionary to raise my swagstocks at school. i tasted all of the varieties of the artificial sugar rocks, to deduce which ones to give to my best friends; the memory betrays but the fuzziness of it all alludes to the fact that i must have had at least a couple best friends then, right? i wasn’t that bad as a person, i hope? surely, somebody would have picked me? the mango, the lychee, the strawberry, they all tasted fine, but the blackcurrant took me in. the heart sat on my tongue, purple and wounded, a preface to what would happen over and over, to me and to my others, in the coming years. it didn’t taste sickly sweet, like you’d expect candies to be. it was the first complex taste of my life, tucked away in a small plastic wrapper. there was something electric to it, a buzz that could only be credited to the colour. blackcurrant, an exotic word that had entered my vocabulary reading enid blyton, and left much to the imagination, was now packaged, somewhere in rajasthan, under technical assistance from thailand. such an important international relation, now mine to swallow, and throw the remains in the dustbin, probably made in china. the candy was everything — buzzing with a minty quality, like vicks made edible — and enjoyable. i saved five for myself, and gave everything else from the packet up in school to subject myself to 40 seconds of “happy birthday” by 27 unruly kids my age, some of whom would grow up but never grow out of the meanness that had become their own personal bruises that would keep on festering. they would always find something to feed it.

i was lucky in some ways. my brother preferred the lychee flavoured more, and my mother, the mango. my father did not enjoy anything hard entering his system, he’d rather send it all out shooting like bright red magic beams — like sparklers on diwali, like the sun setting right before the violet of the night settled all over us like a void, like a blanket.

so i had heartbeat blackcurrant all to myself, and then, so it goes, i forgot all about it. other things replaced it. mood indigo (nina simon - mood indigo), i moved through cities, replacing the sweetness of confectioneries with the loudness of concoctions that helped me be better at forgetting the concept of Best Friendship. i started liking green more. the heart within turned purple and harder, and my tongue lost color, for a bit. nothing tasted the way it was supposed to, so i went to bed hungry. nobody wanted to be my heartbeat blackcurrant love candy anymore, nobody wanted me all by myself. i would have made a big deal about it, but it didn’t hinder the usual routine, so i stayed put. until, i fell a couple times, the boots fraying. the knees bled, and then shut themselves in, a layer of blue and black all over. it reminded me of the party thrown to celebrate my baby brother. i hit my knees on the marble floors repeatedly, until i bled through my pink and yellow frock. there were still parties, but wasn’t much to celebrate. my only party trick left was leaving early, and that’s when i fell in a ditch made of purple leaves and red mud and it all tasted all too familiar. i laid there all night, not waiting for anybody. i saw the sky, and my heart splattered all over it. the birds made their way in and out of the stains, and i could feel each tug within. daybreak and i got up. i chucked my boots. i walked some more. it was the edge of summer. mulberry trees lined the concrete of a city i now begrudgingly call home. i squashed some, i picked the rest.

No woman, no cry

The Woman is enmeshed in a girlhood that is lost in a past that is still dissolving, leaving residual salt in the wounds. The Woman is tackling gender and sexuality, in a safe space (a room with friends at the Same Level of some definition; a house party; a bumble date with another woman), trying to discern how she can appease her inner child. But my inner child WANTS me to be reckless and attempt a career in film within my own life; I am but a heroine, I am but my own favorite, my number 1 fan, my only friend. The Woman takes pride in her solitude and how far she has come alone, conveniently forgetting everybody who walked with her, sat with her, or lent her a cigarette or a pad or a pen or bought her tea or remembered something about her. The Woman longs for community but she has a disillusioned idea of it – learnt from Cool Girl shows and films and books (yes, of course she reads, whenever she can. And substack and long form IG carousels count, right?). The Woman is open minded, and has had friends from all walks of life, but they can all afford dinner that has a bill that comes up in four digits. The Woman prides herself upon her Independence. New city, new apartment, money of her own. No need to marry a man. But the Woman falls in the trap anyways – she unknowingly charts a route for herself. Education, job, relationship. It is so important to have a man who loves you, who cares for you, who is a green flag, whose only personality is being a good boyfriend whom you can compare to the dog you had as a child, who makes money, who learns you inside out, who goes the extra length to LOVE you, who looks good on social media, who has no social media presence of his own, who has no women friends, who does not smoke or drink more than you can tolerate, who has no say in your outfits and your attitudes regarding certain things, who who WHO is this man? So the Woman puts herself in situations. Finds a man. Who is a boy. So that he can be a Boyfriend, duh. But he doesn’t want to. But the situation has sailed, it is a ship. The woman goes on IG, finds a post – THIS JUST IN! Having a boyfriend is embarrassing. She never wanted one anyway. She is a lovergirl, she will find what she deserves. Meanwhile, the school of thought propending friendship is romance dies due to a lack of emotional funding. All the financing has been switched to the Self Esteem Connected to Beauty Currency, and everybody is trading Online. The Woman texts other Women, and they all agree, nodding in agreement. We are so much better than this Situation, we are not going to let our heart get broken anymore, he was embarrassing me so much, I will never go back to him, does he know how many swipes I have on Hinge? The boy texts back, sweet enough. Aren’t we all put on this earth for something? Modern Woman.

