I am trying to figure out 
a way to love
my lover;

an unruly way to love
a way that negates 
the cognizance of
our hierarchical
procreative design that 
slots fuckability beneath
the columns of 
     caste 
     and class
     and creed
     and sex 
     and the history of suicides, divorces,
     elopements within the family
count me out of all such congenital malice

Yes, my alcoholic uncle hung
himself to death

he was only 
trying to figure out
a way to live

My love gets dubbed as revolutionary,
but the way I see it
I curl into the crook of 
my lover's body
to continue breathing, inasmuch as every
touch is primordial, driven by the crushing weight 
of        my       convulsive     will        to                live     

My  lover  is  all sinew  and  bones
and at the sight of his slender back,
I   huff     in     agonising          desire

When.  my   man   and I   are alone
I bite into the muscle    that slopes
downward   to      his         shoulder

When my man and I are alone,
I plop my tongue into the hollow 
of              his                    clavicles

At that moment 
when we are as pliable as clay,
neither of us bear 

   the burden of symbols-- 
   Not the Even Not the Whore
   Not the Forbidden Fruit
   Not the Serpent

I am trying to figure out a way 
to not end this poem with death

I am trying
to rescue my love from theologies 
of retribution and punishment
of eternal damnation 
of purity and pollution

Desire is a Garden of Life, 
out of which nobody was ever ousted from. 

'All that I have is a river,
The river is always my home'

— Johnny Flynn and Laura Marling, The Water

Now that the fanfare around Roy’s memoir has toned down slightly, with all imaginable editorials minting reviews, and with all the veritable chatter around the book and its author having stoked the D(-iscourse)- word on our social media threads, I finally crawl towards my pirated copy of Mother Mary Comes to Me

I read the reviews with a god-like smirk on my face.

Mother- Daughter Relationship Explored

An Honest Portrayal of Complex Mother-Daughter Relationship

A vivisection gone wrong, I mutter. Perhaps, it is my uncontrolled ‘budget- Arundathi- Roy syndrome’ that makes me so dismissive of other reviews. Like many other Malayali girls who saw Ayemenemkkari Rahel’s story as their own and like many Malayali women who are secretly possessive about Rahel’s world (to the point that it stings them to hear another person quote The God of Small Things as their favourite book), I, too, plead guilty of over-identifying with the Rahel-Roy continuum. Somehow, this also makes me act like an insufferable ‘know-it-all’ in matters of the writer.

Partly, why my interest in Roy’s memoir dips as soon as the house in Ayemenem and Nizamudin Dargah open up into her husband’s gilded hallway is because of how little of Rahel seems to survive in the latter part of the memoir. But that’s just a fangirl’s reaction, and my low patience for ‘intimate gatherings’ and circle jerk gossips of the Delhi Literati.

A couple of readers have noted how Roy did not acknowledge the privilege afforded by her association with Pradip Krishen in the early days of her career. Someone even remarked how Roy has very little to say about female friendships in her memoir. I’m surprised that we pretend to confuse memoirs with manifestos.

While moving into Pradip’s house did grant Roy a sense of stability, it was certainly not the first place she sought refuge in. During the domestic battles between the whimsical Mary Roy and her Oxford-educated brother, G. Isaac, years before the fights would culminate in the legal tussle of the Travancore Christian Succession Act, Arundathi skittered off to the lap of her beloved river for solace. She writes,

“The river was my refuge. It made up for everything that was wrong in my life. I spent hours on its banks and came to be on intimate, first-name terms with the fish, the worms, the birds and the plants.”

Shortly after arriving in her natal town of Ayemenem, Roy transforms into “a wild child with calloused feet who knew every hidden path and shortcut in the village that led to the river”.

Looking back into the days of her childhood, Roy declares, “I had a green river”.

What does it mean for a writer to be raised by a river, for her language to be informed by the poetics of the moving river?

I’d even go on to say that it was Roy’s enduring affinity with Meenachilar that drove her to the shores of another, years later. The Narmada. In her non-fiction, she lambasted the damming project in the Narmada Valley.

