Questions

Days pass by like clouds in a summer sky

I look at the sun through the crack in my fingers

With unmoving clarity, it beams back at me

Day after day after day.

When a life’s journey is coming to an end,

One has to wonder, if the sun is just mocking us

Immortal, un-blemished

It dries the blood and pales the bones over its seasons.

When many moons and suns have passed with their shadows across my home,

I will remember this time, when a life ebbed away in front of me

Maybe it’ll be my time to die
And stop wishing upon these foolish, unfaithful stars.

A Singleton's Meal

I pour the smashed carcass of a tomato in the pan,

And go to war hacking peas, corn and garlic in a heaving, unelegant mess

No one checks me for propriety or symmetry, 

For taste of meat or thickness of sauce.

I present this masterpiece to no one but myself,

And eat to the sound of my own chewing.

One plate, one glass, one fork I wash.

Not for me the pageantry of a well-served meal.

I banish what’s left to the icy, unfriendly depths of the refrigerator

Where the meal congeals till I find it again, 

less grand and barely tasteful,

but just enough for one more serving.

The night's shadows have almost taken me,

when I sit up in alarm and wonder,

my heart drumming like the empty steel pots in my kitchen,

“Will the carcass leave seeds of longing behind?”

Stopping to check time. Checking to stop time.

I pick up an antique compass labelled “Marion Ross” on Colaba Causeway. The innards of the city have a lot of history on offer that you can own if you’re willing to shell out the Rs. 750 he’s asking you to. I won’t buy, not the old compass, commissioned to mark yet another boat-ride of old, white colonial men from the continent, nor the pocket watch which has a ferocious eagle on either side. It tells the right time madam, he says, battery operated. Take it, he says, I’ll give you a good price.

Desperate to make his first bargain for the day, the young relic seller sells me his story. These antiques came all the way from Jharkhand madam. They are very old, British-zamaana. Why from Jharkhand, I ask. The British ruled there too, he says incredulously. He wouldn't be doing this, my young friend, if he had found a job in the city. An interior designer graduate, he came from Jharkhand, looking in a place where there is so much lose. Why Mumbai, I ask, everything costs so much! That’s why madam, that’s why I came. Now won’t you buy something? Won’t you buy today? I must earn madam, I must earn till I find a job.

I didn't have the heart to tell him I wasn't going to buy. But that his story had more currency than what he sold. He could peddle that story for so much more, he could create the legend of the interior design grad who runs a humble antiques shack. That he was so quintessentially India in that moment that it was both heartbreaking and beautiful.

I should’ve asked his name. But he had lost interest in me already. He was trying on a fake watch a fellow-seller had brought in his kitty. This is how my life is now, this is how it is, he said to no one in general. The world kept walking by.

Incredibly Fast and Positively Good

We were stuck in the taxi a long time. Behind other cars and buses, scooters and bikes carrying locals to their lives, who were able to carry on unlike us. I felt the time solidifying against my reclining form at the back of the taxi, that I wouldn’t be able to escape the failure of this moment.

To me it was disappointing that we’d spent so much time not “experiencing” things. I wanted to get off and push the car, or run to our destination without a break. Anything to escape this crushing race against time and an unexpected traffic jam.

As it happened, we didn’t make it before closing time. We missed seeing something we’d talked about, planned on and plotted to see. A few days for me, a few years for my friend Sanju. The volcano in Bandung in Indonesia. She’d heard all about it from her mother, who’d been there years before. I understood this need to share a moment with a parent. It’s why I always call my dad from a jazz concert. Both of us looked out of the window to the greying skies that had turned the colour of ash sooner than we expected it to. We were blind to space or time in this foreign land. We seemed to be moving in a linear fashion, yet it seemed like we’d been turning circles right where we stood, digging our heels into the mud. With one final look of resignation towards the mountain we had just begun to approach, we gave up, told the driver to turn around and decided to make our last bad decision of the trip.

I was upset for a long time that day. I was sad because there wouldn’t be a picture of us against the sunset atop a volcano. Of us climbing down to the belly of the earth, of claiming that one moment for posterity in a photograph. I wouldn’t have exclamations of joy and jealousy when friends looked at the picture, when for a minute, I would’ve beat them in this race to be more worldly.

Isn’t that why we travel? To know more, show more. Show how we left our imprints on different parts of the planet, claimed a bit of foreign land for ourselves and were also able to shed that bond like old skin, like a coat heavy with damp, to move on to new destinations, new ideas to be part of, new territories to capture. Stuck at the back of the unmoving taxi, I had already begun to realise how futile this was, this conquest for the sake of a never ending race. Why did it matter that I hadn’t clambered down to a volcano that day? Why did it matter that I’d spent most of my time in a vehicle negotiating in a language that I didn’t understand, over foreign money that didn’t feel real in my hands?  Like I was playing a part of a merchant trading experiences for cash? Why did it matter that on that one day, our trip had been a failure, our best efforts were thwarted, that it being spontaneous hadn’t paid off.