https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/triumphnationalism/cman/text8/selfreliance.pdf

The internet is the new West. Everything that comes filtered down to us, trickling down the Meta butthole, is always, always, a western concept. The cyber colonialism of matcha, bindi, coconut oil, parathas as pancakes, spirituality (once again), and whatnot is just a new age upheaval that we are not able to see clearly, or we choose not to. Everybody is Chinese now, everybody has a spirit animal. In the times of the internet, gentrification happens via memes and hyper-specific trends that get washed ashore in the digital graveyard, where everything rots.

Isn’t it all that one thing we saw in passing on the internet? Everything is available right in front of us. Somebody decides to be vulnerable on the internet, and the conversation gets transferred into the binary of self-absorption. This reminds me of when something just a little similar to this happened to me, I think I am YOU, but in a better way. My suffering is better!

All pinterest images sitting in your boards and mine mean something entirely else than the meaning of the image. To you, it holds a value that is rendered useless by me. But it goes on, for everything.

The need to be a VSCO girl when I was a teenager has evolved into being The Cool Girl, The It Girl, The Girl, and whatever other flowery variation the Limitations of Our Existence are decorated in. Kylie Lip Kit, Rhode Lip Balm, Skims. Homegrown solutions are packaged in neat packaging so that we don’t overdo our identity and then, sold back to us. We pretend it is something new. The elite are nostalgic for a past which was never theirs, and the rose coloured glasses are free – the most damaging thing accessible to all of us. A beautiful life is in front of us, but it is not my definition of beautiful, and it is my life.

Read a paper two years ago, The Anxiety of Indianness. Meenakshi Mukherjee is talking specifically about literature; however, it applies to everything that one has the potential to create.

Everything is a pathology; everything is a trend. Everything is the Next Big Thing. A new artist blowing up on the internet, outside of your personal web is now a fly you want to trap, even if you are the arachnid equivalent of lactose intolerant when it comes to this specific species of flies. Not everybody has to listen to Arca, not everybody has to say Weezer is valid, not everybody is going to be the next Kareena Kapoor in her prime. Should this mean you should not expand your horizons, discover things? But are you coming to these conclusions of your opinions on your own, or are you only seeing what is being shown, the photo within the frame? The intention is lost; the site of history is lost. This is how we lose every day.

A genocide cannot be something to put on the back burner when it is happening in real time. You cannot save the tab for later, when you fight against AI, and decide to write and submit a paper about it and pat yourself on the back because you did such a good job against the Death of Originality. That isn’t the point in this handbook.

Remembering Gaza Photographer Majd Arandas, Killed by Israeli Airstrikes

Everybody is Mentally Sick and Thinks That Makes Them Hot

“If then, something like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder is a pathology, it is a pathology of late capitalism – a consequence of being wired into the entertainment-control circuits of hypermediated consumer culture.” – Mark Fisher

A quote which stands defeated now, but not dead

“Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.”