When Roy glances into the waters of Meenachil, her facial feathers distort and blur. Mary Roy stares back at her from the depths of Meenachilar, and I like to think that Arundathi cups the river into her palms, but the ever evasive Mary drips through the crack of her fingers, rejoining the river. The memoir is Roy’s attempt to preserve her mother’s ebb away from the shores of memory.

I smirked in response.

This is my first act of defiance against Aleyamma, calling her by the name. However, I must clarify that it is not out of irreverence or a juvenile desire for rebellion that I choose to address my grandmother by her maiden name. All my life, I was afraid to speak back to her. I do not think death has equalled us, but it has depersonalised her for me, and I find it easier to summon her by the name.

Aleyamma was born in ___________. I frankly do not know, because one might as well consult her tombstone for such encyclopedic details. Aleyamma reigned in my life for a good twenty-five years, so she could have been anywhere between the age of twenty-five to fifty.

Aleyamma died at the age of seventy-eight. She was quite unwilling to die and powered through life out of some congenital intransigence. Last year, the doctors who treated her broken hip pronounced her life span to be six months from the date of the hip replacement surgery. She lived for a full eight months. The additional two months which she grabbed from the hands of death proved tortuous for those around her, primarily me.

Aleyamma was very bad at dying.

She was supposed to die in 2002. She was supposed to die in 2006, 2020, 2022, 2024… I lived in a state of perpetual fear of Aleyamma’s seemingly imminent demise. You see, she was awful at dying. She was so bad, and her own words testify to this fact:

‘They had come to take me with them. I told them I am not prepared at this time. And then, they left’

So, she snatched a few days from the arms of death, prepared herself (rather, unenthusiastically), and after two days of being in the precipice between the state of life and death, she died, without much fanfare.

In her final days, she merely breathed. A soft breathing of inhales and exhales, which was so delicately woven by the angel before her. It was a symphony, and the angel was the conductor who drew the rhythm of her breath with his baton. The final note could barely be heard, for the music was soaked in by the atmosphere, and the audience (again, just me) was lulled to sleep.

Anyways, here is the thing: turns out someone with whom I had an indifferent friendship probably saves up to fifty thousand rupees per month, from their monthly PhD stipend. That is, ten percent more than the amount I get every month from my university. It turns out, she makes around one lakh, fifty thousand every month, and not a penny of this salary should be of my concern, but I am fuming with jealousy. She is in Europe, and that should explain the figures. But, I will be grumpy about it for a long time.

I remember when a guy I knew got into Harvard. I did not know it was even possible to dream so big. Another guy, a friend of a friend of a friend of a— thus moves, the imponderable chain of Malayali kinship— got into Stanford. Oh, and he also got married.

I have always believed I got into the PhD program out of some bizarre luck, call it my mother’s obstinate relationship with God; she disturbs the heavens, knocks on its gate and eventually, in her impatience, uproots the gate and throws it into oblivion.

Anyways, good for you if you have managed to convince European or US universities about the necessity of studying ramshackle dwellings of the urban poor or the prevalence of Diabetes in South Asia. Congratulations on clearing your German B2 Exams. Sometimes, I imagine the lives of my friends in the metropolis of the First World. In these discreet fantasies of mine, they buy organic produce, they have enough eggs and meat, and they drive to the Midwest for a weekend getaway. They probably have to do some periodic paperwork— visa application and other bureaucratic mood-killers, but life, is easier on them. To console myself, I imagine a different scenario: what if they were to suffer from a sudden tooth ache?

I think I would have relented a little before choosing to do a PhD in my country, if I held a decent job. I graduated with an M.A. Program and was unemployed for eight months. These are horrible things that happen to young people all the time. Am I just deferring employment by doing a PhD? I ask this to myself every day. Sometimes, I imagine what were I to do if the university discontinued the PhD Program at a whim. God, these are the mercies of our times— minimum living wage and a square meal daily.

Would life have been different if I, too, had been accepted by a foreign university? I do not know. I am envious of people abroad who get to live a fuller intellectual life, because they are, definitely, not thinking about ways to stave off hunger without triggering the onset of a gastritis episode. One of the conditions you are supposed to grow into, if you decide to do an M.A. or PhD here, is the acceptance that food is luxury. The dining halls of universities provide zero nourishment, and that is okay, because PhD students are an underclass. They do not need air- conditioned rooms in extreme weather, because they knew what they were getting into. They do not need to, and more importantly, they cannot avail the university’s transport facilities. There is only so much that a zest for learning can do.

