While that might seem like the end to my connection with yarn, it wasn’t. Things that are meant for you have subtle ways of coming back in ways beyond your control. Wool is a symbol of patience and love, but not as much as it is a symbol of survival for my family. Before disintegrating into nuclear families in my parents’ generation, our family was a closely knitted family of thirty-one. With three working members. The stash of cash was short, but that never stopped the women of my family from having a keen sense of fashion. Ready made skirts and tops were expensive, but wool was comparatively cheaper; so with skeins of yarn and rods of wood or metal, my aunts made clothes. From sweaters for the men, to skirts for the girls, everything in our house was handmade from scratch. It shielded everyone from Uttar Pradesh’s bone chilling winters and also from the judging eyes of more ‘well off’ families in the area, who gaped at the colourful and beautifully crafted clothes my aunts made. 

By the time yarn reached my generation, it had stopped being survival. Letting go of the first hand that helps you get up as soon as your feet land on firm ground is human instinct. With better job opportunities and steady wealth, there was a decline in patience and the need to knit or crochet. I don’t blame anybody, that would be hypocritical. Nevertheless, as I said earlier, things of generational worth are old habits that die hard. With fewer gender labels attached to domestic crafts, crochet stopped being a women’s only job and my brother now holds the title of Best Family Crocheter, a made up title but honourable. Crochet books handed down from sister to another have been replaced by Youtube tutorials that my brother sends me. It has been ten years since I first picked up a knitting rod and I’m still terrible at it. I prefer manipulating my yarn for use with crochet hooks.  Sweaters and skirts are too hefty for fast paced lifestyles so I stick to bag charms and bouquets. Eighteen years of life has taught me to hold on fast to things that connect you to people you love, things that connect you to people decades back. So I sit in my green hand-me-down sweater and pull the yarn on my hook the same way my ancestors did, generations ago. 

When someone just starts doing something, something outside their comfort zone or usual choice of art expression, they are met with a lot of criticism. Most of it begins and ends in the mind itself. Sometimes they chase this unrealistic version of their art that can not be achieved in an instant. Sometimes they resort to Social Media for acknowledgement, constructive criticism, and well, clout. Most times, this acts as a kick to the system that helps it move. Other times, it isn’t. The fact of the matter is, external factors like likes, comments, etc can only take you so far. The actual passion towards being better comes from the discontent you feel when you make something that isn’t at par with your expectations. Then, you do more; and you do better. 

I’ve realised through some of my own writing that most of my best works have come from a place of stagnation. To use the cliché lotus metaphor, something good only blooms from my pen once it has been in mud. When I am content and proud of my writing, I usually stop creating more, afraid I won’t be able to meet the expectations I’ve created for myself in my head. That brings us to the you-know-what. You know, a writer’s block. Not a fan of it. Anyway, that’s my personal opinion through personal experience, varies from artist to artist. 

I’ve realised that the more discontent (I’m too lazy to Google a synonym and too in a you-know-what to conjure one) you feel towards your writing, the more passion you feel towards the art of creating. David Ogilvy calls this phenomenon, Divine Discontent, and rightfully so. It is divine, for it is creating, innovating and bettering. Discontent is the mother of creation, I’d say, not that I don’t agree with Plato and the importance of necessity. But what good is a necessity if it doesn’t come from a place of wanting change, in this day and age? Everything is correlated with humankind’s course of life, change. Change isn’t always good, I know, but artistic change is very nice. Broadening your spectrum, giving a kick start to the scooter that yearns to travel and most importantly, pushing that finishing line of creativity is the best form of self improvement. 

Now truth be told, my mother isn’t sexist. Her hatred towards me lies in the fact that I’m her daughter and not that I'm a daughter. My mother’s first memory of me was bloody, I was a shrieking raspberry with no teeth. The doctor tapped her cheek to tell her she had a baby girl. I assume she sighed before giving in to the effects of the drug. We go over the story of my birth in great details every few months. The agonising labour, the faces of our family before my mother’s vision went out like a light bulb in a summer in suburban India. She says she has patches of memory from the day. She tells me about the horror, the fear, the anticipated and disappointment of orthodox relatives over the birth of an eldest girl child. Not once does she mention joy. I assume there was none.