― Susan Sontag, On Photography

There is no point to this. I just don’t think we should create a “cult” for everything, because you don’t really let go of your beliefs, no matter how stupid or absurd, just because a new thing is out in front of you. I think we should just wring the neck of the chicken and uninstall instagram.

Tender is the night when you split it open right after midnight. Tender is the hand that has been warmed by a liquid yellowed until it looks like honey (some parts thumsup, some parts water, no water for me, neat for me, why are you not drinking?). Tender is the soul that is being tended to by all things wrong, in the pursuit of the Absence of Sadness, or to put enough dirt on the deal, a temporary cremation of our unhappiness. Tender is the Dream you carry within you, layered over and over with all these years that keep coming in between you and yourself. The drink is half done, and the night is still ripening, the scent of night jasmines carrying with them the weight of a life left behind, and a life yet to come. It gets too much, just for a split second; that’s when you empty the glass. Another one, another kind, another time.

Dream a Little Dream of Me

It comes and goes, the need to be cared for. It lingers when there’s hotness in the air, all windows closed, doors shut. I broil over in desire until the sensations find a place to reside in me. Just as they settle in, there’s an ache in the back of my head, and I turn around. All gets undone within me. I shut my eyes into the floral pattern of my pillow, and dream a meadow. I dream a meadow, and a lake, and a mountain, and the rain. I dream of the good things forcibly, to lull myself to sleep. We know what comes next.

Superstitious

Right foot out the door first. Do not walk under a ladder. Do not yawn without snapping your fingers in front of your mouth. Do not leave a sneeze without a godblessyou or a thakurjee. Do not forget to name the gods when you are in trouble. Do not eat anything that was left uncovered during the eclipse. Keep a glass of water near you when you sleep, your soul travels at night to quench its thirst. Tell my soul to fucking get over it, I am the one who feels the hunger and the thirst all day long, and it is not even My Hunger or My Thirst, in a complicated way, right? Do not let a black cat cross your path. Do not sweep away your house at night, you might wake up in the middle of nowhere.

Demons and omens are everywhere, and the more cracks you walk with on your body, the easier it is for them to enter and reside in you. You are but a house, awaiting possession. If your insides are cluttered with memory and grief, you will get haunted. If you walk around, rattling your empty self, you will get possessed. It will be either of the two, there is no third way, at least not one we are aware of.

Rituals

Smoke a cigarette first thing in the morning. Drink chai no matter how late you are getting. Stop by and chat with A- and R- everyday, no matter how late you have gotten. Make sure to take the specific route you always take. Drink coffee with another cigarette at 12, and then right after lunch. Buy the same kind of pens. Get angry that they don’t work good enough. Walk back after office, and stop for chai again. Stop at the same store to buy milk. Sweep the floor, use the same jasmine room freshener, it helps you sleep. Put away the jeans for tomorrow, take off all the rings and earrings. Smoke another one. Lie down until. Shampoo your hair on all days except Thursdays and Saturdays. Wait, that was for the superstition section. Can we edit this? No, it has already gone for print. Well, let’s just, let’s just pretend we don’t actually have a Fear Of Things, and this is a hyperspecific ritual. Oh the people with self diagnosed disorders and whatnot will love it. Is that our target audience? Do we have an audience? Are we meeting our targets this month? Wait, the year is about to end, what about the yearly report? Oh, you will be out of office next week onwards? I did not know that, I thought we could grab a drink after work one of these days. Well, maybe next time. What are you doing today, oh you are busy! Okay, okay. Get on with the report then. By the way, do you actually avoid shampooing on Thur- Sorry, I am getting a call.

Chin Chin meanwhile, hated school and preferred to avoid it as much as possible. He loved his brothers and he loved his mother and he loved his father, all in different manners. Chin Chin had so much love in him that it was easy for him to give away enough to fill the other person up but still have some left for the next. He was like the river that was his neighbour. He grew up with her, and he learnt from her. Whenever the world would close up on him, Chin Chin would go sit by the river. When he inevitably left the place, he would search for a body of water to hold him down everywhere.