I admit I have no love for learning, because my existence is bare. I am hungry and my eyes droop with lethargy that I have been carrying for years as a student.

I look forward to fieldwork. Perhaps, cutting my ties with this university that has kept me in a state of perpetual dissatisfaction could help me. I would like to feel more than mere lack.

Anyways, this incident confirmed my suspicion that she has discovered my Twitter antics, mostly something I indulge in during two hour long cab- rides.

Later, this week, she wanted to know why I am “all over the place”, and urged me to give her an answer for my erratic sleep-wake cycles, ostensibly, out of concern and care. I did not reply, but my palms moistened, and a hardened memory from childhood diffused itself in my mind

Malu, nee para?

You tell me. Why are you behaving like this? Am I not a good enough at being a father. If you don’t understand me, you may demand I explain better.

My father is, oddly enough (now I say this without wanting to summon Freud and his progeny for uttering this), like my supervisor.

His voice had an edge that cut like a knife.

At sixteen, I could blame him. Now with my custom gravestone already carved out, it is embarassing to blame others for my volatility.

I am so familiar with this trick: Person A (in the position of power) finds Person B’s (subject to the former) behaviour as an aberration; demands that Person B identifies his ‘symptoms’ and rectifies it, for the sake of Person A.

I am familiar with this trick: Person B pretends to apologise for everything. Person B reaffirms the need for Person A in their life. Person B is builds a house, topples it down and builds another and again…

As asymmetrical as power is between two people in a hierarchy, the one beneath always knows to chafe against the order of the one above: Meek, but incorrigible.

How can I explain this to you, my reader? I sleep little; study lesser. I wake up scrunching my face, or so the phone- screen reflects. I had committed myself to study about a place that makes my soul so overcome with throbbing passion. Without discounting my theatricality, I often think that it would have been nicer were I to die young and be buried in the church graveyard. My putrefying flesh housed in an ancestral tomb that’s more home than home will ever be, and my bones shall dissolve with the earth, like traces of chalk in water, as I finally become one with my “field- site”, my place of birth; the place where my grandfather’s bones cackle, and where my great grandfather haunts the dykes at midnight (where are the women, you filthy inner-sexist?)

However, death is a mere wish that huddles under thick clouds. In its stead, I am weeping inside a tiny cell.

Doing a PhD, as a single woman, I am aware comes with its own challenges. What was quite unprecedented to me was the toll it could take on my physical health. I who never missed a period in twenty-five years of my life, until the previous year, now must confront something like PCOS. I go to the washroom every morning, with a tooth- brush in one hand and razor in the other to shave the wisps of hair sprouting everywhere on my face, neck and chest. I have gained a lot of weight. Of course, no female malady is complete without a medical professional asking you to starve yourself. ‘You need to go on a calorie deficit diet, says the doctor. I don’t even have a diet, I wish I could tell her.

Now the problem is not even the impossibility of shedding blood, it mere adds a layer to the stress I experience.

I swear to God; I want to get this right. I wish I could tell my disappointed mentor that I wish to do this whole PhD thing with every fiber of my being, but—my fibers are fraying, I am a depressed twenty but five year old and I need my bag of candy, I so need my bag of candy, but I probably fucking have insulin resistance.

imagine

a mother,
hitching up her saree determinedly 
above her knees
tying the length of the fabric taut on her waist,

a child,

hoisted on her hip,
his limp leg,
dangling
above the shimmering waters.

mother parted the sea for me,
lifted me out of the smothering rivers
I crawled my way to

she tossed every flint 
and every pebble and every thorn away
to clear the path I tread.

son,
I must return.
this journey is mine alone,
I am afraid 
you can’t come.
I can’t heave you up 
like the way I used to.

I do not wish to see the sun rise 
or seek the mystery behind hued skies, 
I do not wish to see the oceans, nor the moon;
but I ask you for one thing,
let me bid my mother adieu.

you say my soul is nailed to the 
the grills of your prison, 
every time I stir,
blood pools the floor.

