A poem

We must be rusting inside

I didn’t realize it when I could feel it in my mouth, thinking of you
Not when I could feel it in our mouths while we kissed

I couldn’t tell when something about our hands was missing
The fingers, the thumbs, the lines, the soft-hard skin, the yellow-pink nails
They were all there

I didn’t taste it when we moved together
Too well practiced
up and down, close eyes now
hold tight, let go, lie on me

When we shared our anger, I couldn’t have imagined it
The injustice of privilege we shared
The world had to change; we had to give it a chance

And then one night amidst the cacophony of blaring loudspeakers
Trying to keep ground on wet grass, you held on to me
I just smiled
And suddenly I knew

We must be rusting inside.

lessons on unlearning

The untrusting of you is the untrusting of me
and the untrusting of oneself is the most difficult journey to undertake...

Life keeps changing, its incredible what you can get used to, people get used to living without things they had been born with - eyes, hands, feet, fingers, kidneys, parents, siblings, feelings.But i think the real nightmare begins when you try to get used to living wthout what/who you had chosen to love which you had made for yourself the most important of all things, which is a part of that in which all universe coagulates- the image of who you are.

I just finished reading Middlesex recently, it disturbed me in ways very few things have. Not because i am a hermaphrodite,not because i already know that killing is an easy way for societies to keep themselves pure and harmonious, not because i had to leave my country behind to settle in a country far colder than mine,not because i havent been able to get used to cars, not because my naked body has ever put on display in a medical journal or a kinky sex parlour, not because places are not just places sometimes, people not just people and lovers not just lovers.

But because i have to learn to unlove an image of myself, because its just time.
--

Come away

It's just 3 am, my feet hurt from imagining how it will be to run along the streets unseen, unstoppable. To be able to leave and never return, to go from somewhere to everywhere and hide forever in nowhere. I crave insomnia, so i can keep running, but that never happens. I wonder what makes you think thats enviable, to sleep every night with swollen feet.

Is there ever a love that lives in the singular? loves enmeshed in other loves, appear seamless sometimes.The seconds which look like minutes go on into hours and months and finally it all seems like a feeling. The death of one, and then the others. You hate me for loving then, or not loving now? it's bitter irony this, whichever way you see it.At another time it might be a story of two travellers, in a Calvino book, i know you must have read. It has only one page which says

"You are at the wheel of your car, waiting at the traffic light, you take the book out of the bag, rip off the transparent wrapping, start reading the first lines. A storm of honking breaks over you..."

Life has to go on jack, with or without God.

----- pill

What is my body?

The obvious answer is that it can be many things- chronology, history, conformism, subversion, doubt, pain, joy, comfort, pleasure, ill, sacred, desirable,ugly - but most of all i feel it is threatening.

Threatening for different people at different points of time. For myself and my own image as " one of the boys", eventually my worried grandmother who didn't think i looked as nice as other girls my age, finally for the rest of the world for now i am a sexualized, untamed, reproductive body capable of wrecking havoc on everything thatmakes up the 'natural'.

So much power in the hands of a 'hysterical' human being the society understands as its own undoing. So grandmothers censure, fathers surveill,mothers blackmail emotinally and mostly everyone also plays each others part. But there are also mechanisms that sit you down, give you cold glass of water and then begin in soft, steady, subdued and menacing tones about how a decision to pleasure your body outside permissible limits is criminal/hallucinatory because outside of them the body IS not supposed to exist. for instance the 'friend of the liberated woman' the I-pill advertisements. first things first- thank heaven there is an emergency contraceptive and that people are being informed about it, that women have slightly more agency over their bodies and they can be less tense about physical intimacy with men, also save themselves from the harassment of a hair raisingly painful medical procedure(either way) and unnecessary societal curiosity.
NONE of the advertisements however talk of anything other than the kind of condemnation a woman can and by extension naturally ought to face in pregnancy outside of marriage. not once is the language of a woman's control on her body and therefore her sexuality foregrounded over images of nervous looking young girls or older women reprimanding irresponsible behaviour in hushed tones.
The fear of the woman is never characterized by that of the body but by that of the conscience. The all encompassing megalomaniacal conscience which assigns responsibilities to everything it coopts. The woman to be the preserver of an order that actively makes her into a fetishized sex cum morals cum 'career' crazed quick mix, the men to partake (along with women) of the delicacy and even the I-pill to march over to its side as not the beneficiary of subversionists but a 'well meaning "let me set you right" whip on the back "never to do it again" gesture from the socio-smiths.

But like my body, the pill too can be many things. Just if the way it is sent out could reclaim the 'I'.

ahun ahun ahun AHUN AHUN AHUN AHUN ahun ahun....

It's effing addictive this song !

(lurve aajkal)

Sometimes reading this blog makes me think how the complexity of feeling and the constant need for it, is most simplistic.

I was reading Safdar Hashmi today, talking about his dreams for theatre, for the people. His almost innocent, unflinching belief in hope struck me. It made my easy cynicism uncomfortable. A man beaten to death for performing a play outside a factory. In an interview he says, "when the emergency was declared, many of our friends were arrested we got scared as hell. We thought we were a threat to the Indian State. We exaggerated our own threat and thought we were bound to be arrested and tortured. So we disappeared, We didn't perform anymore..."

He wouldn't have known, the lines would ring as comically prophetic and piercingly satirical one day.

I was born many years after the emergency he refers to was lifted.

He was murdered in public just a few days after my second birthday, leaving me and those born since with the knowledge that the emergency was always in continuum and the response could be either- hope that smells of sweat(as Safdar and those like him would have most days of their lives) or cynicism, the smell of my air conditioned classroom.

I choose the latter too many times, this blog tells me.