Chin Chin loved people and so he thought people would love him too. They did, but in ways that did not make sense to him. Nobody cared for him in the way he cared for people. He felt like he lacked something fundamental; why was his vessel of love always empty? Did it have cracks? Had the smoking and the running around and the lying taken the form of a broken earthen pot as a punishment? He did not pay much heed to it; he went on, walked on. He listened to songs and walked along all paths he could put his feet on. He dreamt of avenging everybody. He felt a tinge of violence in him, but he knew how to control it. The river the river the river.

Muck Muck read of rivers and mountains and seas and people like Chin Chin. Muck Muck fell in love with sentences and images in her head that seemed to exist in a reality so different from hers. She knew the world was waiting for her, she just needed to reach the correct train station, the one where all the cool-looking people with just one bag would be standing, ripened with youth and life and love. She wanted LOVE so badly. She had a faint inkling that it existed exactly in the places her mother told her not to go, places where people like “them” didn’t venture.

Chin Chin and Muck Muck kept looking for love and grew up in the sometimes scratchy nest of their own personal worlds. They tried to copy the other birdies, the other rats, the other cats, the other dogs. But Imitating is not Persisting. One Life you have got. Imitation is not enduring the things that come your way, because you are trying to get out of a problem that happened to somebody else. Chin Chin and Muck Muck made their way out of their personal webs of families and lies. They carried whatever optimism and hope they had gathered from others they had seen on the Big Screen, and the Small Phone Screen, and the Small Letters Arranged Deliciously in Big and Small Books, and went ahead. Muck Muck went eastwards, Chin Chin went south. They met new people, new birdies, all looking for That One Thing That Changes Your Life. They met people who smoked cigarettes with them and poured drinks in plastic cups. They met people who walked the grounds with them, talking about things they had in common – films, songs, memories. Chin Chin still didn’t feel the vessel fill up, not even in the least bit. He felt a bit freer, a bit better, but he was still loveless, and the river was gone too. Muck Muck sat by the sea and climbed mountains and induced sleep for hours at a stretch because nobody she met understood what she wanted. Nobody read the same books, so nobody knew what she was asking for. Nobody knew what it meant, all of it.

One year, the seasons got confused and started occurring all at once. The Southwest monsoon got in a headlock with the Northeast monsoon, and Chin Chin and Muck Muck landed in the eye of the storm. They bumped into each other and they both had big bumps on their heads. They apologised to each other and sat for the storm to pass. Muck Muck talked about the mountains she had seen, and Chin Chin told her that she had not really seen a mountain until she went where he was from. Chin Chin said The City he had moved to was bad, and Muck Muck said that had been her home for a long time, and if he saw it with her, he would definitely imitate her opinion regarding the place. They promised to show each other the Other World, and sat together, waiting for the storm to pass. The monsoon winds knew their job was done. All ceased.

Some time down the lane, Muck Muck started feeling heavy in his heart on the regular. Chin Chin thought it was all the smoking. Turns out the earthen pot had been perfectly made all along – it had started to fill up. Chin Chin turned into an angry woman who hated a lot of things, and was indifferent to the rest, so she knew what she felt for Muck Muck was something else. It was the second electrocution of her life, and it brought back something that was lost years ago.

Devendra Banhart told Pitchfork Media about this song: “All the records I’ve made have been peppered with a couple little insouciant, joking tunes that are for fun. Like I’m trying to write weird bubble-gum pop. But this record I tried to get all of that out with the one song, ‘Chin Chin & Muck Muck’, which I sing from the point of view of an old woman because that seems to be who I really am. I go to bed at 8:30, I drink warm milk, I watch my shows. I like it.”

You can grow up but never grow out of the shadow that your parents cast on you. The entire span of early adulthood is seemingly spent on trying to figure out how far away from your parents you can plant your feet. It doesn’t help that the concept of home and parents intertwine, making it tough. One bad drunken decision, and you are tempted to call mom back home, wanting to ask her if it is okay to sleep in her bed that night. The bed is miles away, there are no trains available, and you have things and people to get back to. The phone call doesn’t exist. She sleeps by ten anyway.