I have to leave now;

you may mock me.

but what do you know,
of the miles I have traversed
to be your prisoner.

‘Had I not been introduced to so and so, I’d have missed this’

‘Had my friend not pressured me, I’d have never applied’

I sniggered and responded that I applied for the program, because I did not want to be married off. My other and only female classmate giggled and agreed.

To sound esoteric, I tell people the chain of events that led me to apply for a program I had no expectations from.

Cold month of December… A dead grandfather… A flu that possessed me… Heavy with grief…

Most of the times, my audience do not have the patience to listen to this melodramatic tale, towards the end of which, I appear heroic— recompensed, for all the struggles that I had to go through. What is  common in these narratives of my cohort and I is the sense of relief. Thank goodness, we have been accepted! What if—

Nobody wants to go down the rabbit hole of ‘What- If’s’. We assume that we were picked from a throng of candidates by pure chance, by the operation of forces beyond our control (which is, true) and now that we have been allocated these coveted seats, we ought to bring glory to our respective thrones.

Personally, I think I did nothing to deserve an admission spot. I spent a lot of time being ping- ponged around the barbed fences of higher education. I have bled.

And, I guess, this is precisely why I reject the mystification around admission processes. It is arbitrary, unpredictable and emphatically, unequal. There are lions and tigers in every department, individuals who have bought laurels and secured grants, but to think of one’s worth beyond this gamut of merit is perhaps, the most important quality for the sake of self- preservation.

I write this for myself. I need to be constantly reminded that my life can derive meaning outside of academia.

It is difficult to maintain sanity in a private university cordoned off from the rest of the city. This is something I am coming to terms with. I have frequent breakdowns. Being part of organized student politics, in whatever capacity, was something that imbued my life with meaning. With that option outmoded, I have failed to find networks of social nourishment.

I have two friends.

I love going to the city, but it burns a hole in my pocket.

I like the campus library, but I don’t know where the AC’s regulator is. Somehow, it’s also the place where the two friends and I stage all our antics. So much for being old.

There is a weird game being played out here. I call it, the Indian Matchmaking. Seniors and my batch mates discuss at length on whom should we choose as our supervisors. It is a boring game. How much could one possibly speculate one’s potential relationship with a mentor? My girl friend and I have decided to renounce this game. We have realized we don’t want to jump around like circus monkeys to get validation and ‘network-ing’ capital from the professors.

They’re sweet folks, and that’s great.

I read Kate Zambreno’s ‘Book of Mutter’ (2017) this week. The work deals with the author’s grief upon losing her mother. It has many quotable sentences, but I was left insatiated. I’m no literary critic, but what the hell is going on with the novel as a form.

Zambreno researched for about thirteen years to write this memoir(?), scoured through libraries and archives, but the book is vacuous, for all its lyrical prowess and simplicity. Perhaps, this is a conscious choice, but excising the excess of language does not simply sit with me. It’s also a reason why I don’t feel lulled by most of contemporary American fiction.

I think this brilliant essay by Naomi Kanakia captures the gripe I have with contemporary fiction:

The question isn’t whether the book is good or not—we don’t really know, a priori, how good it is. All we know is that people say it’s good, and we’re supposed to think it’s good. But do we believe that judgment anymore? In other words, how willing are we to use our time and our critical faculties to launder the opinions of the hype machine?

She also talks about Mathews’ ATBCD, which was a long- awaited release for me and ended up disappointing me so severely. I am a fan of her short- stories and her incisive political essays, but the novel has crushed me. I could not chug through its first- person self- centeredness. And I also hated that it turned out to be one of those works easily slotted into ‘diaspora’ writing. Mathews’ is way too good, and it is sad that her novel was written for the Kanakia calls the hype- machine.

Anyways, I think verbosity is not a sin. I like Rushdie. I like Marcquez. I love Faulkner.

The best news of this week is Arundathi Roy’s announcement of her memoir. I AM SEATED. It will only be released next year, and what can I say, my life span has to be extended to another year, sigh! Here’s what Roy has to say about it:

I have been writing this book all my life. Perhaps a mother like mine deserved a writer like me as a daughter. Equally, perhaps a writer like me deserved a mother like her. Even more than a daughter mourning the passing of her mother, I mourn her as a writer who has lost her most enthralling subject.

