When I was a little under three years old, my parents took me to watch two movies at the cinema in quick succession, praying, I suppose, that their kid doesn’t throw a crying fit in the muchness of the theatrical experience. This is hearsay, cherry-picked from family conversation, so adjust your expectations accordingly: but my mother said I was a natural at the movies. Unlike other antsy kids, my cousins among them, I sat yoked to my seat, watching the screen with rapt attention. It didn’t matter that both of these movies were over two hours long, punctuated by frequent song breaks. It didn’t matter that these movies were in Hindi, a language I was yet to learn as a Telugu-speaking child. I devoured them, eyes open, nary a sound escaped my mouth. The year was 1995, and the films were Rangeela and Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, released a mere month apart.

Of the two, it’s easy to imagine what movie might have made a stronger impression on a child yet learning to see, discern shape from colour, unbridled joy from melodramatic sap. From the opening credit slideshow of iconic faces that have immortalized Hindi cinema, diegetic sounds of Bombay slowly curdling to a high-spirited, unrestrained vocal lift narrativizing the film’s beating heart, to Urmila Matondkar’s nimble-footed turn as a jejune on the brink of stardom, I was enraptured, taken, and irrevocably in love. Asha Bhosle’s “Rangeela Re”, a hat-tip to all that is free, pure, and earnest about ambition and yearning, quickly became my anthem. My mother says I cried for days until my father relented with a cassette of the Rangeela soundtrack — incidentally, my first foray into Rahman. But it was Asha’s voice: young and desirous, that would hold my hands into girlhood. And Mili, the star-is-born in Rangeela’s ode to Hindi Cinema, would evoke the possibility of dreaming well beyond your means.

A fortnight ago, Asha Bhosle passed away, earning tributes, well-deserved elegies, and retrospectives. And why wouldn’t she? Together with her elder sister Lata Mangeshkar, Bhosle was a doyen of Hindi playback singing—she has been recording music for nearly as long as India’s been independent. [It’s an incredible feat and a sobering conclusion: we’re losing many of the faces, voices, pens that captured India’s coming-of-age story.] Much has been written about Bhosle’s incredible range: her ability to switch from Hindustani classical to cabaret, Ghazal to ballads, operas to lullabies. We have literature comparing the Mangeshkar sisters: Asha’s weightlessness to Lata’s gravitas, Asha’s sensual playfulness paralleled by a colorful personal life, to Lata’s austere discipline. But I write to consider what Asha’s voice did for women on screen, to examine, indeed, what vocal capacity does for women’s storytelling in cinema.

And we need only look at two women: Mili and Simran.

Mili, the dreaming, precocious, determined ingénue of Rangeela, and Simran, the self-correcting, conflicted daughter of Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge arrived in the same year. But both held very different possibilities for women in India, and in film, for the young girls who watched them onscreen.

Rangeela is the story of Mili (Matondkar), a background dancer in Hindi films who aspires to be a heroine. One day Mili is discovered by superstar Raj Kamal (Jackie Shroff), dancing on the beach—he’s so taken by the way she moves, unperturbed by gaze and uncaring of applause, that he casts her opposite him in a movie. But Mili is also desired by Munna (Aamir Khan), her ragamuffin street-smart neighbour who has loved her his entire life. Who Mili chooses is the film; what Mili will become is non-negotiable. From the first moment Matondkar as Mili appears in the frame, in the title track to Bhosle’s voice, Mili’s future feels destined. Her lithe unrehearsed freestyle, her agility of movement and readiness of expression, make Mili a Capital-H Heroine before she’s even landed her first gig. It’s a matter of time, we say watching the movie—and are happily confirmed.

What does Bhosle’s voice do for Mili? It energizes her journey from ingénue to starlet, from face discovered to star-become. There are two glorious Asha Bhosle numbers on the Rangeela soundtrack: the title track “Rangeela Re” kicks off the film and orchestrates the audience’s discovery and love for Mili, whereas “Tanha Tanha” is this dreamy, beach-kissed number of pure pheromones, by which point Mili is a heroine, realized and ready on a movie set. In “Rangeela Re”, Bhosle is cherubic, open, audacious; in “Tanha Tanha,” she is husky, measured, all-woman.

Between these two songs, an artiste comes-of-age.

Rangeela was A R Rahman’s first original soundtrack in Hindi, and the first time he would collaborate with one of the Mangeshkar sisters. While some reviewers of the time say Rangeela revived Asha Bhosle’s career in the 90s, it feels impossible to imagine any other 90s singer embody Mili’s easy, guileless sexuality and embodied artistry. Not Alka Yagnik and her paper-thin high-pitched vocals, more suitable for romantic ballads and playful naivety (and no: “Choli Ke Peeche Kya Hai” is what is it purely because of the video). Kavita Krishnamurthy, though easily more interesting and versatile, didn’t have the mythos to lend a song an immediate burst of spirit. And let’s not even entertain the idea of an Anuradha Paudwal. The lore to Asha Bhosle’s voice and artistic tapestry, the playful sensuality of her association with challenging R. D. Burman numbers and Helen cabarets, her technical mastery, lent an immediate heft to Rangeela and its collaborators: where Ram Gopal Verma, A R Rahman, and Urmila, were relatively new and burgeoning, Asha’s voice was the definitive lift to the film’s narrative, at the sprightly age of 62.

Indian cinema, not unlike Hollywood in this regard, has struggled with femininity on screen, and often resorted to the good woman / naught woman archetype; where the former is the saree-clad woman of substance you can take home to your mother, the latter is the titillating eye-candy, all body and potent. Where Hema Malini, Waheeda Rehman, Jaya Bhaduri, easily fit into the first category, Parveen Babi and Zeenat Aman fit into the second; outliers would include Rekha who had the versatility for both, and later in the 80s, Sridevi. But those early films of Indian cinema broadly seemed to suggest that substance needed to exist independent of sexuality and playfulness. Asha Bhosle’s voice could be the bridge; it allowed the women she sang for to embody sexuality on screen, while also being deeply dynamic and complex women. Mili in Rangeela, her want and ambition propelling the film’s narrative engine, is perhaps a most glorious illustration of how background vocals can help channel a full-bodied personhood onscreen.

When I think of Mili in Rangeela, I think naturally of Simran in Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge. A more commercially successful and culturally enduring film due to its impact on the diaspora, much of the soundtrack for Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge is set to Lata Mangeshkar’s voice. But its narrative hardly aspires for transgression. Simran, the daughter of a strict traditionalist father, falls in love with Raj on a Euro-trip; this compels Raj to follow Simran to Punjab, interrupt her arranged-marriage ceremonies, and win over her family’s approval. While the film takes place in Punjab, London, and Europe, Dilwale… at its heart is a movie about toeing-the-line, of conservatism cloaked in branded clothing. Crucially, the film places Simran, its female protagonist, squarely in relationship to and not by herself; we see Simran fractured between her father’s expectations and her love for Raj, but we’re never allowed access to Simran as a person, as a young woman aspiring to something other than the autonomy to choose her partner. Even within the bounds of this narrative, Simran rarely pushes boundaries; she’s afforded few, if any, moments of agency, and is often the one following, not energizing the narrative. She begs to go on a Euro-trip with her friends, trades her life in the bargain, but is sullen and self-censured throughout; she is enraged when a guy drinks alcohol in front of her, can’t seem to let loose even when physically separated from her parents, such is her fear of parental correction.

There is but one moment of reprieve Simran has in the entire film. When freezing in a barnyard in Europe, she decides to take a swig of Raj’s alcohol to warm up, gets drunk, and prances around the city. In a soundtrack overpowered by Lata’s voice, this song of let-loose: “Zara Sa Jhoom Loon Main” (“Let me sway a little”) is set to — you guessed it — Asha’s voice.

Perhaps the differing registers of Mili and Simran didn’t seep in as a child, though I certainly felt and responded to Mili’s joy more—but on repeated rewatches throughout childhood, it is Mili’s ambition, desire, and craven hunger for largess that spoke to me. Unlike Dilwale…, Rangeela does not leave the shores of India, taking place largely in Mumbai and Goa, but Mili’s quest is outsized.

This was true for me, and may have been for other women reading this: cinema has always shaped my understanding of gender, body, sensuality, romance, morality, and wanting. In a society quick to dismiss and disregard dialogue around emotionally complicated registers, I turned to films to understand layered subtexts that ordinary interactions rarely afforded. As a child growing up in the 90s, the films I watched were the foreground to my coming-of-age. Mili occupied such a force to this imagination for the self, this belief that one could be anything if they wanted to—Asha Bhosle’s voice was the spirited guardrail to this religion.

And this would compel so many other characters across movies: as the thieving, manipulative, oh-so-seductive Daya Shankar (Matondkar) in the comical hijinks of Daud, which would reunite Bhosle with Matondkar, Rahman, and Verma; yearning as a divorced, fragmented woman (Tabu) in Chachi 420; as the theatrical danseuse (Karisma Kapoor) in Dil To Pagal Hai; heralding another star-is-born moment, this time for Aishwarya Rai in Taal (1999): as an obsessive lover-gone-rogue in Pyaar Tune Kya Kiya (2001); embodying the playful tease of Radha-Krishna love in Lagaan; and of course, as the mischief-making interruption from Shamita Shetty in Mere Yaar Ki Shaadi Hai; as a bunch of horny teenage girls in Lucky (she’s 72 here by the way). The late 90s and early 2000s feature fascinating turns for women in Hindi cinema and often, Asha Bhosle’s voice would be the vocal accompaniment.

Zoom out and this would be true for women across decades: for Rekha in Umrao Jaan (1981), Madhubala in Howrah Bridge (1958), Waheeda Rehman in Chaudhvin Ka Chand (1960), Helen across numbers of surging sexual teasing, Zeenat Aman in Hare Rama Hare Krishna (1971), or, my personal favorite, as Asha Parekh’s girl-on-the-run turn in Caravan (1971): Bhosle’s voice ensured a prismatic moodboard for an actor to embody on screen, of body, vigour, sensuality, and feminine delights. This doesn’t even cover her immense work in independent music, her albums of pop-remixes, ghazals, qawaalis, her collaborations with britpop acts.

When one voice reigns over a generation’s soundboard, songs and renditions can start to feel interchangeable. This has certainly been the case over the last decade: where Shreya Ghoshal and Arijit Singh have become the de-facto voices for Hindi film music, it’s hard to imagine variation in persona, appeal, and mythos on screen. The disappearing act of women in Hindi film soundtracks directly impacts what women can embody in film—consider the biggest films of the last three years: what were women doing in them? Asha Bhosle’s voice registered a possibility of prospects for women in cinema; but also for the girls and women, gays and queers watching it, of the kinds of mythos possible in a self-mythologizing medium.

As a child, I watched and rewatched one spectacular live show of Asha Bhosle that would play ad nauseam on tv: a star-studded affair, in it celebrities rush to the stage to dance to Bhosle’s singing. Kajol, Rekha, Govinda, letting loose as the sexagenarian (how fitting!) Asha moved, writhed, and delighted in their embodying of her voice. This chemistry, so electrifying, is entirely missing in modern Hindi cinema. The losing of icons is never easy, but the losing of formative cultures? It’s much, much worse!