And then, when Sanju said we were in the southern hemisphere, that we’d flown over the arbitrary line that converts the earth into a complicated minefield of time zones, forests, ice caps, deserts and people, is when I realised why I’d been a foolish tourist in the back of a car, blaming the universe for standing in my way. We were flying back, sipping tepid coffee at the KL airport from our last few Malaysian ringets. “ Is this why the days were shorter?” I asked her, the foolish tourist. She smiled and nodded. I think she knew what I was referring to.

Travelling is about people, she said. Through people, I added in my mind. I had travelled through her. Quite literally, she’d let me come with her as a last minute addition to her itinerary.  More than that, I’d seen through her eyes, her vision of a perfect holiday. She’d been disappointed too, maybe even more than me, that we never got to the volcano. But for her, this trip was a lateral experience, like a file cabinet she could pick experiences out of. She could file away Bandung, only returning to it as a cautionary tale. An antidote for further trips. Maybe what she would open regularly was the day we stayed up for 24 hours, starting in a Buddhist temple and ending in a reedy club in Jakarta. The time she held her friend’s baby for the first time, or when she began to giggle, uncontrollably, at a reggae singer’s high-pitched laugh.

My dad has the travel bug. He passed it on to my mother, by telling her stories of the places he’d lived in and the food he’d eaten. Impossible stories of how monkey brains were scooped up in spoons and eaten with their bodies wriggling under the table. She’d laughed herself to tears, she told me, and then decided to marry him. Since then, they’ve taken my brother and me to fantastic places both within and outside India. They were conventional travellers to unconventional destinations. Instead of Paris or Rome, they took us to Jordan first. We saw the Bhimbeteka caves before me or any of my classmates could locate Madhya Pradesh on a map. I still remember the insides of a cavernous dark room in Chakori, where by candle light, my dad told us ghost stories of station masters whose hands would stretch like rubber. It was always the same story, about arriving in a strange place at a strange hour and meeting strange people. In some ways, it mirrored what he did on holidays with us. He planned to the very last detail, booked every minute of our time onto mundane tours meant for old, crinkly people and herded us like lost members of a flock, snapping and gesticulating wildly when we were late. We can’t waste time, he said. Time is money. We’ve already paid for these. His string of reasoning was inexhaustible.

As much as I awed by where he took me, I was annoyed at how he did it. He still does it to us, at malls, for movies, for functions and on holidays. So that day, on a taxi ride with no end in sight, I heard my father chiding me for being late, for the lack of planning, for not wringing joy from every moment.  Trying to deafen myself from it, I watched the sun slice the sky into dark and light halves, and shutters of shops go down as we sputtered up the narrow highway, still hopeful we would make it. I was unable to reconcile this, I urged the driver to press on. In my version of a holiday, there was no question of wasting borrowed time.

And that was my second revelation. Flying back, I realised how the airlines had tricked the time barrier itself. I’d never felt it so starkly because I’d never flown through three different time zones. We were almost making a mockery of the linearity of time, going ahead and forward in calculated strokes, so that somehow, we managed to arrive in Bangalore the same day we left Jakarta. We flew back in time. We controlled its flow. It was up to us to decide how we owned it. We owned it. We’d earned it. It was ours to waste, to hold and to lock up in memories that were a consequence of only our decisions. Suddenly, I wasn’t being held hostage by the idea of time slipping by me. Instead I stood directly above and parallel to its flow, like a river I could dip my toe in and out of.

These moments of enlightenment are still nestled in my brain. They go off as light bulbs as I write this. Create a fuzzy frequency between the two, urging me to stay beyond the realm of everyday disappointments. It won’t last, this heady feeling, this emancipation from the need to be “switched on”, on being a slave to time, destiny and logic. But it has re positioned things inside me. Like pieces of a jigsaw, they now sit better together and I am able to move more swiftly through the day with the knowledge that I failed, but I moved on. That experience and memory and joy are, at the end of the day, under my control, and the world is still my oyster to pry open, only with different pliers each time.

Circles

We're walking on parallel sides of the road
In different directions, away from each other.

He turns suddenly
I can feel the little hairs at the nape of my neck bristle
as he changes the direction of the wind with him

He smiles at me and I can feel its warmth on my turned back.
It ends swiftly, this two-second love story.