Say what you want about Roy, but to be known for your novel twenty five years after its publication, to have an ensemble of fan- girls (and boys) poorly copying your writing style and to have readers waiting for every essay you write and every photo the Mayank Austen person takes of you all is simply fantastic. The number of Malayali girls who believe they embody Rahel in flesh and blood…

Yes, of course, I am kind of crazy about The God of Small Things, because it was the first adult- adult book I read. I was fifteen. I was a late bloomer in a cultural sense too, meaning I was not exposed to literature and writing early on (besides the Holy Bible). And ten years later, the mood of the book pervades my mind whenever I think of Roy. Like I said, I am no critic. However, the ‘mood’ Roy’s book captures is so potent; it is the hum of the provincial life, of the mosquito infested marsh, of dilapidated churches and dozing believers inside of it. It is the mood of the Meenachilar River. There is a sense of decomposition, which eventually culminates with the sight of abandoned houses.

For me, Roy’s first book is a biography.

Now that I am done with the gushing, I also direct you to Aijaz Ahmed’s critique of the book.

I am going to watch Kishkindha Kaandam this weekend. I was supposed to focus on my academics with unwavering attention, but I don’t have a lot of self- restraint.

Alright, bye! I hope someone somewhere is reading all of this.

It is quite funny to me that she dates the lambs and I choose the wolves. However, this is not about the wolves devouring the lambs, although, they might cross paths. This is about us, of the resplendence of our youth and an affirmation of our humanity denied to us, because for most of the world, we are a sub- par species with a stalled evolution.

My relationship with, let’s call this person Aditi, appears fleetingly in the passage of our bustling lives. After the glory of graduating from a women’s college, we took different paths. She works a 9-5 now. I am a fledgling PhD scholar. What marvels me is how life throws me into her lap, every time I am breaking from the seams. In the safety of her familiar company, I fall into a tranquility.

I refuse to romanticise our friendship. It is one that was sustained by the enormity of the grace she extended towards me after committing a deep betrayal. A second- chance was given, without the prick of reminders that the next infraction will have me ousted from her universe.

I do not know to theorise sisterhood, but I know that loneliness is a shard that cuts deep through the soul and perhaps, the only antidote to this looming threat is to find yourself among a group of like- minded women who are unmarried, and have an unquenched love for the world.

One thing nobody warns you about is the extent of work you have to put to sustain friendships. As one revels in the companionship of a friend, one has to also wrestle the miscommunication and disagreements that might arise. It is a meticulous work, this caring business. Feminists would tell you that we are embroiled in a “crisis of care”. Everyday, I wake up to a world I cannot tread on my own. On some days, I deal with the reality of this by not getting up at all from the bed. On other days, I walk and walk, with hands clasped firmly by my friends.

Coming back to wolves and lambs, they are mere distractions. After some efforts, I think I have learned to keep them at bay, without having these creatures gorging on my world. We are so intricately entangled with everything and everyone, and to have these symbiotic networks thwarted by whims of our very- much- straight lovers is unbearable.

You wake up, fold your sheets and comb your hair. If you feel a slight thrill that day, you line your eyes with kohl. When you are seated at the dining table for breakfast, the discomfort among those around you is palpable. Families get all sorts of ideas when their adult daughters reside in their homes for an interminable stretch of time; the challenge is to put you back on the assembly line, before the charakku (you) begin to decompose and lose value. If you are not earning and contributing to the family’s income, or if you remain unmarried, the personhood erodes and you are, but a defunct product, with null exchange value.

This is not a unique experience. My cousin budged to marital pressure, because it caused immense distress to the family to see her, merely hover around her own household. A lot of young women I know prefer to stay away from their families for the same reason. When a woman so concretely exists before their sight, in the fullness of her flesh, she poses a threat to the patriarchal household; she occupies a space outlawed to her after the wane of girlhood. She attempts to claim (however, unwillingly) a place to which she ceased belonging eons back. The unmarried young woman eludes the schema of the family. She cannot be conferred a role within the natal household and this illegibility generates tension which, ostensibly, has the potential to implode the familial structure. The resolution is ostracisation or marriage.