Adult children take pride in being aware of the fact that they learnt from their parents’ mistakes. The person who learnt was a child, still unaware of the world and the cost of freedom. The mistakes are the tax attached to the experience of living. So adult children make mistakes that are a variation of what they have witnessed as collateral damage, and they chide themselves in private – dignity is learnt and wished of throughout life, and it is the smallest pleasure one can give oneself.

The years pass, but the months and dates remain the same. You might not be in 2012, but it will be November yet again. This is something my father taught me, November of 2012.

Joan Didion talks about her daughter extensively in Notes To John. The book felt like a guilt trip; I should not be reading this. She is dead. This was her life. How much sympathy is going to undo the effect. Too late.

There was a phrase in it that stayed with me. “An extremely delicate negotiation.” That is all it is. Life. Adulthood. Being somebody’s child while trying to be somebody else’s lover. Being the person you always wanted to be, but that idea keeps changing. It is not 2012 anymore. But the year is ending. Time for change.

In The Dream House

The dreams have taken up on their sentience too willfully now. The dreams have realised they resemble a house more than a thought, and I have no choice but to enter that space each night.

I have longer, black hair, and I look a little different. I look beautiful. I am back at my school, from years ago, an elevator where my last classroom used to be. My best friend from a past life is there. We enter the elevator, and it is free fall. I suffered a miscarriage. I tell nobody. I sit on the school bus, I am older now. The bus takes me somewhere. It is cold. My parents are in every dream I see. They seem to uncover new things about me. Things that are inherently a part of me, but still new to them. The dream door opens, something guides me outside. Tells me to come again. I have no choice.

Love

While I wait for the vegetables to simmer, I do the dishes. While the milk boils, I put sugar and coffee in the cup. While I wait for the auto, I light a cigarette. Everything is a response to the Other, an act of waiting. And all of it is a show put on to fill the minutes while love is in the back. I will be patient. I will wait. I take things. I sleep. I enter the dreams and forget about the wait. But fortunately, time keeps on passing in the real world. I wake up on my bed; the light has shifted more than I have in the past fifteen hours. Love is closer now; I can feel it. I tell myself these things, not to listen to the other possibility.

Pretending that we’ll meet

Each time I turn a corner, I walk a little faster

Pretending life is sweet

‘Cause love’s around the corner, I walk a little faster (Fiona Apple)

Everybody from everywhere is going home for the festival season. The current sensation in my body is akin to what I would feel when everybody in school would hang out with each other, minus me, minus the school boundary. The past week was full of people, which meant more angles of attack on my weakened sustenance. I felt left out in places, in instances that don’t add up to anything later on but haunt me until my brain gets tired of thinking about them.

Presently, I am not tired of it all. I spend my days, all alone, rearranging situations and emotions until the pointedness adjusts, and the pain blunts.

I spent today drinking by myself, scrolling through Instagram, looking at other substance-pilled people, and memes that all mean the same thing. Everything means the same thing. There is somebody at the other end, conveying only one ardent desire – LOOK AT ME LOOK AT ME LOOK AT ME LOOK AT ME CAN YOU SEE WHAT I AM MADE UP OF IS IT GOOD IS IT WORTHY?

I spent the last couple of hours lying down in various positions, adjusting around my kittens, thinking. I love thinking so much.

I thought of spirals, how nothing is ever a full circle, but a bit distended from the original path. Nothing ever returns. I listened to songs that meant so much when I was somebody else. I listened to RibsbyLorde and SuperRichKidsbyFrankOcean. I am finally a teenager alone in her bedroom, a decade too late. Parents ain’t around (enough/anymore). It drives me crazy, getting old.

I thought of Fiona Apple and almost cried, the beer quick to act. I thought of all these sounds crafted in specific orders and how they all have left spaces within themselves for us to fit our small lives in them. I thought of how many songs I had listened, and how many I had long forgotten, and how they would find me when the time was right. I like leaving things at that, even though it has never worked in my favour. Nothing has found me as of yet. I am still lost.

I thought of blue and expanse; sometimes they are the same thing. Wherever you come from, wherever you will end up, blue will never leave you. Some days it feels like the entire world is bruised to keep me company.