I want both this and the infinite that will follow
but half-emotions is all we can hope for
in half-returned glances and half-empty glasses

And again one day
In the heat and dust of a busy city street
Maybe two others will meet the same fate
Maybe exactly where we stand today, or a few feet away

They will step into the molds we left behind
Of hearts flowing over.
And love being a silly metaphor for life

It will still be us, in a different time and space
Such is the inevitability and history of human fault.

Old Fears, New Spaces

It feels good to be a statistic. At least you feel like you’re part of the country—of the millions who were intimidated by some action that they never called for. While protesting or writing complex, jargon-y statements about women’s right to claim the streets, to walk unafraid of mental and physical attack and through the very act symbolise the legal freedom of being out ‘there’, I never once really understood the utter sham words can be.

And yet all I can do is write when a gentleman on a bike reaches out of his way to plant a sharp slap on my ass. No I didn’t ask for it. No it wasn’t the middle of the night (Even the prude eleven o’ clock Bangalorean curfew wouldn’t frown upon a 10 PM walk). No it wasn’t a dodgy, run-down part of town. It happened where I’m given to believe Bangalore’s elite live. No I wasn’t taking my chances with the night in a mini-skirt or hot pants. Just merely walking home from dinner in a “morally conducive” pair of jeans.

The appalling thing is that he actually stopped to check my reaction. Turned his head around to see what I would do. Too stunned to move, I couldn’t even swear at him. The slap had seemed disconcertingly familiar.

I’ve had my breasts peeked at, poked at, an unassuming hand graze across my ass. I’ve had boys in school wait under staircases and been stared at so hard it made it impossible to stay in one place for too long. I had never underestimated the violence of a gaze, but the sheer anger of being touched without consent is something much bigger than just anger. It’s an unlearning, a complete undermining of your person.

He had a yellow shirt on but that’s all I could tell. He was on a bike, his face half hidden by darkness and the other half by an ugly smirk. He was indistinguishable from the thousands of others who do this to thousands of other vulnerable women across the country. They often do much, much worse.

The ironic thing is that on the way back from work earlier, on a bus segregated by gender, I thought about the geography of misogyny and violence. And I realised there isn’t any. Once the son of a prominent cabinet minister had joked about how women only got raped in Delhi, in contrast to Gurgaon where they get murdered in addition to being raped. I thought the joke in very bad taste, but since we were being young and urban and self-consciously gender neutral in our friendships, I let it go.

I sat through a slew of insults against Delhi when I first moved to Bangalore. About how Delhi didn’t know how to treat its women, about how raping was a sadistic past-time there, about how ridiculous the Khap Panchayats were. As if Delhi was a monolithic kingdom that sacrificed women as part of a daily ritual. The truth is that people rape, abuse, harass, touch and pinch women in Delhi for the same reason that men in other parts of the country do: because they can get away with it. The helplessness of not being able to run after the bike, or it being too dark to check it’s make, were things not in my control. They’ll never be in my control when a hand reaches out from the back. From now on, in my mind, my geographies of violence will change. Familiar streets will grow vulnerable to the sheer audacity of men on bikes.

Statistics have history. So I learned when I called the most un-hysterical person I know: my mother. Tough as nails, my mother’s response to the rising incidents of assault and abuse in Delhi has never been to curtail my freedom. Typically, she heard me out calmly and offered a few ripe insults towards the biker to assuage my hurt. She then told me about how thirty years ago, as student in Miranda House, she had faced much of the same thing while walking to class. In her mind, the map of assault and insult consisted of a few streets in Delhi University where she and her friends were regularly leered at by groups of men dominating street corners. “Sometimes the days would be just as bad. There would be no one around in the scorching summer heat. No one to help,” she said. For my mother, I know that these geographies of violence shifted constantly as she moved between states and even to other countries. Bad men were bad men everywhere. Their belief in misogyny intact, it didn’t matter how or who fell to the system.

When someone calls me a feminist, they usually mean it as an insult. They say it to undermine my political and personal belief that every individual has the right to live equal to his/her peers. At work, in the middle of UN millennium goals poll, a colleague, quite coolly, passed over the need for gender equality. “What do you need more? Water, food, sanitation or women’s equality?” he said. In his vision for the future, if this happens to me again, I should come back home to my water and scrub off the feeling of guilt and utter helplessness. Because that’s women do—they wipe themselves off an existence.

FAR FROM FICTION

My grudging appreciation of Chetan Bhagat is much like my grudging appreciation for Shah Rukh Khan. Both unwittingly stumbled into stardom, and without much talent or backing, created empires that shifted the meanings of superlatives in our vocabulary. Both, in a sense, are a celebration of middle-class India’s love for mediocrity. Both are heroes of an average kind.