In short, I doubt many women can comfortably sit in the comfort of their homes and chart out an academic future. As much as she would like to read extensively and write in crystalline prose, the female scholar warrants no respectability from her family members who see her academic engagements as indulgences. In her poem, daughter, Sudhir Hammad writes:

the tradition of my parents

wanted a daughter not a writer

I earned abominable scores both during my B.A. and M.A. This should be surprising, given, both times, for undergrad degree and Masters, I had to put up a bloody fight to just be allowed to study. It is ironic how I ended up not studying, because my wounds were ripped open, and they began to reek. Once out of my home, I was gripped by insomnia and panic attacks, and for years, I failed to understand why my body revolted so much against itself. I wanted to be like my smart peers, “an academic weapon” to use the internet’s lingo, but the repressed pain struck like a whiplash.

When my grandmother got to know I’d like to pursue a PhD, she privately told me that I should let it go, for the sake of my parents. I pay no heed to this advice of hers, because she is the same woman who becomes tearful each time she recounts how she was forced to stop schooling.

For a long time, my mother lied to me that she holds a degree in History, until I had to edit her resume one day and asked her why there is no mention of the degree. She replied, “I thought my daughters will not take their education seriously, if they found out I haven’t gone to college”. We laughed together.

Let’s be candid, I am not embarking on a PhD to release the unfulfilled dreams of my mother or aunts. I am doing it for myself, and most of the times, I am alone. I am fortunate enough to not bear the financial responsibilities of the household, at least for a short time. I told my parents recently that I would appreciate if they could redirect the money earmarked as dowry to my education. “We don’t have a dowry fund to begin with”, my mother informed.

Irrespective of all the well- intended blog posts that promise to demystify the process of Grad School admissions, our chance at procuring a seat— as we grapple with the onslaught of neoliberal capitalism in our social sciences’ departments— depends on arbitrary factors like luck.

In 2021, when my comrades and I campaigned against the National Education Policy- 2020, a lot of students, particularly from well- to- do backgrounds vocalised their preference for the newly introduced Four Year Undergraduate Program (FYUP). Their reasoning being that the Four Year degree gives an edge when applying abroad for graduate programs. This statement underlines the defeat of public education in the country. As the middle class redefine their aspirations and flock to foreign countries for higher education, those left behind have to make do with meagre stipend amounts and juggle TA-ing with research. My former professor, who was cast out of the university, provides an insight into the reality that doctoral students must eventually face.

The Union Budget has dramatically slashed UGC funding by 61 percent. With the aggressive promotion of digital learning, MOOC courses and skill- based education that NEP- 2020 outlines, the end of the university has commenced. We are most definitely fucked. The END.

I graduated somewhere around April 2023, with a not- very- impressive CGPA, alcoholism and infinite amount of self- deprecation. I went through a gruelling admission cycle applying to Indian universities. CUET— a centralised admissions’ test consisting only of multiple choice questions— had to be tackled. The scores were then used by departments as entry- level cut- offs, following which one had to attend interviews. I had a ‘dummy- proposal’, something I actually did not want to work on, but nonetheless, was polished enough to be submitted for evaluation by the pompous inspectors occupying faculty positions.

I remember turning up for my scheduled interview at JNU. The corridor was teeming with aspirants. It was a brutal winter season, and I sipped coffee in one of the canteens. When it was my turn to give the interview, I was greeted by a panel of smug- faced academicians who seemed to have already made up their minds on whom they would choose. Nonetheless, they played the charade. A surly looking professor asked, what is so sociological about this? I mumbled an unsatisfactory reply, but he was persistent in his interrogation.

Where is SOCIOLOGY in this?

I left the hall flushed in embarrassment. His defensiveness about disciplinary boundaries seemed comical to me. To nobody’s surprise, I did not make it to the final list.

The next interview I subjected myself to was that conducted by the Delhi School of Economics, an institute that once enjoyed extraordinary eminence for sociological research. I traveled all the way to North Delhi, depleted my allowance on Uber, and arrived half an hour later to the qualification test. I did not stay around for the interview, because I was reeling from an agonising flu and hence, feverish and heavily disoriented.