A few days ago, coming back from work, I looked at the inky blue sky melting into the red and yellow of traffic, the scene so electric that it almost made me forgive the arduous commute back home. I am trying not to be angry at people, so I get angry at things and concepts. I am currently angry at my broken chopping board, the broken cooker handle, and the constant smoke in the air. I am angry at the concept of festivals and how it is tied so intricately to the idea of homecoming. Or going back, mostly. I listen to Bruce Springsteen to apply a salve on this specific pain.

Got a wife and kids in Baltimore, Jack

I went out for a ride and I never went back

Like a river that don’t know where it’s flowin’

I took a wrong turn and I just kept goin’

Everybody’s got a hungry heart

Everybody’s got a hungry heart

Lay down your money and you play your part

Everybody’s got a hungry heart

I am angry at the long commute; I am angry at the big, sweet box that I got handed at the office. I am angry at the unpredictable weather and my inability to read, and the heaviness I am feeling right now. I am angry at the fact that everybody is going home, and I am yet again left alone. I thought we were in this together. We are not. Turns out even the closest of your kin has another secret kin they have to get back to, that they like more than you. All of this is childish, but I have been a dissatisfied little girl for the longest time possible, albeit mostly in private. I spend whatever time I have these days training myself to keep it all within. I am trying not to be angry at people. Nothing is ever a person’s fault; it is definitely something in the air, trust me. We are all rid of sin, you are free now, or so I proclaim, and who am I to do so is something that will be decided under your jurisdiction. Everything here is two-way; otherwise, I would be standing at the corner of your street with leaflets of my sermons every Sunday.

The fact of the matter is, the heart hurts no matter what way you position yourself in this world. It was never about avoiding the pain, anyway.

Anybody born in May is a comrade of mine. I was born in May, my brother at the cusp of autumnwinter in India. 30th October. I scoured through a blue coloured baby book for a name, and I wished I was going to have a baby sister because the name Natasha caught my fancy. Born on Christmas Day. It became lodged in my memory. Once in the school bus, I mustered up enough courage to go to the senior who had that name and tell her what it meant. She replied, humoured and amused, you are only in second grade, why do you know this? I think the apt line of questioning would have been how did I know that, so that I could actually give an answer. Baby brother incoming. Baby names book given by doctor. The only piece of literature available at hand. Scouring through it all. Picked out fancy names for fun. I like your name. I like you. You are so tall, and your skin is so pretty, and you have something called a boyfriend, and your skirt looks better than mine. I love you Natasha, my Christmas miracle. But you don’t know the right questions to ask, so I will let you go. Bye Natasha. Bye forever.

She graduated the next year, and I never saw her again, until I stalked her on Instagram a while ago. Turns out, she is just an ordinary woman, just like me. The Christmas lights can’t stay up forever.

I grew on.

The last three years have been spent dreaming. Dreaming in rooms that don’t belong to me, dreaming in between places, during work hours, while bunking classes simply because. The dreams are all linear in spirit – I must get out, I must give myself to something bigger than me.

Conversations with friends have been about leaving this goddamned place (this place being the one we left the previous goddamned place for) and going somewhere we feel a sense of belonging. I be longing all the time, no matter the time or place. But that’s not the point.

A common theme of our discussions is about going to a country which is not the USA, not the UK, or wherever we are usually sold the Dream, as Indians. We want to go to Vietnam. A road trip in Sri Lanka. Laos. China.

Latin America – the landscape of Romance Languages

Give me a laptop, and the email id of my love, and I will speak romance all night. Even better, get some substances in me and leave me be with hands I am familiar with, and you will have a new creole in the news the next day. Any language is a contact language if you know the vocabulary of love.

It is all too easy for me, this loving business. I love the best when I am left alone, I invent things for pleasure, simply fueled by the love I carry.

I remember I picked up Camus simply because Che liked it. Che, my friend, the cousin who comes over during summer vacations. He was a lean boy, always reading, always quiet, until it was time to play a game that was bound to get violent. I remember him stealing our uncle’s motorbike in the afternoons, the loudness of it a risk he was willing to take. It was this image that made me braver each passing summer. I got brave about touch, about sound, about being loud.