Something’s rotten in the state of Hindi film music. Everything is stale. Music composers are impeded by bloodsucking record companies (well, one, really but it really sets the stage for the rest to follow suit). When even the Rahmans, the Trivedis, the Shankar-Ehsaan-Loys are failing to come up with a half-decent album between them, then the larger culture begs investigation. When musicians are directed to make songs that can be repeated ad nauseam over 30-second long IG reels, that can relay a visual trend on social media, there is a paucity of imagination: songs are architectured around repetitive bursts, begin to sound awfully lot like each other. When movie soundtracks forsake the vision of a singular composer and the ensuing relationship that is shared between a composer, lyricist, screenwriter, and filmmaker, compiling instead a ragtag team of who’s in vogue, we get scrambled albums where each song is desperate to be a single, a runaway hit, where each song behaves as a part of a completely different movie altogether.

In this culture of lacking, composers turn to old songs; digging up tracks sometimes from the subliminal dead, some other times from recent past to encash on generational nostalgia. There have been a ton of these lately: from the unimaginatively named “Chor Bazaari Phir Se” to “Sajna Ve Sajna” (criminal for how it strips the pathos off the original). These remakes are hardly radical or interesting; often maintaining the narrative echo-chamber of the original, they are derivative, nothing more than a cheap parody, a petty crash-grab at best. Are they successful? The YouTube hits definitely suggest so. Will they enjoy a legacy? What legacy is borne in the absence of vision?

But something more insidious than capitalist opportunism is underway with the music of Dhurandhar, parts I and II, the latter of which released this past weekend. For one, accusations of laziness and dissonance don’t stand against the project. Featuring a two-picture soundtrack by Shashwat Sachdev, the Dhurandhar album is the result of a singular sonic vision board. It’s kinetic, aspiring to the ambitious footprint of filmmaker Aditya Dhar’s fanatical cross-border mission, no-holds barred. While the soundtrack too turns to the past for cues—drudging up songs from classic Hindi cinema to Punjabi British pop to achieve its cinematic soundboard—the effect here is different. Far from simply mounting a lazy remix of the original, Sachdev chooses to sample songs, composing a fresh outtake around the sampled parts. This allows the songs to be renewed, reimagined, transplanted from their original usage to fit a whole new patchwork. The songs are popular too, charting incredible numbers on Spotify and YouTube music, challenging an audience to want more from reimagined music.

Except, and this part is crucial, Sachdev’s soundtrack, successful to the spirit of the film, achieves another outcome—it rids the songs of their foundational blueprint, the narrative and compositional ethos of the primary record, the syncretic principles of the creator team, and instead crafts a brand new sonic memory, one tied to Dhar and the movie’s explicit adherence to a political ideology sanctioned by one national party—we all know which one. With Dhurandhar, Dhar is not simply rewriting history, casting past failures and successes in strictly partisan terms; its music is also cultivating brand new associations where songs from forgotten past are renewed under the egis of nationalist violence and bloodlust.

By now, the narrative thesis of Dhurandhar is quite well known; the first part grossed USD 140 million at the global box office, and the second part will likely do just as much. The film’s narrative agenda has also been written and debated about extensively; one would have to live under a proverbial rock to skip the volume around Dhar’s duology. A historical fiction take on India-Pakistan cross-border tensions compounded by terrorist activity and military excess, Dhurandhar is a fantasy built around a what-if possibility. What if: India could simply send an all-capable man: Hamza, a figment of bulging arms and sharp instincts, as spy into “enemy territory”, dropped into the thick of Karachi gang wars, the proverbial site of all terrorist activity against India. What if: Hamza could infiltrate the ranks, rise to rub-shoulders with the who’s who of ISI, become integral to the inner workings of the political-military-financial nexus that supposedly regulates not only national politics in Pakistan but also launches offensives on Indian internal security. Narrativized around “some” real-life events, others grossly misrepresented, Dhurandhar imagines an insider, one of our own among the other, and builds a violent if mythical take down around this fantasy.

To do so, like any Hindi film, Dhurandhar relies on music to propel its narrative ambition forward. Sachdev, who earlier worked with Dhar on Uri: The Surgical Strike (2019), returns to curate a soundtrack that cites an array of regional and trans-national music influences: qawaali, bhangra, hip-hop, Bollywood opera, soul funk, rock jostle for attention on a dense, polyphonic soundtrack. The influences are electric across the two films; the results are debatable. Personally, I found the first soundtrack a bit clamorous—some songs are fun, some others noisy, together, it’s all too much—while the second feels comparatively dissonant [although I love, love “Phir Se” from the second album; beautiful Arijit vocals, stunning Irshad Kamil lyrics.]. But this isn’t about the merits or subjective estimation of the albums, rather it concerns the rewriting at play and how it twists the songs into a modern nation-state agenda.

Consider: classic Hindi film composer Roshan’s ‘“Na Toh Caravan Ki Talash Hai” from Barsaat Ki Raat (1960), a choral qawaali, featuring the voices of Manna Dey, Asha Bhosle, Mohammed Rafi, Sudha Malhotra, and S. D. Batish o Sahir Ludhianavi’s poetry, is reimagined around a pivotal line: “Na toh karvaan ki talaash hai, na toh humsafar ki talash hai,” I’m not in search of a caravan, nor in need of a companion, to underline the solitary pursuit of a spy in enemy state. Barsaat ki Raat is a stunning, poetic opera of love between an Urdu poet and a woman in love with his verse, against the backdrop of newly Independent India. It’s sensual, charged with ambition and sincerity; shaayari and qawaali are the medium for the film’s implicit, unresolved tension, carrying a poet’s deep yearning. “Tera ishq hai meri aarzoo, tera ishq hai meri aabru, tera ishq main kaise chodh dun,” sings Manna Dey in “Yeh Ishq Ishq Hai,” an extended qawaali from the same film. Your love is my desire, your love is my honor, how can I lose your love? This song is revived in Dhurandhar’s lingua franca, becoming a treatise on Hamza’s commitment to patriotic love for India. But in Hamza’s world, this erstwhile gentle anthem of unadulterated love is set to Sonu Nigam’s voice and visuals of guns, blood, and violence. Patriotic love is underscored by a willingness to hurt, to maim, to strike down. The soundtrack is simply an enabler, a vibe-setter, if you will.

Similarly: Bappi Lahiri’s Rhamba Ho, itself a generous rip-off of Donna Summers’ I Feel Love, becomes the histrionic score to a gun square-off with bullets ripping through a wedding hall; R. D. Burman’s erotic melodramatization of the cabaret in “Piya Tu Ab Toh Aaja” is masculated with Hamza tearing through the streets of Karachi with a barely-adult Muslim woman riding pillion; British-Indian MC Panjabi MC’s wildly popular Jogi is sampled here with rap from Hanuumankind, to complement Hamza’s undertaking as one proverbial cool and with-it project, reclaiming cross-border missions from geopolitical necessity to one with spiffy, tantalizing appeal.

While I haven’t seen the second part of Dhurandhar, a multitude of samples circle its soundtrack: from Danish duo Bombay Rockers’ Aari Aari, a diasporic ode to pind life to R. D. Burman’s hedonistic sad-song “Kabhi Bekasi Ne Maara.” The movie also includes reimaginations of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s qawaalis: “Dil Pe Zakhm Khate Hain” and “Man Atkeya Beparwah De Naal”, a kalam by Punjabi Sufi Poet Shah Hussein. For a film with a decidedly anti-Pakistan stance, the choice to feature songs from the oeuvre of Pakistan’s most enduring voice is certainly … interesting. I can’t speak to their picturization but for a sequel titled The Revenge, which reviewers have called angry, and excessively violent, I can only imagine the visual output.

In all of these re-renderings, the songs are stripped off their sui generis aspiration, and manipulated in parts and extracts to fit a whole new milieu and moodboard. Gone: the hybrid vocal arrangement of Roshan’s Qawaalis and the lush poetics of Sahir Ludhianavi’s urdu poetry, the sexual playfulness of Lahiri’s music and Usha Uthup’s transgressive voice, the theatrical suspense of Caravan’s cabaret, the transnational handshake of diaspora MCs, the yearning in Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s voice that cuts through language, border, and generation; the blueprint is renewed for a younger generation wholly unfamiliar with this music. This blueprint is set to militaristic patriotism made aspirational, violence as just and retributive measure, and a political ideology that is not pro-nation or pro-people or pro-life, as much as it is pro-party, amply awarded by India’s Prime Minister in power.

Music here then is a tool to aestheticize violence. Music, reimagined, remixed, sampled, reconstructed, is mobilized to set tempo, melody, and extracted to infuse meaning onto montages of brutality. Without music, violence is just… violence. It’s simply gore, simply skin being peeled off body, arms being hacked, bodies being bludgeoned. In short, it’s simply gratuitous. The music here, encashing on both familiarity and in appealing to new audiophiles, soothes over the proceedings, makes it cool, urgent, necessary, relishing. The extracted lyrics offer poetic justification to the visuals at play.

Go to the videos of the original recordings on YouTube and you’ll find a recurring theme. “Who is here after Dhurandhar <Insert fire emoji>.” Or some variant of that, thereof. There is a rewriting of history here too. The intention of the artists, the composite culture that birthed the composition is lost to represent a narrative stripped off nuance, uni-directional in its bloodlust.

In 1992, psychoanalyst Stuart Feder, who spent a lifetime writing on the deep linkages between psychoanalysis and music, described songs as “compound aural memories”, due to their ability to encode and sustain various memories at once. Consider any song from Yash Chopra’s Dil To Pagal Hai (1997); for a kid raised in the 90s, the song can evoke several interlinked yet distinct memories at once: the experience of the movie itself, the thrill of communal Antakshari sessions, montage of weddings and building parties, a mellifluous arrangement of contestants on singing reality shows, maybe even an Annual Day performance or two. These memories come together to shape not just your emotional resonance with the song, but your relationship and understanding of such things as beauty, love, community, family, and the extensions of all such attributes. [Pesonally? I cannot think of Bombay rains without humming to “Ghode jaisi chaal, haathi jaise dhum, o saavan raaja, kahaan se aaye tum.”]

For a younger generation, coming of age to the soundtrack of Dhurandhar, what aural memories are taking root? “Kharay Siyyane Rah Dasende, Ishq Kee Lagay Rah De Nal,” writes the poet Shah Hussein. Wise folks show you the path, yet love needs no guidance. For a movie clinging desperately to a fantasy, where comeuppance comes only in the shape of punitary, vengeful assault, where the death of innocents is deployed to sustain a certain ideology at the center, what shape does Shah Hussein’s poetry, rendered in divine longing or perhaps subtextual romance, take in this renewed context? The image of a spy, a figment of desire and numbing violence, a craven bloodlust for more, the endurance of war…

So… yep, yes, yeah, I guess if all things go well, my short story collection will be out in the world one year from now. With Feminist Press in the US and Penguin Random House in India.