Aside from my very rainy birth, I don’t think I was of much remembrance to my mother until I started talking. Sometimes my mother tells me about how lonely it was before, when I did not speak, because she had no one to talk to. Now we go days without speaking in the same house. I guess her loneliness is better than the bitter truth in my words. Some other times she talks about the quiet guilt of giving birth to an exact replica, the same stubbornness and arrogance. Look where it got me, she says. It’s true, I don’t want to end up like her. No offence, mumma. 

I don’t think she wants me to end up like her either, you know. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. She is the daughter her mother never wanted. Third daughters in a middle class society were nothing short of a curse, back then. Honestly she isn’t that ancient. Her mother hated her because she was sexist. I think hatred with a noble cause is love. I love you too, mumma. I’m sure an immature instagram poet who spent their teenage years scrolling through tumblr will find a poem in that. 

As a woman who experienced what one might call a ‘sudden glow up’ after not being conventionally pretty until fifteen or sixteen, I’ve fallen victim to feeling good about having pretty privilege. I’ve joked about winking at a guy to make him pay for my drink, not thinking much of it. That is, until I spoke to a friend who has never experienced this. It baffled me. It’s funny how you sometimes need to step into someone else’s shoes to come back to your senses. Empathy truly feels like a dead art.

I realized how conventionally pretty women are often sheep led to slaughter in a butcher house owned by misogynistic men. Pretty privilege is yet another way to draw lines between women. It differentiates us using the same tired criteria of colour, stature, facial features, overall appearance. Pretty privilege doesn’t make me feel pretty; it makes me feel sick. It makes me wonder whether I look like someone who believes women deserve different treatment simply for looking different.

The ideal guy would send a drink to both the conventionally pretty friend and the one who isn’t. You know how some partners bring a small bouquet for their lover’s friend, too? Exactly. If you’re genuinely interested, a coffee, a muffin, or a drink for someone’s friend is a thoughtful gesture. And that brings us back to the point, pretty privilege is not a sweet thought.

Beauty bias is a far more accurate term than pretty privilege, and it’s something that has existed for generations. As a society, we have boiled a woman’s social worth down to how she looks. That is objectification. That is differentiation. That is the exploitation of the ‘girl code.’ Nothing about pretty privilege is pretty, it’s just petty.

My mother and I share this familiar longing for things we can't quite own. Things that slip between the cracks of our fingers like sand and air. Everything we love both, somehow always ends with despair. She never complains and I complain enough for the both of us. She prays I can differentiate between love and lust. She oils my hair from roots to its split ends and I ask her if this agony of yearning ever ends. The fire in her eyes and the ice in her heart tells me it does not but words spoken have an upper hand over words merely thought. Comfortable silence is a paradox between the both is us. Silence after a question thrown in the air is thick enough to cut into pieces with a knife, in servable size.I'll find my words and pens, half written sonnets and love songs, too. For when they shed off this mask of pretentious maturity and fake hopes, blended with my mother's weight of love that never suffices, they find me sobbing in my bed, in my room, with all my vices. I say all these conversations with my mother make me a mouthpiece for emotions of a human but I am not a poet, I'm just a woman. Daughter of another woman.

You are not original, you’re just a collection of things you thought were cool.

It has taken me eighteen years to come to terms with that fact that I am not original. Everything about me is borrowed. If somebody were to ask the question, “Who are you?”, at the end of the day, I would say I’m a mosaic of everything I’ve ever liked or disliked. My cupboard of topics to discuss are an amalgamation of every weirdly cool subject I’ve heard someone else talk about. All of the books I loved were a recommendation from a friend or stranger on the internet. I’ve spent hours curating the perfect music playlist after seeing someone add the wrong songs to the wrong playlists. I’ve broken pieces from people that I thought were best and I’ve fixed them onto me. The only trick is I know exactly what jigsaw piece I want next. Nothing is erratic or sporadic. I’ve spent eighteen years curating this personality and interests. But alas, nothing that I so easily get possessive towards is mine, only a copy.