He gave me books to read, but he never really took my recommendations. I wish he had read more women, maybe he would have been gentler. Maybe he would have not had to look at me as one of the guys to treat me with respect. I am tired of being one of the boys, I want to be considered a woman of intellect. I am slowly paving my way to that, and if it means I end up being angrier than usual, touchier than the rest, and more uptight, so be it. Not everybody knows how to ride a motorcycle.

The last three years were also spent readingrereading Jack Kerouac. The more convenient way of escaping. Me, on an uncomfortable bed, years apart from Che, reading a book, and feeling a sense of unrest. I think he would have laughed, in a mocking way, of course, at the general abandonment of Jack, so freed from everything, despite suffering the same. So American. I did get to drink on hills and boulders, and meditate in ways so personal to myself, so I think I am done with that aspect of the Beat Generation. I am simply beat now. But not in the sense that I give up. I am beat with the weariness that is attached to simple living in today’s times. Work, work, work. Everything is about work. Don’t try to get any personal gain, it is all about how you can move the company forward.

Che, look what they are making me do. They want me to become a cog in the machine. I am allowed movement, but only in the direction they are moving in. I simply cannot comply with this, right? Movement is necessary, but people often forget the second part of that sentence. Movement is necessary as long as you are guiding your feet. Movement is necessary until you reach a place where you are needed. Stop and work, stop and talk. Find out. The more you find out, the worse it is going to get. It always gets worse, before it gets something else.

For now, I will walk to a rock, lean on it and drink a little. I will stay for the night, a little while, in the bigger scheme of things. Maybe in a couple years, I won’t have time to look up. Before riding a motorcycle, I need to learn the bicycle. I will take it to smaller revolutions, and when it breaks apart, I will continue walking nonetheless.

As Bergman said to me today,

Recently booked a late night show for Neeraj Ghaywan’s Homebound. I had heard enough, seen enough about it to know that I would like it. Masaan, and Juice, and Geeli Puchchi – all the films that you turn to when you want to see something Good & Real are his creations, so I was not in for a bad surprise.

Homebound is based on an essay featured in The New York Times by Kashmiri journalist Basharat Peer. It recounts the story of “two young migrant workers in Surat, who were caught in the COVID-19 lockdown in March 2020.” I had somehow ended up reading that article when I was reading anything and everything I could find, perhaps a recommendation by somebody on the internet, or it had landed in my inbox.

I am considering backspacing everything I have written, this sounds too article-y, too MA papery. Let’s drop it, start afresh.

I watched the film in Hyderabad, where Ghaywan was born. I am somebody who suffers from “interconnectivity” – I want everything to connect to each other, justify within itself, otherwise I won’t be able to carry on living. Everything means something, otherwise why is it there?

Let me review the film before I move ahead. Fantastic. Go and watch it. Give money to these movies. Give it praise and accolades. Give such stories the courage to come out in the open, especially in the times that we are living in.

Okay, moving on.

The theatre was cold, but I was appropriately dressed. My phone was at 31 percent, and I had fed myself so that I would be able to sit through it all. The movie started at 10:55 pm, or at least the ads did. I watched trailers for all films that in the moment felt watch-worthy, even if it was ironically. An annoying couple sat next to me, who started eating even before the movie started. They were definitely north Indian, which gave me even more courage to say something to them. I ended up shushing them, telling them to shut (the fuck) up. I hope they suffer everyday bit by bit, in ways that throw them off their routine. I do not like people who talk during the movies. I am not going to the movies to make out, to flirt, to talk, to eat. I am going there to have an intimate moment with pictures on the screen, I am there to listen to things on a volume that is otherwise unattainable unless you are in a baraat. So, yes, thank you, I would like a ticket for one, and one only. And if everybody else can clear out as well, it would be ideal.

The plot is not the point; it is a fact, it is history. The actual point of Homebound is the characters. Jahnvi Kapoor did a good job. I really hope she believes in whatever she portrayed; if nothing, it will give her cushy life some flavour. I am glad nobody darkened her skin.