Dejected, I decided I would leave this uncaring city, and go home to my grandmother. By this time, I had given upon applying for PhD programs in the country. My friends, who had given the CUET with me in October, were finally getting admission spots for doctoral programs by the end of February. It took nearly six months of uncertainty for my friends to make it. The happiness wasn’t fool- proof. Central universities grant a paltry stipend of eight thousand rupees for PhD scholars. There was another hurdle to be bypassed, if my friends wished to live a life of dignity— the UGC NET exam. Clearing this ineffably ridiculous exam could guarantee minimum financial security for scholars.

Around me, most of my fellow classmates were appointed as Research Assistants or NGO workers. They had jobs. They had jobs that would gleam bright on their resumes. Things worked out for other people, or it appeared to me so. They were on their way to hallowed academies, and I presumed I would forever wallow in self- pity.

News of acquaintances making it into PhDs abroad was celebrated all over social media. FULLY FUNDED! IVY LEAGUE ACCEPTATION! On Twitter (alright, ‘X’), people were always ‘delighted to share’ that they got accepted into a program or other. I reworked my proposal, quit my remote work to focus on research. I was/ am burnt- out.

Alongside writing the proposal, I applied for countless jobs. I applied to a publication house six times, three times out of sheer spite, that regularly advertised for an entry level position. They rejected me each time. I rummaged through webpages of successful PhD applicants to find out their research background, but mainly, to self- flagellate. I have no qualms admitting I am a deeply embittered person. All I know today is that impostor- syndrome and a diminished sense of worth prevented me from reaching my arms out to opportunities. I thought I was never ready enough, never well- read enough to begin applying outside.

I am disillusioned by this quest. I have lost enthusiasm for reading, the very reason why I embarked on this journey. Writing endless emails that re- iterate my proposed research interest has sapped me of any joy. The more you repeat certain things, they start to lose their meaning. Now I wonder if there’s any merit to my work at all.

During my Masters, I took a course on ‘critical pedagogy’. We collectively lamented about the trajectory of higher education policy in the country and ate oily snacks once the class dispersed. A semester of Marx, Althusser and Freire, before we were so brazenly exposed to the indignities of the job- market. Once I started tabulating all the jobs I apply to. I got bored, and the excel sheet read like a tally of my personal failures.

There are no take- aways or advices from this piece. Academic work is precarious, but conversion rates make certain offers more enticing. I know I need money. Perhaps, I should have known it a decade earlier, before I was entranced by idyllic hopes of making a living out of what I love. Bullshit, I swear.

But I think what was most distinctive about Appachan was his storytelling— he could tell the audience something mundane that happened years ago, and infuse to the narration a kind of potent humor, sarcasm and wit, and capture the grandiosity of history and time with a language, coarsened by embitterment and drudgery.

Appachan was the eldest among his siblings. He dropped out after fourth grade and joined his father, a  jolly fellow, who meandered across the canals and paddy fields of Kuttanad and Kumarakom on his boat. Thus, at a young age, he accompanied his father to sell earthenwares in towns of Kumarokam and Edathua. During his time as a marine wanderer, Appachan learned how to fish for and cook mackerels.

At twenty seven, he got posting in KSEB and worked as an electrician until retirement. He was also engaged in paddy cultivation. Appachan’s disposition towards productive  work was something that aided him to support his brood of younger siblings. His own father, being a careless wanderer, never gave much of a thought to the care of his children, and thus, much of this burden fell upon Appachan’s shoulders.

An image flashes before my eyes: sometime back in 2008, I stand by the bund and watch a perspiring Appachan scatter the seeds across the field, trudging through mud and clay.

Another image is of him slitting the throat of a chicken on a Sunday morning, blood splattering on our washing slab.

The gentlest memory, however, is the one in which he takes me to a KSRTC bus ride to our nearest church. I was ten and was to return to my parents —who had immigrated to the UAE— after spending two years under the care of my grandparents. It was our special ride, the last joint visit to ‘Kochupally’ and I hugged him and wept, as a torrential rain drenched the seat and streamed forcefully through the bus shutters.