A few people, online and in real life, have asked me: How does it all feel? Are you terribly excited? How did you celebrate?

My answer to those questions in this order: I don’t know. Sure (but mainly terrified). Nothing yet.

Not to mope around on main; this moment does feel significant. It’s a culmination for a project I’m been compiling for nearly seven years. It’s a consummation of obsessive hours spent thinking of all the ways the domestic space has been my reckoning and undoing, and how it’s potent for transgressions: familial, gendered, sexual, that can trickle a domino effect into the collective, political space. I’m honored the project gets to enter the collective with Feminist Press, a publisher I turned to from the very first minute I encountered their booth at my first ever Brooklyn Book Festival in 2016 as a newbie transplant to the States. It’s absurdly unbelievable that little ol’ me will have a book published in India by a publisher I’ve read my entire life. These are all gifts and I don’t take them lightly. Crucially, I do feel safe and held together by all the people instrumental to this process: editors Jeanne Thornton, Kameel Mir, and Rea Mukherjee, agents Danielle Chiotti and Kanishka Gupta, and all the other wonderful folks in sales and admin I’ve met through these folks, who see my work and hold it in esteem. I could not be more grateful to be collaborating with them.

Perhaps it’s because I’m yet to begin edits, or maybe it will take receiving a physical galley to feel changed and truly reckon with a feeling. But the announcement also has me feeling a bit exposed: something that was personal and for a few trusted eyes only so far, will travel beyond me and affect and be affected by everyone that will encounter it. Certainly this has to feel universal to every artist on the cusp of publication. It is inevitable: the people that will see this work will have feelings about it; I may not like some of those feelings. There is a small, tentative part of me that is already preparing for this outcome.

On the other hand, I also feel: what the hell, we could all do with thinking less of ourselves. It’s a colossal mess we’re in. There is so much pain and anguish in the world at this very moment, I feel my heart breaking at an average of five times a day. It is remarkable any of us are getting anything done; caught in the belly of the imperial, military beast, bemoaning homes that are coming apart as we endeavour, make work, feed ourselves. It is remarkable I am here and alive; it is remarkable any of us are here and not there, deep in the vortex of world come apart; it is remarkable and only a draw of the card that we are still ticking.

Most days, it is remarkable we can get anything done at all. How do we resist the cold, hard rush of anger?

Maybe that is why I write, to obsess over, make from nothing: something, so I don’t crumble with all this anger. How lucky am I that I get to put this work out? Very, very, sublimely lucky. I hope you will read it when this work is a tangible, little thing.

***

I was in Baltimore first week of March attending the 2026 iteration of AWP, repping Radix. As it goes with AWP, I made a last-minute appearance on a panel “International writers navigating post-MFA careers.” Few things rile me up like the arduous, exploitative immigration process it takes to remain and work as an artist in the country. And young writers, still in college, rarely know the cost of living and continuing to make art in the US. Colleges that covet international students rarely prepare them for the realities of post-graduation careers. [If you work in academia, you will know how little college admission committees even know about post-graduation visa options in the first place.] The most common visas are not tentative options for writers, and indeed most artists who wish to have jobs and also make money from their art. The MFA here is also notorious because it is a discipline-based rigor; it asks you to commit to art without having to concern yourself with the vagaries of employment or the jobs industry. But this is also precisely why the graduate writing degree feels closed off to those from less-advantaged backgrounds. International students do not have the option to switch careers after graduation or accept cursory paying jobs in the service industry to keep the writing gig going. Unlike homegrown writers, international students have to plant the seeds of potential employment and opportunity from the very second they land in the US, if they wish to stay; they cannot simply write-away for two years blissfully unaware of larger immigration realities.

The international writer experience elucidates how many parallel narratives are taking shape in the MFA or within the larger writing community. The annual AWP conference is another great backdrop to understanding this. It draws publishers, writers, writing programs, and booksellers from around the US every year but the reality of attending AWP is not the same across the board. In a bid to be affordable, AWP alternates between a smaller town and a big city every year; but come the conference and its rush, even smaller towns begin to resemble big-city prices. Rooms in paltry two and three-star hotels in Baltimore were going for over $400 a night the week of AWP; it was impossible to get an uber for under $25 even for the shortest 10-minute ride to anywhere in the city. For publishers, the price of appearance at the conference is steep: the cost of the booth or table, the cost of ferrying two to three members to the host city, and cover food and lodging does not not always guarantee returns in sales.

For emerging writers though, AWP can feel necessary from the outside-in; from the inside, it’s hard-pressed to find the lure. It can be an opportunity to see your favourite writers on panels of craft and industry, but the schedule is so incessant, there is barely any room for reflection or play. I’ve been to this thing twice now, and both times, I’ve felt zapped of all energy, rather than rejuvenated or inspired to write. The conference has the subtlety of a Las Vegas casino caught under harsh tungsten lighting in the after-hours. The question is: what are we peddling?

What can I tell you about Baltimore after AWP? Nothing but that it was wet and cold to touch. That in shades of morning light, it resembled a backdrop to the kind of David Fincher drama we don’t get to watch anymore. That the harbor looked potent for unease, hewn by the kind of wetness that feels palpable. Nothing more. For two years in a row, I have seen and enjoyed little of the host city, running from hotel to conference center to reading and back again. It was all so needlessly much that I returned to Providence sick beyond measure. One week later, I’m just about crawling out of the woodwork.

I might continue showing up at AWP still; as an editor and professor, it is imperative I go even if the writer in me would take a break. But next time around, I’m determined to see the city, enjoy great food, and find pockets of leisure. If I’m still around to make it to AWP in Chicago, I’ll be out dancing, eating, and trolling about. And maybe this is what we need more than an offsite reading. A good ol’ dance party! Writers who are interested, hmu!

I’m currently watching Man on the Run, a documentary on Paul McCartney’s post-Beatles music, his solo work (the fantastic Ram which is the superior post-facto solo record, no questions about it), his exurban life with Linda, rearing sheep (Ram!), turning vegetarian, and learning to collaborate again with The Wings. No matter how repetitive the beats of the story are, I’m always down to watch a Beatles documentary—the sui generis pulse behind their meteoric rise shaped by four unique, and often competing, perspectives is such good narrative drama, soundtracked to compelling music. (Sue me, I love schmaltz!).

The documentary had me return to McCartney (1970), then Ram (1971) and McCartney II (1980)—but a big whole NOPE on McCartney III—and had me thinking how much I love these albums, yes, but naturally return to the time in my life when loving things: albums, books, movies, mainly, television and art, secondarily, came easy. Anyone who knew me in the before knew of my unvarnished love for things that moved me. I could be annoying, superior, absolute about the things I liked; it felt easy to profess this love as both unabashed and founded, and to argue for art on grounds of critique and that ephemeral thing called taste (yes, yes I know this can be classist and campist; I’ve read Sontag and Hume too.).

I’m firmly divorced from the “let people enjoy things” camp, because, why, yes obviously, stating so feels redundant and overtly defensive; I also think it necessary to be able to advocate for our choices, of material and artistic pleasure, on intellectual, critical, and political grounds. But lately, loving things, enjoying things has been made tough by the state of, well, everything, and the deep fractures it has exposed in hierarchical, power driven industries that regulate access to the art we love. Popular culture has perhaps always been a methodical tool wielded to sharply deflect a keen population from absolute madness (or anarchy) and political anger, but in recent years, the culture of silence against imperial forces from hypervisible communities in film and music, has tainted the pleasures of these media.

Suspended between India and the USA especially, popular art and dialogue around its effectiveness is championed into the foreground, if not to outright signal support for its militaristic, oppressive ruling ideologies, then to keep consumers busy in a reaction loop, look elsewhere from the site of deep regress. Given the intricate, thickly-veiled, and gargantuan structures of power, where a few people seem to control everything we’re given access to, even artful, intentional works are exposed to harbor some unsavory characters behind the screen, making liking things a whole ordeal of “how much are you comfortable knowing?”

Perhaps this is fair and the way of adulthood—the sheen wears off for almost everyone, the concerns of real life take over. Or perhaps understanding the mechanisms of what makes some art visible over the others is the necessary design to appreciate the rare work that cuts through, leaves you changed, in spite of industry manipulation.

Yet, somewhat crucially, there is something manufactured about the time we live in, not just in the making and distribution of “pop culture” but in the rigor of its repetition, in the loop of its reemergence on social media, in reactionary takes, in a circlejerk of aye and nays. This is further cemented by a culture of pop criticism that necessitates responding to the “work of the moment”, opting for populist-bait over something considerate and reflective. What would be the antidote to such recreation? Perhaps in writing that wills itself to be written, outside the naysaying club of clickbait and reactionism. Writing that is compelled by the art, that comes through in ekphrasis, deeply considerate, maybe internal, maybe cutthroat, maybe enamored, but always true and unvarnished.

I’ve been speaking to a friend about this and perhaps will have something official in the works one day. But in the meanwhile, I want to begin by using this space to write of culture that moves me to say something: long form or bite-sized, but an effort to deviate from the immediateness and circular loop of Twitter and other social media. Let’s call it Culture Take, and let’s suppose I’ll be successful enough to write it monthly. It will be wholly my reading of culture, but one considerate of the forces that influence it. Very likely it will include writings on cultures of India (including Telugu cinema of course) and outside it, on cinema, image, and text predominantly, and often caught in its own wind, entirely self-referential. Hey, I did warn you!

It’s not lost on me that in an effort to move away from social media that feeds of immediacy reactionism, I turn to Substack which has its treasure trove of concerns. Not to mention, there might be real fatigue for readers forced to read rambling, woefully unedited takes, each claiming to be unpainted by the gloss of SEO-engineered code. I don’t trust or believe people will arrive here in droves to read what I have to say, but if the compulsion to write here will at least pull me away from doomscrolling for hours, and putting my loud-mouthed opinions through some editorialization then I consider that a win. As for Substack itself, we’re all temporary anyway. Here and elsewhere.

*SOME UPDATES*

• I will be AWP in Baltimore, curating this offsite for Radix at Red Emma’s on Wed, Mar 4. Come!
  
  Radical Reads: Literature of Anger, Action, and Solidarity with Radix Co-Op
  
  

  

  
  

• I’m thrilled to celebrate the publication of my dear friend Preeti Vangani’s Fifty Mothers at Riff Raff on March 12, 7:00 pm along with Shou Ji Eng. Come!
  

If you’ve found yourself doomscrolling reels on Indian social media recently, as I’m wont to late into the night, then a specific video must have certainly crossed your desk. In it, a young woman is recording a fit check; for those blissfully out of the know, a fit check video requires the documentarian (because what else are any of us anymore except urgent, incessant recorders of daily life?) to balance their mobile device on any kind of mounting—think desks, compound walls, even a tree branch—so they may record themselves flexing their outfit in front and side profiles. In this video, a man, if I remember correctly (not that it matters), deigns to walk into the frame, unaware that a recording is underway. The young woman claps her hands in frustration. “Zero civic sense, ZERO,” she blurts out. “Someone is recording a video and people just walk into the frame!”