When she mentions that she saw her father fail, so she was perhaps asking Chandan to compensate, it made me feel an ache in my heart. I wanted to run out immediately and call the proof of love in my life and apologise for being hard on him. When she talks about how education is the only way for emancipation, I felt reassured about PhD in the future. I felt reassured, the only thing I could do, being from the general category. Picture an old lady nodding along to Chief Keef, it is not for her, but it is music to somebody, and Chief Keef rocks. The worst parallel award goes to me right now.

The scenes are beautiful. There’s light, and it diminishes like an eclipse taking over Chandan and Shoaib, over and over, in various periods of their lives. When they are on the top of the truck, running from the police in the streets, walking across a drought ridden field somewhere in North India. The light comes and goes. It envelops Chandan’s mother in the last few minutes, but her entire being is outlined and coloured with darkness. That’s what happens when your ghar ka chirag (the light of your life) goes out.

The tragedy keeps on building upon itself. Chandan is one of the best characters ever. He is stuck in a place that has no way out, he says it so himself. You look at him and you see a boy, lost. Why does this boy not have the same privilege as the other boys he plays cricket with? He is just a boy who is in love with his friend, another boy. Why are these two boys always getting the shorter end of the stick? You think the same questions that have been echoed everywhere, especially in academic spaces, in air conditioned halls, in papers that mean nothing once you have presented it, in rallies and protest sites that have to keep happening because if you stop pushing or lose momentum you are done for. Sitting in the audience, as somebody who does not have a life like the Chandans or Shoaibs, but who has a lot of them in the most personal version of my life, I could do nothing but send out a prayer to everything out there.

The friendship between Chandan and Shoaib reminded me of these two people I know, and I couldn’t help but feel a bit like an outsider, staring at something so entirely unattached to myself, and I felt sad and pathetic about the fact that I do not have anybody like that in my own life. But that happens, anything and everything serves as a reminder about my halfness in this world – the certain kind of halfness that is only fulfilled by a friend who will be the Mikey to your Nicky, Gazzara to your Cassavetes (yes, of course, I am Cassavetes, who else?), and now, Chandan to your Shoaib.

Throughout the movie, I cried a lot of times. I cried in the beginning because I was sitting with so many people and watching something together. Peoplehood, even if half of these people are a nuisance. Go to the theatres and watch Homebound, and people-watch. See the kind of people who have come to watch, who have the privilege of affording a ticket, and maybe the popcorn. Before you feel like the audience is misplaced, think about how these people made a choice to come and watch this – and they will take home something from it. Maybe it will not change them entirely, maybe they won’t be at the frontlines of resistance tomorrow morning, maybe they will start being kinder to the people around them, maybe nothing will change. That is what this world is about – it’s not the beauty of the world; it is a mere fact.

Coming back to the crying. I cried for my father, whom I have been missing intensely lately, and for the first time, I feel like going home all the time. I don’t know why that is. Probably because he lost his own father recently, and I am just scared for him, he is just an orphan out in the world, and he is so old, but he is NOT fragile, but he is my father and – yeah, well. I cried for Chandan’s sister, and I cried for Chandan&Sudha, I cried for Chandan&Shoaib, I cried for Shoaib. I cried in a way that is helpless, but I know I am better than this. I can’t sit and weep and call it a day. I have a lot a lot a lot to do.

There is Babasaheb in the movie; Chandan has a photo of him in his wallet. It reminded me of the stencil of Che in my favourite canteen in university, where I would sit and read quietly for hours. It reminds me of the Independence, Democracy, Socialism (zindabad) flag in my room. It reminds me of the hammer&sickle printout I took from my friend Hari’s wall when he vacated the hostel. There is a lot to do sathiyon.

I am perhaps getting carried away in the disillusioned city girl MA degree manner. I am getting too emotional about this. Let’s be practical now. I am quick to cry lately, forgive me.

The bottom line is, the movie is excellent. I think this Oscar entry makes up for Laapata Ladies. Neeraj Ghaywan, you are wonderful. Please go watch it. Watch it and make your friends watch it and watch out for everything from now on.

Mitski, take the lead.

But I’m working for the knife

I used to think I would tell stories

But nobody cared for the stories I had about

No good guys.