I am not suggesting that Appachan was a flawless man. He was a typical patriarch, and carried feudal prejudices like artifacts to be handed over to the succeeding generation and the next. We avoided talking of politics. His aspirations for me included a well- paying job and a respectable marriage. I have failed to achieve both.

Appachan’s demise hangs upon the house like a fever dream. We sit in the veranda and look at the empty wooden chair he used to occupy.

I look at myself and realize there’s hardly a trace of him in my temperament. But then, I graze at my bulbous, not-very- feminine nose with the tip of my nail. That is a part of him etched on my face. That is my inheritance, along with my name that he chose and pronounced before the world first.

“My eldest son’s oldest daughter”, he would beckon me affectionately. The last time I met him, he muttered the same thing, despite the tubes that clogged his nostrils and mouth. I am, Appachan’s first granddaughter, and while I might not, in my disposition, reflect the principles that anchored him (or brazenly disagree with most of them) in the world, there’s one lesson he had always emphasized upon: be a just and righteous person.

Neethimaanayi Jeevikkuka.

you first have to walk over the wooden arch bridge,

beneath which–

street urchins swim in a display of divine kinetics, 

ignoring the warning of their beleaguered mothers– standing by the riverbank

evoking the name of the saint,

so their tongues, blessed by the utterance of the saint’s name

may forget the taste of hunger,

so the punyalan, with the tip of the spear that had plunged into the dragon’s skull

may extricate their entrails–

beneath which,

once a potter who rowed his boat,

would fix his gaze on the sahada’s shrine and bow his head as the

sun liquified and fizzled upon the waters

(the man was my great grandfather, kuttappi- the varathan)

once you have crossed the bridge, 

after making customary purchases of gold, incense and garments 

from the shops across the church, owned by descendants of debauched landlords,

you walk towards the column of red bricks.

pick a brick from the pile,

feel the texture and weight of the brick 

and place it upon your head.

now, bearing the weight of your sins,

and those of your ancestors,

encircle the perimeter of the cathedral ten times each:

one, you owe an apology for having been born with the mortal sin,

you who were birthed out of vulgar, human passion;

two, your passion expands and festers within you, and it emits an unbearable stench;

three, you fell in love.

four, you fell in love, and your love did not redeem you;

five, the voice of the mad preacher rings in your head:

ONLY JESUS CHRIST,

OUR LORD AND SAVIOUR WILL TRULY LOVE YOU! YES, in all YOUR UNWORTHINESS.

six, you found a common krait convulsing in the blue web of net erected over the boundary of your paddy field.

seven, you fell in love and hatched venomous eggs.

you fell in love, and your hazel brown tresses turned to serpents.

eight, you hissed at your lover.

nine, you cut your hair from its roots,

the golden locks slithered into your neighbour’s plot of land.

ten, the punyalan is venerated far and wide for

his power to deliver people from the wrath of plagues and poxes and the assault of snakes.

the punyalan slashes the crown of the serpent that nibbed the woman’s heel.

our edathua punyalan is a gilded little guy;

he does not have the machismo of his european representations,

our punyalan is a persian beauty with a south indian blend.

he looks into your eyes,

without a glint of malice in them.

a faint smile wavering on his face

as his lance pierces the belly of the beast.

This poem is written after Saint George, the patron saint of Edathua Forane Church in Kuttanad, Alappuzha. Saint George is colloquially referred to as Geevarghese Punyalan.

Sahada: Syriac word for ‘martyr’

Punyalan: Saint

Varathan- Outsider

To know more about devotion to Saint George in Kerala,

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1006/reli.1997.0085

https://www.keralatourism.org/christianity/chruches-st-george/50

blow air into my mouth and utter the command of life,

rib bone extricated from his body, an elimination of what seemed excess

a man wanted to fashion me out of himself,

create a Frankensteinish freak, perform anatomical experiments;

but I was already fully formed

before he walked out of my womb,

before he named, claimed and seized everything upon the earth

the last time a man tried to create me—

apple juice staining his teeth, semen dripping from his member—

he was exiled from paradise.

I am not a vapour to be contained

before it dissipates into the air

I was always here,

bare legs stretched apart,

a congelation of flesh and blood.

you never looked back

to the cave you crawled out of,

you never saw me,

but I was always here,

glaring at the cathedral you built.