It’s a ridiculously out-of-touch clip that bears a certain entitlement to public space by way of, what I like to call, the mobile appendage syndrome (still workshopping this, by the way). We’re living in the era of the 5th limb, where people are constantly, consistently found scrolling through their mobile phones: these small five to six inch devices forever glued to dominant hands, extending almost as an appendage, an additional limb in activated position. Naturally, the ownership one feels over their body and its unique positionality in the external environment is easily translated to the mobile device, and everything it’s capable of.

This is never more stark than when in India, where catnipped phone users record, shoot, photograph, and play reels on loud volume at will, the shared contours of public life notwithstanding. On trains, buses, busy streets, airport lounges, young and old alike don’t balk at the idea of their phones claiming space, even at the cost of intruding others’.

So of course the idea that when one’s phone is in use, recording and documenting, then others must contort around the object and its field of vision, bend their lives, make themselves smaller, while wild, fits perfectly with the sort of liberties we take with public life in India. Throw in the assumed superiority of phone culture: where privileged, in-culture folk would know the supposed rules of public recording; know, for instance, to pause for the picture or video to be taken, or to pass by out-of-frame, allowing for inherently embedded class and caste dynamics to rot around digital consumerism.

Of course, the young woman’s clip went viral on social media and she was dunked on, across platforms. Ironically, her clip also spurred a “zero civic sense” trend on social media, where users stage visual interruptions to poke fun at her supposed audacity. Ironically, of course. Never mind the fact that the self-feeding content loop lives on in this fashion.

But the whole viral video to social media trend discourse pipeline asks a singular question: what are the terms of the social agreement? What do we owe each other in the lexicon of public life?

This is a question that has perhaps long plagued anthropologists, sociologists, and just about anyone who occupies space in India, who pauses to reflect the chaotic disarray of our arrangements. There is a certain absence of, to put it gently, social etiquette; strange, considering that many kids who grew up in the 90s and 2000s will remember classes and guest lectures dedicated primarily to moral education, a mordantly named subject dedicated to functioning in the public space. “Don’t litter,” “Do good unto others,” “Help those in need,” “Always say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’,” “Look out for the elderly, the pregnant, the children,” “Be kind to strays,” “Respect the rules,” and basically any such variant of this trained to instil orderliness in a rapidly growing population. But the virtue signalling of this class would be contrasted with the disorderliness of daily life. The dense, compact structures in cities, towns, and places of repute somehow gives way to greater civic disobedience, an each-unto-himself inclination toward all social interaction, no matter how quotidian.

The public littering can of course be chalked up to India’s deeply rooted caste system, a systemic attitude that comes from the confidence that there is always going to be someone else, someone inferior that will clean up after you. It’s a byproduct of upper-caste patriarchy regulated by the unpaid, thankless domestic labour of women, and centuries’ old tradition of public sanitation falling on the backs of poor, Dalit and Muslim workers.

But this absence of social etiquette isn’t restricted to littering alone. From trying to be the first to squeeze through any door, avoiding a queue at all costs, flagrantly disobeying signals should a camera or traffic controller be absent, talking at high registers to the annoyance of many, to the ubiquitous paan stain—this author’s personal phobia—our public life has become predictably unrestrained. The mobile phone has simply exacerbated this absurdity, quickly becoming a newfound nuisance. It is fairly common now to find yourself in the vicinity of people watching reels and videos, listening to music on their devices at full volume, apathetic to the ears around them.

Last month, I visited the Simhachalam Temple in Visakhapatnam on a research trip. At the phone drop-off counter, there was naturally chaos brewing. People jostling to submit and pick up their phones, when a simple line could have streamlined the entire process. I attempted to enter the crowd carefully—surrounded as I was by men—prudent to let the ones who were already there finish their transaction before I thrust an arm in. But no sooner did I enter the fray than a fresh set of men collected about me, pushing me around to deliver and / or collect their phones before all else. (All else what? Bear in mind that unlike me, every one else was a person of faith making a pilgrim stop. What’s the rush?) My body, in close contact with strangers, was on high alert; awkwardly shielding myself, I tried to be conscious of those who had entered before I had, ensuring I wasn’t overstepping. I attempted for some kind of order, some restraint, hoping my polite attempts would rub off on the others. But the world around me soldiered on, caught in this desperate loop of phone drop off and pick up with exigent seriousness. “Wait,” I blurted out to someone shoving past me, “Can we just wait, can we just queue up.”

“You queue up if you want,” the man snapped back at me. Fair enough, I suppose. Serves me right to think any feeble attempts on my part would switcheroo an embedded and stubbornly held protocol of “me first.”

But that wasn’t even the funny bit. One man, his forehead doused in sandalwood paste, a flower peeking out from behind one year, went on to collect his phone from around me, and upon receiving it, immediately turned on Instagram, back to his scheduled programming of doomscrolling reels. My mouth agape in barely concealed shock. The man couldn’t even wait to exit the whirlpool of phone drop-off and collection, let alone leave the temple premises, before dousing us with the screech-speak that is routine for Indian reel content. Devotion, after all, is an active undertaking.

How do we make sense of any of this, careful and conscious of the political disarray of our times where deflection is perhaps the only recourse we have in a sharply crumbling democracy. Is this all we have left? Our relationship with the digital infinitude, where by watching and participating, we are, we register, we matter? Suddenly “video, ergo sum” [Latin: I see, therefore I am] feels like an incantation for the grand future.

But while it seems most people have come to accept the mobile device as a necessary appendage to living life, we don’t take to all its uses kindly. Suppose someone were to turn the camera to record a mild nuisance, suppose this nuisance were the quotidian act of sexual harassment that some people, all women especially, come to face regularly, suppose the perpetrator implicated in this document were to spiral out of shame, the act of seeing, recording, and testifying takes on a criminal proportion.

Suddenly, the mobile phone is no guileless device. It is no longer a necessary accoutrement to living and being. It becomes a weapon of harassment.

Weapon. I thought a lot about this word when I traveled across India recently. This past month, I was on a research trip which took me to eight cities in the span of 30 days: in Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, and Delhi. Far from a sight-seeing adventure, I was working: mapping the towns and cities I hope to write about, speaking to people, declaring myself as a visitor with a camera strapped around my neck, furiously taking photos and videos. And somehow, a strange fear had me gripped throughout this expedition. Like an anxiety-prone tic woodpecking on the nape of your neck, loud and incessant, I couldn’t shake this fear that at any point, any one could grab my boob and dash away.

The boob-grab. That’s it. For whatever reason—was this also a deflection?—I didn’t imagine I would face anything worse than a cursory transgression on my body. Was it because as women we enter the world chest-first, perceived by the roving eyes of men around us? Was it because, as far as sexual offences go, it’s the easiest to pull off, with low stakes if you’re sprightly enough (derogatory)? Was it because I felt othered, marked as different, an outsider, in every city I was visiting? Or was it because as a woman who spent a considerable time living in India, my breasts have indeed been touched, brushed against, poked at, in obvious and muted fashions making me acutely aware of when a touch is intentioned and purpose-driven, rather than a mere accident?

And suppose this were to happen, what would I do? What weapon of choice would I yield? My voice, landing awkwardly and alien to place—could it cry and signal intrusion? Could I exhibit a moment of bravado, grab the perpetrator by his shirt sleeve and drum up communal anger? (Did I even dare train the anger of the mob on one isolate given the escalating frenzy of mob violence in modern India?) Or would I stop the man and deliver a moral sermon on boundary and respect when the act was clearly designed to peg me down a size? If you’ve read this far, I can feel your eyes rolling all the way to the ceiling—you and I both know this doesn’t work.

What then? The phone? Can’t be. This metal and plastic device hanging on my wrist with an inbuilt camera? Would I strain it on the world, dare it to record transgression on my body in full witnessing?

What comes of the social agreement when we turn the phone camera on the world, rid the other of their claim to privacy? What can we say of the world, where we must turn the phone camera on the world, to shield our bodies? It is impossible to reckon with one question, without the other.

It used to be that certain acts of transgression was beyond partisan moral codes; as a collective we could agree that any offence launched at vulnerable bodies, any perversions of consent and boundary were unequivocally wrong. But this is new India we’re living in. Where the religion and caste of the perpetrator is measured against that of the victim before arriving at consensus; where a ruling dispensation garlands acquitted rape accused, where caste atrocities continue to stamp down on the sexual autonomy of young women. Perhaps social etiquette now is not only about how we share space, but who we make room for, whose grievance is heard, addressed, accommodated. Zero Civic Sense? I may have to agree (derogatory).

UPDATES

- Last Tuesday, I did a reading with the wonderful poet Alina Stefanescu. On March 12, I’m supporting the Providence launch of my dear Preeti Vangani’s new collection of poems Fifty Mothers over at RiffRaff. 7:00 pm! Come through!

- I will be at AWP this March at Baltimore, supporting Radix. I’m curating and hosting an offsite event at Red Emma’s on Wed, Mar 4, 8:00 pm. Radical Reads: Literature of Anger, Action, and Solidarity is an invitation to turn to literature, to notes of solidarity, poetics of shared anger, calls to revolution. Come through: https://redemmas.org/events/radical-reads-literature-of-anger-action-and-solidarity-with-radix-co-op/

- I have the most important, major update of my life to share! So stay tuned.

Anyone and everyone that has ever come in contact with me won’t necessarily categorize me as a “quiet” person. My voice projects; whether I’m in a classroom facing 25 students or in a house party, trying to drown out the music with some drunken epiphany, you will hear me. And to those that notice this, to those that are imprudent enough to comment on my loudness, I have only one defence: have you met my father?

My father is L O U D. And not just in the way of volume, but also timber, bass, and any other perceptible qualities that qualify higher registers. In our humble little apartment complex tucked away in one corner of the megalopolis, my father’s voice would boom across the seven floors of the building, in joy and anger. My mother would comment, often embarrassed, that my father missed a career in politics for he would have easily addressed a crowd of thousands without a bullhorn in sight. My father’s voice, made for public speaking, was restricted often to the quadrants of living room salons, where it declared itself in every conversation or argument, not necessarily for correctness but for the fact that it was both the first and last voice in the room. My father speaks to prove the fact that pragmatism dies at the doorsteps of a closing statement, no matter the circuitous logic of its rhetoric.

But say, you are imprudent enough to comment on my father’s volume, he will proffer only one line of defence: have you met the Mandas?

Each and every living member of this family will vouch for their dominant gene of sound and sonic affectation—few are willing to pause and consider that each new generation has had to learn to speak up, or be loud, as a survival mechanism, as the only way to be heard around deafening adults. And so, on and on, blame rolls and stumbles. But truly, to be loud, to live in volume is not some unique family trait. It’s the coexisting constant to being Indian, to live in India, in the continuing din of sound: music, good and bad, blaring off of speakers, a cacophony of car, auto, bus, truck horns, publicity calls from shop awnings, hawking peddlers, street salesmen, the incessancy of speech, of dialogues, conversations, and even economic barters rendered at impressive decibels. To live here would require a certain tolerance to the mores of this arrangement.