I wonder if there are people out there in the world who believe they’re the ones who start something. Every art piece, every opinion, every poem, every creation is a product of a series of happenings that happened due to the interference of other people. If someone was isolated from the world at birth and only saw white walls, I doubt they would want to colour their skies. Every single thing on the planet is a recreation. The literary artworks use the same set of alphabets and metaphors, just rearranged by the poets or writers to their liking. The rise in social media and access to other people’s ideologies has only made the mess of creating messier. We are now subject to the reviews and opinions from a larger mass. This allows us to find something that we think is birthed from our own imagination but it has been thought of before. It has been executed before. Now, I’m not talking about science experiments that been done after years of research. Or the papers published every year with new found studies. I’m talking human behaviour and interest; personalities and opinions. Everything that we think belongs to our own individuality is a result of not being individual, but a part of something big that gives us the space to reconstruct.

“Weaponise the false incompetence, it's dominance under a guise.”

Labour, Paris Paloma

Be feral. You don’t have to fit in a vessel to move. You can be as free as the air, as moving, as calm, as rapid, as unpredictable. Just because you are gifted to create, doesn’t mean you’re not capable to destroy. Mother nature, she engulfs us whole, sinners and saints, the sailors and their sails. Glass boxes can’t hold you; customs and norms can’t contain you and the fickle tongue that exclaims, ‘a woman is not all that’ can’t cage you. You can soar through the sky like a phoenix and you can fall to the ground like ash. You’re a movement, you are what they say you can never be. You are all that. You are all the women that rise with you. Burnt at stakes or buried alive, in palaces, in huts, golden cages or dirt, their indifferences aren’t different. It’s what makes the dead more alive and the alive more dead. You are not yet subject to the same fate but you might be next. Live in the glory of not knowing if you’ll end up like your sisters.

It’s okay, you can go to the battlefield and win if you know you’ve got nothing to lose. Because we’ve lost. So much. So often. So long ago. The grandeur, it rests on our weary bones and weeps. Women are enigmatic but fancy words are reserved for big old men with their fat bellies so we’re just mad. Caged in golden, painted in pink because our red scares them. Toned down, quietened, hushed, locked. Plucked before we reach our potential because they need to warm their seats with our spilled blood. The children, the women, the ghosts of us that will never return. Go feral. You have to go anyway.

The internet reduces women as muses and inspiration of works highly speculated to be their own creation. Truth be told, history has seen more cases of thievery in art and science than toes of all renowned artists and scientists combined. Drawing inspiration from the personality of a wife or lover is poetic. Stealing works of a wife or lover and claiming them as their own is diabolical. All art is a recreation of art provided the basic ideology is repeated. Phrases, sentences, plots and storylines cannot be ‘borrowed’, they can only be stolen. It’s time we use the correct terminology and put a halt to the idolisation of authors that have built their reign on plagiarism.

“Plagiarism begins at home.” America’s first flapper had fire on her tongue, from all the fury she had been stomaching inside of her when she spoke these words. A missing diary, edited letters published in his name and a book written on the drafts of her own were Scott Fitzgerald’s wedding gifts to Zelda. Flippant remarks on the plagiarising of her work ultimately converted to trips in and out of the psychiatric ward, later in her life.

I hope she’s beautiful and silly, a beautiful little fool

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s words from The Great Gatsby may be compared to the society’s expectations of women. A beautiful little fool that sits on countertops to pose for a photograph; or to be painted. To have sonnets written about and to be the reason a man returns home from war. Except, the words aren’t Scott’s, they’re Zelda Fitzgerald’s.