What they portray is a dream without the cruelty of irony or parody. Khan can still earnestly morph into a make-believe, computer generated action hero and fight the fight, talk the talk and charm the pants of his heroine. Bhagat can still write books, despite his clear paucity of expression, and postulate on what the youth of India want.  Both are marketing phenomena par excellence. Both pander to an audience only too willing to indulge their exploitation of the middle class bucket-list.

Those of us who look down on Bhagat’s style of writing often forget the kind of intuitive appeal his books have had on a generation bred solely on post-liberalisation TV programming and very little library time. The creation of his stories, it seems, is based on this very insight—it’s a seamless extension of the programmes they watch on TV, the news they consume, the women they wish they had and as always, the aspirations they need to mirror to be part of this seemingly buoyant economy.  (It has, however, been four years since he penned The Three Mistakes of My Life and India’s fortunes have dithered since.)

In the early 90s, when Switzerland was being re-imagined by Yash Chopra through his epic romances, it was Khan who shouldered the weight of middle-class aspiration. He was a one-way ticket to the Alps.  However Khan himself was beyond the aspiration and the struggle. As the poor little rich Raj, he was charmingly off limits. We revelled in the gaps he created, happy in our half-baked hopes of flying abroad one day and tasting real Swiss cheese.

Bhagat is a harbinger of a completely different generation. His heroes are call centre executives and MBA grads. It’s not so much about inherited wealth and privilege as it is about enterprise and self-worth (For the sake of this argument, let’s assume that all Bhagat’s books are potential scripts, which seems to be increasingly the case). His heroes are optimistic to a fault and smack of familiar stereotypes of the Indian middle-class. They would pick a business plan over a trip to the Alps.

What changed? Did we forget our fascination for the West? Or did we imbibe it so seamlessly that we’re happy with our mashed-up version of consumerism? Maybe a bit of both.  In Kai Po Che, Bhagat’s latest offering in Bollywood format, a familiar underdog story is played out between three men driven by different motivations. This, Three Idiots and more urbane fares like Rock On and Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara are markers of another classic shift—from largely portraying the inner realms of family life to the very public nuances of friendship and camaraderie.  Friends, in a sense, become moral guidelines for right and wrong, often leading to the creation of a different set of standards to live up to. For instance, filial loyalties in Kai Po Che are trumped by what was promised to friends. There is rebellion against the idea of duty and support for breaking away from the fold. Associations with the family, like in the case of the right-wing Omi character only end in complete destruction and friendship is sacrificed for a pithy game of communal politics. The re-emergence of the multi-hero format is reminiscent of the late 80s/early 90s when it was unsuccessfully tried with films like Tridev. While Dil Chahta Hai marked a watershed moment for Hindi cinema in the new millennium, no one could quite replicate its success through the decade. Till of course it became apparent that that no new talent could singularily carry a film like the Khans of the 90s. Acting talent, at least partially, is crowd sourced from lesser platforms like reality TV and soaps, re-casting the middle class hero in 2012 in middle class roles. With the exception of Raju Ban Gaya Gentleman, Khan’s directors made him do quite the opposite.

The sly brilliance of a Bhagat and the directors that adapt his stories is that they understand the value of populism. They derive full value from the term ‘popular culture’. Kai Po Che uses the Bhuj earthquake and the Godhra massacres as backdrops, referencing them only to the point that’s comfortable to the middle class imagination. The rather sanitised depiction of the riots is a familiar itch but something no one’s willing to scratch for fear of a scab. The film never lets it get under the skin of the characters and the socio-political history that abets the riot is reduced to an emotional outburst, where the character is only looking to avenge his parents’ death, nothing more.

Admittedly, mainstream cinema is not a platform for conflict resolution. The portrayal of the Muslim minority sans caricaturisation itself is a triumph for Hindi cinema. While their blatant victimisation and dependence on the secular albeit Hindu hero isn’t exactly palatable, it’s still less unequal an equation that Bollywood is used to showing.

Political niceties aside, what burns through and pointedly so, is the entrepreneurial spirit of Gujarat. It brings to mind the other middle-class hero who has risen to now contend for the top job in the country. Narendra Modi, or Bhagat’s Parikh, is also re-casting himself in the public arena of politics. Chief Minister three times in a row, Modi has successfully created a brand of Hindutva that works on the simple theory of economic development for the majority. Kai Po Che (or for that matter Three Mistakes of My Life) also never makes an attempt to alter this set equation. It’s logic that sits well with the middle class. It’s the children of the 90s, weaned on Shah Rukh Khan’s opulent cinema, who now understand Modi’s easy and rather flawed link between money and development. Bhagat as a chronicler of our times has captured our shift rather well, be as it may in SMS literature.