But on a recent trip across Andhra Pradesh, I found this unnerving Indianism stretched to the limit.

A few days ago, I embarked on an all-day boat ride down the river up to Papikondalu. Papikondalu, a portmanteau of Telugu words Papidi (a parting of hair, maang in Hindi, where the vermillion sits for married Hindu women) and Kondalu (hills) is a stunning geographical region in the East Godavari district of Andhra Pradesh, where hills separate, but only so to allow a narrow partition of the mighty Godavari river to pass through. Papikondalu also frame the ride toward Bhadrachalam; a site where Hindus believe key episodes of the Ramayana took place.

For years, the Godavari has held a strange pull for me. Every year, I would ride a train over the Godavari bridge to visit my grandmother in Visakhapatnam; once the river appeared, my mother would beckon me to devote a 2 rupee coin to the waters that, she would say, could make any wish come true. Many wishes lie unfulfilled in this fantasy, but the myth of the waters, that through decades and centuries of welfare engineering projects of dams and barrages has fulfilled a rich biodiversity and agricultural output, has me enthralled.

I chose this day-long boat ride for another, more timely reason. Currently, construction is underway for the controversial Polavaram Dam, an hour drive from the city of Rajahmundry. Once completed, the dam will purportedly irrigate the Godavari waters, currently flowing into the Bay of Bengal, and hydrate great swathes of the Deccan Plateau. However, the project will also submerge the Papi Hills, much of the rich biodiversity of the Godavari Estuary, and will displace nearly “nearly 3 lakh people, out of which 50% are tribals and 15% Dalits, while the remaining are OBCs, all of whom depend on agriculture and the forests for their livelihood.” Despite spirited farmers protests and intervention from human rights organizations, the construction of the dam is well on its way to completion by 2030. Taking the boat ride was a way to at least watch, archive, and remember the life that once was.

However, any efforts on my part to romanticise the Godavari, to reflect on its bounty, to ponder over the disappearing communities and empty villages one now finds on the way to the Papikondalu would be in vain. No sooner did I board the boat, than a voice greeted me through a shrill audio system, promising us a great time and a boat-load of wonderful memories. This terrible pun should have been the first sign, a proverbial red flag on the shiny outpost of a December morning. But as someone always wont to quit things, I soldiered on, kept my ass sat on a rough plastic chair, determined to see it through.

Alas, dear friends, I forgot one important life lesson: never, ever, trust Government tourism in this godforsaken country.

I knew to expect a rusting boat, paint shoddily ripping off its metallic surface, uncomfortable seats, barely clean toilets (I pee-ed myself out before starting the trip), and cramped quarters. What I hadn’t bartered for was 7 hours of non-stop… noise. It started promptly with an overenthusiastic emcee on a high-piercing audio system, and quickly devolved into “entertainment” which would involve interactive games, audience participation, children dance contests, adult dance contests, couple dance contests, single people dance contests, old people dance contests, breakdancing dance contests, mimicry dance contests, and “for absolutely no reason” dance contests, set to the latest, the loudest, the most cacophonous of Telugu film music, leaving little room for subtlety or quiet.

Now, I don’t look down upon the Telugu film tradition. Acutely aware of its flaws—a star-obsessed culture, a homoerotic, obsessive fandom, and cinematic moments designed to titillate the psycho-sexual tensions of its audience—I’m also a repeat offender. I have watched Telugu movies my whole life, have loved both its soft, tender bygone era and also its more crowd-pleasing moments, and have admired its meticulous grammar of populism, so utterly original and separate from the Bollywood mythmaking project. I’m not above Telugu pop music, and have played many a DSP banger while running on a treadmill, and may have a playlist stashed somewhere of my favorite Telugu songs from the 50s all the way to the modern day.

That said, the predominant genre of populist Telugu music post-2000s is… excess. An affinity for maximalism has defined the aesthetic sensibility of Telugu cinema in the new millennium. Always a star-obsessed culture, where movie icons have gone on to built effective public personae as political and cultural figures, the industry entered the 2000s with a bunch of new-age heroes, several among them off-spring of successful 80s and 90s icons. How do we present our stars, caught in the limitations of what has been a regional language and movie industry (though now enjoying wild global popularity thanks to the diaspora and the export of Rajamouli-esque ambition), as overpowering figures? How do we frame their image as the acme of romanticized desire and strapping possibility? How do we cultivate star power through the medium of cinema, ensure it carries off-screen, long after the movie is over, so the industry can have bankable icons? After all, where there is star-power, there is fandom, there is money. And movies are a business, right? Cue: over-the-top action scenes that have delighted oblivious obsessives over YouTube. Cue: Repeat mass entry moments set to thrilling background scores, each more elevated from the last. Cue: iconic song and dance numbers that come to define a star’s iconography. These include romantic numbers, yes, but every film must also include at least one, if not more, earworm dance numbers, where the hero is paired with a dancer, given hook steps and repeatable catchphrases that can multiply like wildfire, that can be played at weddings, public processions, even political rallies where the crowd is listless with wait.

In the 2000s, where Hindi Cinema caught the urban multiplex bug and began to cater, in speech, treatment, and sensibility, to the upper middle-class wont to Hollywood, Telugu cinema leaned in to its audience, offering the mores of popular entertainment. This formula has remained more or less consistent, even as the scope soared in the last decade. Case in point: “Naatu Naatu” from RRR, a wildly popular dance anthem manufactured around the coming together of two movie stars and skilled dancers: NTR Jr. and Ram Charan, with a dizzying hook step and a musical crescendo building up to a dance battle. The circumstances of the song are contrived but the pleasures, if you care, are limitless. There’s the screen splitting to accommodate two varying stardoms, a misnomer in Telugu cinema made possible only with Rajamouli’s standing, there’s the high-energy dancing, the unstoppable assault on the senses, and the clever choreography and blocking of the scene where two Indian men square off several Englishmen on the battlefield of the dance floor in a colonized India.

In this surplus, it’s easy to forget that the song is kind of mid, an earsore too maybe. (Sorry to Keeravani whose music I have loved otherwise.) But here’s the rub: the excess of cinematic sensibility demands music to match its steps; a gentle, sober number will not compel the front-row seaters to their feet. This is cinema designed to the draw the audience in, to keep their attention, to economize their time for every second they spend in a movie theater.

Unfortunately, this sentiment easily devolves into other areas of life, where the economics of time must be qualified by entertainment, by loud music, by comical extravagance. That’s how I found myself on the boat to Papikondalu, a round-trip of 6 hours, without a moment of silence. Where I’d hoped to spend a reflective day on the Godavari waters, and consider what writing of it would entail, I was instead ambushed with a real-life reel-generator, a simulation of doomscrolling, a never-ending spiel of content. Considering that we had no network, nor internet connection on the boat, the programming felt designed to deflect us from any ponder, much like our phones do.

How strange to be floating down the waters of the mighty Godavari, flanked by hills and disappearing hamlets, but on a vehicle off which bass thumps crudely, puking out noise in all directions. Never mind that unlike me, most undertook this trip as a religious exercise, taking the excursion all the way till Bhadrachalam for the evening aarti of Gods Ram and Sita; the sober undertaking of their pilgrimage could hardly be fussed by the desire for spurious consumption.

Throughout this ordeal, I kept returning to one question: who’s afraid of silence? What’s so horrifying about quiet, to be restful and pondering, to let the mind run amok? What are we so terrified to think about?

In my own family, silence is a placeholder for discomfort, for unresolved tension. I spent many years of young adulthood socializing myself to stillness, learning to resist the urge to speak and say nothing much of worth. And still, films with diffused quietness unnerve me. I shift uncomfortably in my seat waiting, quite the circuitous come-around for the kid shuffling in her seat all those years, through adult voluntary vows of silence. But now, in my 30s, I have finally come to appreciate “home voice”, the secret and intimate tone to dialogue, the stillness in shared comfort.

What would it mean for a people to find respite in being quiet together? In speaking in low tones? In actual dialogue, as opposed to surface-level jabs derived from film-speak and humor? What would we talk about if we could talk about anything at all?

UPDATES:

I have updates! I can’t share them yet! You just have to trust that I do!

In December, I did a 10-day trip through Andhra Pradesh, covering a chunk of the East Godavari district, along with Vizianagaram and Kakinada. I visited the college my mother studied at, located in the Vizianagaram Fort donated by the royal family. I was allowed to climb to the viewing deck of the fort, an area that is usually locked for everyday visits, and get a bird’s eye view of the town that is so instrumental to family lore. I also got to meet really interesting people: academics, scholars, writers, and astrologers (!!!), to talk about mythmaking and legacy-building projects. I’m pregnant with ideas. Now, on to the writing bit.

I’ve been mulling a lot over this, this building up of things, certainly over the last twelve months that I’ve failed to say something of note here, the quietness of this self-designated front a compounding confrontation to my indecisiveness. What can be the thought to diffuse through such inaction? The thinking of the thing itself becomes an all-consumptive affair. And so forgive me for not writing sooner, forgive me for the year-long silence, forgive for not being able to get over the whole—waving hands in the air—thinking thing. It’s just… maybe, I’ve always been this person.

What better day than today to reckon with myself? Turning 33, I find myself naturally predisposed to memories of old birthdays, of which I remember very little, but can recall with naked clarity the days leading up to them. Every year, at the onset of November, a feverish excitement would take over me, as if my own impending birthday was an unexpected surprise waiting to happen. I would walk around plagued by excitement, desperate for the day when I would feel a bit different, maybe chosen, maybe an incredible stroke of flourish in a world of such happenstance, deliberate and wanton. What mere day can compare to the jejune fantasies of a worldbuilder? Inevitably, my actual birthdays would often pass without occasion: the world would strum about its axis per usual, and I would be left disappointed by the normalness of it all.

Birthdays have since paled in excitement, age has reasoned its course, but my fanciful tendencies have remained intact and ticking. Then again, what would a writer be if not a person who wills the future? To write, to want to make anything really, is to take the work so seriously, to come to the page with the heart open, with a desire niggling at the centre of your chest, that every word you write can become something more: a sentence, a whole, part of a propulsive undertaking. It is to imagine what can be, in order to make it possible. It is to commit to future, what you write today. It is, at its very core, a deeply romantic pursuit, besotted with its own potential, shivering at the capacity of a heartbreak.

This year, crucially, with all its packaged awfulness, has watched me retreat to the page with my heart pounding. I’ve written a few things in the last few years—some closer to fruition than others (more on that later)—but it’s hard to describe what I feel now; I’m attuned to the nervousness of coming upon this story: a story that’s always been there, that down to its tendons and sinews predates my coming by decades, that, in more ways than one, made me possible, affecting this little life I have lived and been familiar to, and that—if I can say so myself—is my story to write of all the stories I have ever written. And so every day, every moment I spend at work, every second I feel my mind churning, every waking moment, I think of this story. This story I have begun, that I am slowly gestating, that is yet to come to its consummate finish, needs a building upon, an active imagination, the fertile mind of an over-thinker. Easy-peasy. However, what it also needs is for me to come to the page, to write what can be written, to trust that the work will reveal itself only in praxis, and to accept that such an undertaking will be bumpy, rife with piss-poor pages, awkward choices, and an evolving ecology. To be precise, such an undertaking would demand some floundering along the way. On the worst days, I will need to return to the page. That is both exciting and calcifying of the work it takes. This would mean a relinquishing even; to build upon what is possible, but to also abandon some control, to delight oneself in what happens.