Patriarchy and piracy are thick as thieves. Whilst men’s contribution to the world are undeniably large, they often come at the cost of erasure of women’s. One such example is the book, Tender is the Night, which was built on the ashes of Zelda’s very own, Save me a Waltz. Fitzgerald compelled his wife to publish what is but a very edited version of her book, so that he could save the best parts of her work for his own. Hypocrisy reached its peak when he accused her of being a ‘third grade writer’ and ‘plagiarising’ his work.

Zelda was subject to severe trauma for not abiding by Scott’s words. Her decisions of a divorce were shouted down by locking her up in the house until she complied to taking her words back. What started with beautifully thrown parties that glimmered with champagne and chandeliers, ended with a schizophrenia diagnosis and a loss of authority over her creativity, ideas and words.

When I was young, my mother talked of this baba that would take me away, break my bones and keep me in his bag. I’m fortunate enough to laugh about it, as if it were a joke. For some, it is the reality that crashes on them. Like thunder. It is the lightening that strikes the tree of hope and burns it into ashes. The ash is then smeared on their face as a reminder of their place. On the ground. The government doesn’t have a data on the number of children that lose their childhoods between platforms. A quick google search tells you it ranges between thousands to lakhs. They’re not significant enough to count. They’re not significant enough to remember or keep a track of. Their transience isn’t a personality trait, it is a survival skill. Something about being constantly on their feet must be liberating. Maybe the shackles of fate feel less heavy when you’re on the run.

I was unimpressed by the dirt that touched my brand new shoes on the train station. I like trains, they’re fleeting. There, I met a boy with star like eyes that no longer glowed under the realisation that his life starts and ends between those metal railway lines. Bare feet, bare head, barren. He didn’t have to worry about the dirt spoiling his shoes. The freedom of not caring because of the lack of things to care about is something you and I cannot feel. He didn’t care about an education, he didn’t agree to coming home with me. He wanted money. To give to his employer, I suppose. The baba that broke his dreams and kept him in his bag. His narrative, his world. Snapped his independence into two and left him with no identity. He spoke no words, he asked no questions. He was subject to only answering them, so that’s what he did. When I asked him what his name was, he said, ‘Badal.’ Apt. I never saw him again.

[ translation | badal : cloud ]

Being at the sidelines of destruction

Fancy machines that I prefer as toys are demolishing the building next to ours and the foundation of my house trembles. In the morning, it felt like a winter chill. Then, like the shaking of a salt box; everything falls into place, all white and perfect. A little shiver, perhaps comparable to the quiver of a lip before sobs break through. The building, which served as a church for half a decade, has lost purpose. Religion has little to do with longevity of a place when it can be bought by cash. The bricks were a dull crimson, with cracks filled with algae – a gift of the humid weather. Vines grew past the walls that held solemn hymns and vows and funeral prayers. I’ve never been inside it and now, I never will be.

The thuds and sounds of breaking echo in the empty halls of my house and ring in the ears of my mother like war sirens. She complains of a migraine and it is Mother’s Day next Sunday and I wonder if the change in my pockets could buy her some peace. The shaking billows in full swing by afternoon and the sun isn’t bestowing mercy on the workers. They’re drained and tired. But no amount of breaking of sweat breaks the brittle heart of the destruction bringers. By the time the pillars are what remain of the building, it feels like our house has been hit by a natural disaster at least a few hundred times.

My mother, anxious as ever, compels us to sit on the ground floor. She thinks our house might also fall. That’s the thing about watching destruction from the bylines. The sidelines. The not-so-very prone to a tsunami’s high tides. You’re always in a state of terror. The building may never break and hell might never lash upon us but it also might. When fear of mishappenings is instilled in the hearts of people, the ground beneath their feet shakes but the earth seldom quakes. The mind does. The thing about watching a war break loose in front of your eyes is not knowing when you can shift from a casual watcher to a causality of war.