And look at the pleasures that await when one is open. Only last month did I think I would be alone this birthday, already wary of the ennui that would follow. When my friend Tanvi insisted I visit her in NY, I decided I would go. But, having acquired wisdom from the follies of childhood, I also decided I wouldn’t build it up to anything, that I would just accept every minute as it unfolds, that I would, as the youth say, go with the flow.

And what a day I’ve had for it. I got woken up at 5:00 am by Tanvi’s cat Kirara furiously rubbing my face. Tanvi and Harris took me thrift store shopping; we walked around Bushwick, hopping from one vintage store to another. I changed, unchanged, rewore clothes while Tanvi and Harris physically, personally pulled clothes off the rack for me. How loving and tender to be dressed up by one’s friends! We walked over to Tanvi’s home, where Shoo and Patrick showed up, followed by a birthday cake from Magnolia Bakery. We tore into decadent chocolate, and maybe a tear curled in my eye in the warmth of it all. Earlier this afternoon, Harshal called me from India, a cake with my name facing him, and cut it with a birthday song over Facetime, as if to tell me he’s always with me even when he can’t be, and vice versa. And now I sit curled up on a couch to write this, while Shoo and Tanvi talk about the year it’s been, notes of reflection and deep wisdom circling the room.

And perhaps this is what it will take to return here too. To just accept that some posts (including this one maybe) are just going to be nothing-burgers, that there will be some floundering along the way, but so long as I return, insist on writing, something good will come of it too.

Because what else can a writer do but write. Not everything has to be the story, perhaps there can be mini-stories along the way, written off-the-cuff: for pleasure, note-taking, keepsakes. Maybe Adrienne Rich wrote it best in her poem, “A Ball is For Throwing”:

For now though, I’m excited and determined to share what comes next. This Fall, I was awarded a Professional Development Grant at the Rhode Island School of Design to take a research trip which will help me, I hope, come closer to the story I want to tell. For 25 days, I will travel across towns and cities, some of which I only know by reputation, and documenting in image, video, and conversation. All of this will lead to much thinking, and maybe some of it I will share here; especially the bit of visiting Andhra Pradesh—my home state—alone, without the cover of family. I’d like to think and write through meeting kin here; here’s hoping you’d be open to it.

Thanks for reading along.

(the author a few weeks short of her 32nd birthday)

“Poor woman. Poor girl, to be born in a time of fools, to live among fools. The end. The end. You were right to put that down. The end.”

I didn’t want to argue, but I had to say, “Well, it is not necessarily the end, Pa.”

“Yes,” he said, “what a tragedy. The end of a person.”

“No, Pa,” I begged him. “It doesn’t have to be. She’s only about forty. She could be a hundred different things in this world as time goes on. A teacher or a social worker. An ex-junkie! Sometimes it’s better than having a master’s in education.”

— Grace Paley, “A Conversation with My Father”

In Grace Paley’s “A Conversation with My Father,” the narrator is tending to her ailing father. She writes: “My father is eighty-six years old and in bed. His heart, that bloody motor, is equally old and will not do certain jobs anymore.” But the narrator, much like Paley herself is a writer. In her rendition, the heart in an unsporting curmudgeon, limiting her father’s movement around his house. The truth is much plainer, boring even. “Potassium shortage.” Not the stuff that makes good short stories.

The father, keen to the way writers dramatize and flourish, makes one request of his autorial daughter.

“I would like you to write a simple story just once more,” he says, “the kind Maupassant wrote, or Chekhov, the kind you used to write. Just recognizable people and then write down what happened to them next.”

To keep matters simple, the author-narrator recounts plainly and briefly a story that had been transpiring in their neighborhood, right across the street. But of course it isn’t enough. The father insists the story lacks flourishes known to Chekhov’s writing. Or Turgenev. Maybe he meant ennui. Maybe he meant an isolated society. Maybe he meant the cruel nature of ticking time. Who’s to say? I haven’t read all of Chekhov and Turgenev either.

So the narrator-author flourishes the story, dramatizing its minutiae to great effect. In this turn—best understood if you read the story in full, here—the story of a woman who becomes a junkie to remain enmeshed in the life of her junkie son only to be abandoned once he cleans himself up, is a chronicle throbbing with the tragedy of absurdism. This version, filled with authorial commentary and wisdom, concludes with the mother, all alone, left to grieve a son who would never return to her.

Predictably, the father has gripes with this version as well for it no longer reads to him plainly, as a story of truly ordinary people. But he agrees that the author-narrator’s decision to end the story on a declaration — “The End” — is true to form, that nothing can come of the woman who took to drugs to be one with the youth. No, his daughter-author-narrator says (here I must clarify that the story never insists the narrator is a woman, I just read her that way). The once-junkie woman can become anything, she argues. Maybe because she’s no longer only a woman who lives across the street from them, but a character left to the devices of its author’s ambition.

I kept thinking of this story because much like Grace Paley’s narrator, I too have been writing pointedly of the people I once knew. Like her, I too have been calling it fiction. Called “Anatomy of a World,” it’s a story composed of seven short fiction vignettes, capturing the myriad characters populating a suburban apartment complex in Mumbai, India. Like the one I grew up in, where I made sense of the world and its random allotment of rules. Where I was allowed to be small and insignificant, but also potent and viable. Where I was ingratiated into the lives of people who lived around me in close proximity, to learn that fortifying cement walls can hide both love and violence only so much. Where I became a person.

In my story, every character resembles a face from memory. But of course, they hide behind the arrogance of fiction, remain superficially unrecognizable. In fiction, I can hide and deny, rearrange the limitations of ordinariness by awarding my characters the “open destiny of life” as Paley writes. In doing so, this feeble attempt at capturing a time and place in the genie bottle of a short story has become my wishing well for the people that raised me from the ground up. A testimony that I saw them for who they were, warts and all. That in my story, I have written them only with love. That in this writing, I discovered not only my love for them, but my love for that time. That even in the confusing heartbreak of childhood, there was so much candor to cherish.

Many of them I still see now when I return to India, to visit my parents. Some others have long left the suburban cavity behind. Who’s to say how the tourniquet of life functions? I too left that building behind at 23, to live in a country 8000 miles away. (I have also learnt to think of the world in miles, and not in the kilometers of my early life.) None of them know I turn 32 today. But perhaps, they already knew I’d live to be 32 one day. They already saw who I’d become. Some one. Who “could be a hundred different things in this world as time goes on.” They too were the authors of the life I’ve whipped out. And I’m living still to say this: I was seen, therefore I am. Visus sum, ergo sum. Maybe. I don’t know Latin.

Fittingly, writing “Anatomy of a World” finally concluded the short story collection I’ve been writing for a few years now. A collection that has now left the nest to make its own way in the world. Isn’t that a joyful coda to a life lived?

On that note, here’s also a picture of my birthday lunch, no different from the ordinary everyday of childhood lunches. It’s only been a good birthday so far!

“I have spent all these years thinking about my identity in this universe.”
Volga, The Liberation of Sita

In 2017, I was tasked by my professor to write a piece toward an existing narrative figure, find out who my work automatically reaches out to, and what that says about the thematic direction of my writing. Clearly, quite some time has passed since then so I’m unable to relocate the exact strain of madness that led me to write three fractured prose poems: to Sita, the suspected wife of Rama doomed to domestic grief; to Draupadi, wifed by five brothers who bet and lost her in a game of dice; to Kali, the symbolic representation of female rage who sopped up our right to be angry. I was raised to worship these women with dogged faith, but even in suspicion, and later atheism, I clearly found it impossible to let go of them entirely. 

"dear sister of mine / simmer down for a minute / shrug off that tension / that unbending rage / and let’s talk / angry woman to / angry woman…"

With that, I was kin to a narrative tradition that predated me. What had been pedestaled as holy by my mother, and thus without reproach, now opened itself up as story, to the tune of my revisionism. The women that had been stock-figurined as goddesses were now conversation partners. The women that had been stock-figurined as ancestors were up for reconsider. Though I had been a fiction writer until that moment, I found in poetry freedom to be transgressive, to reveal and obfuscate, to imply and declare. SOME OF MANY WOMEN was born in the joy of those prose poems. It offered a pasture where no image, thought, or memory was too kosher for recall. Writing fragments and pieces about the women who raised me, about this body divorced from my mother’s, about the whisper networks, somatic spaces, and tough cruelties of domestica: I came into my own. It grew slowly and assuredly to become my first completed poetry collection. 

Over the years, Some of Many Women has changed form, and evolved with my poetic voice: narrative, many-tongued, aspiring to the sing-song elocution of the voices that populate my memories. I have spent much time with it — I was 24 when I wrote the first poem, I am 31 now and still tinkering with its edges — because it’s a collection that always offers more. In so many ways, I am a markedly different person now than when I first began writing it; I am a markedly different woman now than when I first began writing it. For all those reasons, Some of Many Women is also the closest I will come to writing a memoir of my selfhood. It bears the stamp of my irreverence, anger, love, and hope, unlike any other work. 

So, I’m honored to share that Some of Many Women is a finalist for the Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize. On Saturday, Oct 12, I will join the other finalists to read my work over zoom. I have read poems from this collection through these many years, but at this reading — not only for the momentousness of the occasion — I will be thinking of the time that has passed, of the person I have become. Come join me? No matter what happens with the prize, I will be happy to have shared an excerpt with everyone who are integral to the work: Friends, community, and my co-conspirators in this act of daily defiance. 

You can register for the event on the link here. The reading is over zoom so we can all be pants-less. Isn’t that swell? 

I hope I’ll see you there. 

*****

Over this summer I finally got around to reading Amit Chaudhuri (First Knausgård, then Ernaux, Delillo, and now Chaudhuri — it has truly been a year of diving headfirst into the greats), and of course I started with Freedom Song. 

Set in Calcutta, in the immediate aftermath of the Babri Masjid demolition of 1992 when Hindutva fundamentalists destroyed the 450-year-old mosque in Ayodhya, Freedom Song traces ordinariness in upper-middle-class Bengali suburbia. A work of extraordinary stillness, it is a masterclass in writing around the edges of the unsaid. In Chaudhuri’s novel, characters young and old, all Hindu and upper-caste, marry, fall sick, pontificate, argue, complain, seize afternoon naps, recollect forgotten memories, visit doctors, complete homework, agonize, and live while India at large is engulfed in communalized mayhem. By offering an insight into lives unthreatened by political calamities, Freedom Song becomes a novel of explicit political privileges — it challenges the reader to consider who gets to wake up every day and “embark upon the minute frustrations and satisfactions of their daily lives.”

Such is the state of our lived reality. Not once can I overlook our ability to churn out ordinary days while a harrowing global massacre and genocidal campaign goes unimpeded.

In such a time, writing has often felt like a defatigable pursuit. Against the harsh light of this world, the act of putting word to blank sheet has lost some of its promise. In these times, I’ve often wondered why I make art, why I write. What thankless conclusion do I seek when I suture words to make sentences? It is an exercise I recommend to every person — certainly every artist — in a world eager to commodify works of a certain intonation, if only to return to the answer that is true and irrefutable. 

I write because it is the only way I can make sense of my mangled world. 

I turn here to the works that have moved me, that have held me afloat over these past few months, without which I would not have been able to articulate the crude disposition of these times—

• Coining a Wishing Tower by Ayesha Raees
  
  I am proud that Radix took over the publication of poet Ayesha Raees’ COINING A WISHING TOWER, a startling hybrid epic, or one long poem masquerading as several prose poem fragments (Ayesha may take umbrage with this description). 

I am grateful for every time I was able to return to this book during production for I was comforted by its archival of the body and mind grieving in stillness. I would implore you all to read it. 

• [...] Poems

Much has been said about [...] Poems, the collection of poems by Fady Joudah that renders the omniscience of Palestinian narrative. Animated with grief, anger, disappointment, incredulousness, with the touch of a poetic historian on full display, this is a work of masterly proportion. I return to it again and again.

• The Storyteller: Tales Out of Loneliness by Walter Benjamin

I will forever be grateful to noam keim, Radix fellow and admired writer, for under their influence I am now slowly plowing my way through the works of Walter Benjamin. First up is The Storyteller (sorry noam, The Arcades Project must wait). And my god, my god, my god. I get it, I get it, I get it. 

*****

My silence these past six months has not been lost on me. I will try to be more regular (the writer promises, the person fails). I will never stop trying. More soon. <3

Early January, my father and I walked many kilometers, the winter sun keeping company, in search of the house I had been hearing about my entire childhood. An incredibly assuming property with a grand stone foyer in the center, many room-ed, a small backyard to boot, its most impressive declaration were two lions, made of stone, flanking a wrought iron gate, after the man who had the house built for his growing family and had the lion’s colloquial call embedded in his many syllabic-name. In that house, built under the watchful eye of the British empire, the man married a woman, had three children by her, lost her to sickness, married another with whom he would go on to have three more children, marry his brood off, one after the other, take his last breath, die. The house which had been built to contain many slowly lost them all: to families and jobs that took them away from the fledgling town of Vijayanagaram to extraordinary pockets of the country. The house that had been architectured to hold the bustling feet of a proud man’s lineage whittled down to his widow and the only son who remained behind, unmarried, un-futured. 

That is the last memory my father has of his grandfather’s home, a family monument my father would run to as a child, graze its walls with the pearly tips of his fingers, whisper his family’s story so it could remain suspended in remembrance. As these things go: my great-grandmother was left embittered and cruel in the wake of her husband’s passing; kept much of her family away from her late-husband’s home, desecrating its ambition; and despite the many-headed pleas that came her away, sold it off for a measly sum to an “outsider”. 

Since then, my father has kept the home alive in recollection, in stories of running down its corridors to annoy the grandmother he disliked so, in vivid descriptions of its stone front, its tall shadows on a humble footpath, the lions, the lions, the lions, the physical embodiment of this grandfather’s pride and stature in their small community. 

Of course, you already know how these things go…

No wrought iron gate, no stone foyer, no impressive many-roomed home with tall shadows, no lions of stone. In its stead stood a multi-family gaudy green mini apartment with a cemented perimeter. 

“Is this it,” my father wondered. 

He looked around to confirm he’d come to the right place. “Here’s the gully that runs up to the buffalo shed,” he said, pointing at an adjacent pathway. “Here’s the lake in front. The old movie theater is down there two blocks away.”

He took one last look at the home that would remain committed to his memory. “Yes, this is it,” he said. 

We walked across the street, purchased two coconuts, and sipped its sweet water to cool ourselves down. All these years I had heard my father speak about this home, the one relic from his childhood he kept alive in moments of tenderness, I had never once heard him suggest a possibility that it was no longer there, that, like many other artifacts of the old world, it could have been razed down to make way for a new world order. In his retellings, he kept a hope alive that in retrospect sounds incredibly naive for a pragmatic man wise to the ways of the world. 

There, I wondered, is a poem.

My father, outside the gate that should have been wrought iron, that should have held two lions on either side, that should have contained a grand home with stone foyer, sparked a memory, held its candle burning in the face of undeniability, spoke the unsayable into existence, enlivened it in retelling, now stood restrained in the declaration of reality. I considered the absolute decency of this moment, thought about the world I let cruise away in mindless chatter that could otherwise be preserved in the hallow pathways of the unspeakable. All of this I see, think, feel, that can only be consecrated in the pursuit of considered, intentioned, thoughtful storytelling. 

This is to say that for the past few months, I've been denouncing outpour in the pursuit of gestation. I'm sitting, watching, listening, imbibing, and most importantly, I’m waiting for the right words to come along. 

So where does that leave this Substack? It will trudge along, and maybe will be home to more haphazard bursts of writing, the kind of thought-rendition that keeps me up [redacted] during the wee hours of the night, maybe even thoughtless-rendition. I’m also considering bringing the texts — books, poetry, music, articles — allowing me to write more and write better, to you, advocate for their immersive hearts. More on this soon.

THERE IS ANOTHER INCREDIBLE NEWS I HAVE TO SHARE —

Which might deserve its own post. Pushing it to the bottom of this page feels cruel and dismissive to a life-long dream. So hold on for a day or two; I’ll be speaking to you soon.

Also, the suspension of self in a body twenty years younger, at 10, so eager and propulsive, then again at 12, so eager and hesitant, then again at 13, so eager but fearful, then again at 15, so hungry and certain, then again at 17, so horny and unflappable, then again at 18, so desirous and fearful again, then again at 21, so full of pretense and social ticks, then at 24, suspended in a country so foreign and eager to whip you into its shape, or be reduced to chalk-print. This wisdom too, I say, points toward the coming of age. 

I stand tall looking at a classroom full of students and I recognize in their tender age the impulse to know and remember, where each day is remarkably unique and quotidian, and I am struck once more by a time stretched thin by endurance, when forever unfolded like a canvas blanked out by possibility. There too is a naivety I recognize in age. In that recognition, I come unfolded.

Parallel-parking, I say to myself. Learnt on Youtube and practiced in real time. So much of it is contingent upon the etiquette and goodwill of a fellow anonymous driver. So much of driving is contingent upon the etiquette and goodwill of a fellow anonymous driver. So much of living, etc., etc. There too is wisdom gained, I tell myself.

Music comes unspooling like soundtrack to a life rendered unrecognizable without sound. What is a song if I can’t remember when I heard it anymore? How can I claim to love anything new? Everything that belongs to me feels like it belonged to me once. 

If I re-enter the classroom that marked me singular, 8th grade or 9th or 10th, will I remember the desk I sat on? No. Am I older in spite of it? Yes. 

I fold over and touch my feet. Here is a sensation new to my body, unknown to memory. Have I lived outside of this ability? Yes, I say pointing at the folds of my stomach, grown, shrunk, regrown. Here too is a body of possibilty. 

Can I tell you the story of my first kiss? No. 

Can I tell you the story of the last kiss? Maybe. 

Am I older in spite of it? Yes. 

If I walked across the street, a phantom from the future, would my past-self see me and want to hold this body? 

Would it matter that this body is drunk on juices of memory, flush with knowledge of things seen and heard, ripe with the the freedom of knowing what it knows? 

Joy? That’s another question I ask this 31-year-old body. I shake its shoulder, feed it carbs, replace the carbs with greens and fresh juices and vitamin D supplements, ask what it needs and it answers in burps and groans. Okay, I say. Take what you need. I bandage its weakened nooks and pray to the god of happenstance in the absence of the true divine. In your make-believe haberdashery, I say, brushing my teeth, rinsing my hair, drying my skin of wet reminders, spare this ankle. Today my ankle was spared. Today is my birthday. Today was my birthday in India, in Europe, in some parts of the eastern world. Today is also no longer my day of birth, Also this day has birthed countless others. Who’s to say I’m important? Who’s to say I’m among the living? 

I type this on my phone before allowing all the beer I consumed after to wash over me. The rest I write in the warm haze of a new day. 

(ankle.jpeg)

—

I have flat-feet — and if you’ve seen the promos for Greta Gerwig’s take on Barbie, you will know this is absolutely the vilest thing to have. I kid, of course, because most people tend to live functional lives with flat feet, only I am not one of them. I have never been able to run fast and my ankles have always bruised easily. If I must come up with a number, then I am certain that I have twisted my left ankle alone more than ten times in my life (perhaps less than 20); my right ankle has fared much better, having been sprained a handful of times only. In the suburb I grew up in, I know all the orthopedics by name, and most I hate for having been unable to offer a feasible solution to the persistent twisting of my ankle. Most, in fact, never made the connection between the issue and my flat-footed walk. 

Until one jolly good fellow, who held my feet in his hands, and much like Prince Charming did to Cinderella, prescribed me a customized insole that would potentially solve all my problems. 

This was December of last year. I had gone a few years without any aggravating incidents. Then, in 2021, I picked up a tennis racquet, having only ever played the game prior on a video game console. And I immediately fell in love. Not because I was a natural — I sucked for the longest time, and even now, despite having acquired a degree of skill, I am prone to bouts of technical regression. But the game was and continues to be beautiful to me, it satisfies my deeply competitive drive, and every good swing I make renders me powerful in transience. When I play tennis, I feel capable in a way my body has never allowed me to feel for so many years; for those hours, my mind relays worries of writing and work and concerns itself with space and timing, attentive to only the green ball going back and forth. Then I twisted my ankle reaching for a particularly tricky shot last October and just like that, my ankle awoke to punish my newfound athletic imprudence. 

Then three months later, while shopping for silk sarees in Chennai, I twist the same ankle again, laughably this time, because the only competition I was in was for this emerald green saree I was desperate to lap up for my mother that another auntie was curiously eying. But the custom insole rescues me; it nurses my ankle faster than the shoes I’d worn in the past. And for once, it feels that perhaps, there is a way out of this vicious cycle. Perhaps, I would not be enslaved to the fear that tied my brain to the nethermost part of my body. 

And then, two months later, like clockwork, I twist the same ankle again, while walking victoriously from one tennis court to the other, having vanquished my opponent in a highly competitive set. Walking. Not playing. Not mid-play. Not reaching for a shot. Simply walking, between games. My ankle gives away, I stumble to the ground, and I cry desperately at my rotten luck. 

This time, enraged, I begin physiotherapy to strengthen my ankle. I suspend play and focus on exercise. I continue my sessions even on a short trip to India, where I tolerate my physiotherapist’s long rants about her fifteen-year-old son so long as her hands mobilize my ankle. I wear sneakers with custom insoles everywhere; I relinquish my brogues and sandals. I watch the ground with alert attention when I walk, maneuvering aberrations and uneven turfs. 

Even as I revise my life around my ankle, taking an extra second to correct my stance during yoga, fear permeates every movement in my life. While walking, jogging, skipping, or even balancing, I worry my ankle will snap, through no fault of my own. 

Cut to yesterday when I was scheduled to play a USTA doubles game. I make sure to warm up before the match, flexing my ankle this way and that, around its axis, awakening it to movement. I run forwards and sideways, lunge deep and jump high, ensure my feet has a taste of action before jumping on to the tennis court. And then, I play quite possibly the most exciting game of my life. 

We begin the first set poorly, trailing 0-3. My partner P and I were facing a slick playing duo with clean, competitive returns, intelligent placement of the ball, and just really good chemistry. Whereas P and I are playing together for the first time. I know P to be a good player but I had never played with her and so had no indication of how we would work together. But what I admired about P was that she played seriously, she is competitive, and so hates to be on the losing end; a feeling I resonate with deeply. I like when people get angry over unforced errors and come back with a vengeance. It’s a sport damn it, and not laughing matter.

And so, we look at each other at 0-3, agree it wouldn't do, and decide to hike up our game and strike back at the team, hit balls that would be impossible for them to return, and find gaping holes on their side of the court. And we bring the game to 4-3, then 4-4, then 5-5, before cinching the first set 7-5. 

I look up at the viewing area and find people who had come to watch our game up on their feet, certain that they were as incredulous as we were. 

Then, set 2. Despite being neck to neck at 3-3, something in our game momentarily gave away. Shots untaken, unforced errors. We are tired of the multiple deuces, playing games 10-15 minutes long. At 3-4, I felt my spirit wane a little, and decide that to make up, I will leap at every shot I can take, no matter how impossible it feels. 

Then, it happens. 

Turns out my partner P had the same idea I did and we both went for a shot about to land in no-man’s land. Only, neither one of us made the call to intimate the other about our decision. We rush to the ball, crash into each other, and my ankle duly obeys, twisting about its axis, plunging me to the ground. I scrape my knee bloody on the hard indoor surface and suffer a stab on a knuckle on my right hand. But none of that hurt as bad as knowing my poor ankle had once again taken the fall. 

I lay on the ground as the other players decided the best course of action. Since the opponent team was leading set two by 2 games, they had been adjudicated winners of that particular set. Per USTA guidelines, if the teams win one set a piece, the winner would be decided by a tie-breaker as we only had 10 minutes of game time left. P and the other players encouraged me to forfeit for the sake of my ankle. I could see a club member rush to me with a bag of ice. I looked sideways and our viewing party were once more on their feet, this time with worry, I presume. 

But all I could think about trying to distract myself from the pain: this is not how I want to lose. This had been a contentious match, and until then I had played as best as I have. Our opponents were, for lack of a better word, unsportsmanlike, challenging our calls and rolling their eyes. And my desire to win felt stronger than the common sense for self-preservation. Damn you, Michael Jordan, I thought to myself, having consumed The Last Dance vociferously, over multiple rewatches; if you’ve read my previous Substack on the topic, you would know how desperate I was to channel his indomitable spirit, his complete dominance of mind in the most precarious moments of the sport he played. And so, I rose, held my racquet, walked around and resigned myself to play the tie-breaker. 

“I might not be able to run, P,” I said to my partner. But I didn’t want to go down without trying.

__________

I share this story because lately I’ve been consumed by this fear: I’ve lost my edge, if indeed I ever did possess any. I shy away from challenges in fear of defeat or, even sillier, embarrassment, and this continues to affect how I straddle my writing, opportunities, and even relationships. I don’t know if it’s a by-product of getting older and wanting little to dismantle the life I’ve constructed. I give in to neuroses in important moments and I’m unable to get my shit together when I most need to. 

But today, sitting on my bed with a swollen ankle and a bruised knee, I don’t feel as maddened by my ankle as I have all these years. I am still a bit vulnerable. My body is still a little broken. But for the first time yesterday, I felt like an athlete. Like I can take on something even when it feels impossible.

And, by the way, we won the tie-breaker 7-5, and the match along with it. 

Or The Horror of Life

You spend your life dreading the potency of select moments of danger. There is the obvious: falling off a moving train (local trains in Mumbai are open doored), strangers stalking, getting run over by a truck, crashing into another vehicle, and is that creepy sound behind me a wild animal? Then there are the less obvious, the kinds you don’t actively fear or worry about, but once their possibility strikes you, they endure in the back of your mind: escalator suddenly speeding down uncontrollably, a meteor crashing into Earth, a tree falling over you, another potential Titanic situation on your very first international cruise — you know accidents that are ridiculous but plausibly consistent with the unpredictable nature of our lives. 

But the truth is: life is largely predictable. As someone terrified of flying, I can quell my anxiety by remembering, over and over again, that statistics suggest flying is no less safer than any other form of transport. Arguably (because I’m too bored to scrounge up the data), it’s even safer. And so the odds that my life will be rendered special by a freak accident are as low as freak accidents. A meteor will not crash into the planet tomorrow — Don’t Look Up was a bad movie. Tomorrow will not be exponentially more different than today. Life is largely normal and boring. 

You’re so busy oscillating between predictable danger and unpredictable fears and obsessions, that you don’t always have the capacity to dread the threat staring you in your face. At least, this is how my anxiety works — perhaps yours is training you for every horror challenge out there. But today, I found myself woefully unprepared to acknowledge how dreadful it would be to get stuck in an elevator with my parents when I discovered that I was stuck in an elevator with my parents. 

We were having a particularly combative afternoon — maybe a 5.5 on a scale of hostile aggression, 10 being the highest — running errands that held little interest for me — and of course, the heat in Mumbai wasn’t helping; I was sweating from every orifice, my hair had lost any sign of life, and I was angry at all the fabric touching my body. I decided that only a meal would solve our afternoon and despite my parents’ very limited palette, forced them to Tanjore Tiffin Room in Khar West. I didn’t care for how mad they were making me, I am going to be in India for 10 more days and I’ll be damned if I don’t eat the food I like. (Sorry I never mentioned I’m back in India again, on a much shorter trip this time.) We arrived to find the entry to the building, whose second floor Tanjore Tiffin Room occupies, wrapped in tarp and workers currently painting and improving its facade. We walked past the workers and the fumes from a fresh coat of paint, to the elevator, which looked suspicious but a tiny man convinced us it worked just fine, and promptly entered and shut ourselves in. Then, it refused to budge. 

For a minute, it did not respond to our command that it go up a floor. So like monkeys, we pressed the button again and again, squeezing it tighter with every subsequent press, hoping it might cull the elevator into action. When that didn’t work, we pressed the elevator to open its doors and let us out to the mercy of a staircase, but the doors remained closed. Here, I wish I could tell you we tried to be ingenious and crafty, that we at least discussed the next course of action, but none of that happened. My father instantly began to bang the metal walls of the elevator, deafening the tiny cubicle and us in it, while my mother began to hyperventilate. When I directed his attention to the alarm button, he crushed the poor fellow so hard, the alarm went off into a cacophony, refusing to shut up. In the middle of that commotion, I felt a part of me die — I am forever changed and reduced from that experience. Even as I begged them to calm down and think straight, I knew that this little naive, unsophisticated, hopeful part of me now understood the horrific turn life could take — an accident that won’t kill you or hurt you, but maim you irreparably was underway. I was thrown into such a fit of anger, deep sadness, and anxiety that I forgot to even consider the elevator might malfunction into a free-fall. Every second I spent in that elevator cut me a little deeper. 

Of course, after what felt like an hour but was maybe five minutes at best, a crew of men pried open the doors and we were let out. After some strong words from my father, we made our way to the restaurant because that’s what we were there to do: eat. I ordered suitable foods and we nibbled slowly, but food had lost its taste. We had felt real fear in that elevator, for different reasons of course, and worse, we’d seen the other in the throes of their fear. Eating food was fine, but enjoying it was only going to add to the humiliation. 

Whatever you make of this story; lately it feels like my emotional core is intent on punishing itself. Every day requires a great bit of overcoming one’s worst instincts — intrusive thoughts? That’s what the kids call it — to operate even a little bit functionally. But right now, I cannot shake away the idea that every pleasure I seek has so far punished me. My routine — series of actions, not established protocol — is stuck in a rut of self-flagellation; no part of me can cut through that cycle and enjoy or revel in anything. On the contrary, it feels like some part is constantly being pricked by invisible forces. The food I wanted found a way to make itself gratuitous — that really soldiered a larger point I’ve been trying to avoid; all my desire has lately hollowed itself out. 

I know of flagellation as theological retribution. Jesus was flogged by the Romans as a prelude to his crucifixion; in Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ (basically my Bible) (just kidding), you see the gory undertaking of the proceedings, right before Christ’s ascend to complete divinity (or not really, the movie is a bit complicated). You understand that this is torture that can only befit the Son of God. In the Islamic calendar, Muharram marks the first month and a month that Shi'a Muslims spend mourning  the martyrdom of Hussein Ali, grandson of the Prophet. On the tenth day of the month, they participate in public processions of self-flagellation, hitting themselves with sharp knives and chains with blades on them, drawing blood. It is a passionate cry of atonement. And if you grew up in India, you certainly know of the streetside performers who whip themselves loudly to collect money. They do this as performance, not punishment, with music emanating from small drums on their belt and ghungroos tintinnabulating on their dancing feet. Hailing from a SC community who are devotees of Goddess Mariamma, they perform to connect with divine power, to ward off sicknesses, and evil spirits. Despite a prominent Indian marvel, they are dismissed to the margins of street performance — however, no one who encounters them can mistake their unimpeachable connection with divine faith. 

I say this not out of deep study — I’m fascinated, of course — but I’m far from a spiritual or faithful person; in fact, I’m the opposite of one. I wouldn’t deign to compare myself with that kind of mania; you can throw in the worshippers who walk on a blazing coal pit and devotees who pierce their bodies with steel tridents and hooks (see Hinduism has its fair share). So, of course, I use self-flagellation loosely here, an exaggerated quip. I only joke but not mean when I say: I know God gives his toughest battles to his strongest soldiers, and die laughing. It’s a joke to play up the severity of this turmoil, a bit outré to suffer this loudly, but also it’s not a joke that it’s begun to affect my work, my writing, my ability to churn out something creative and fulfilling. 

Which this is not. Neither creative nor fulfilling. Nor complete. This is all to say that lately it’s become impossible to do something, and not wonder if I should have done differently, not feel a bit implicated and penalized in the execution of desire by forces, both predictable and unpredictable. That I, who fears so much of this world, never paused to consider the possibility of being stuck in an elevator with my parents — even though a small part of me is forever caged in this one-bedroom apartment I shared with them growing up, and will be, even when I leave. What would I have done to avoid it? Take the stairs, avoid the restaurant, take charge, think happy thoughts. But it happened. It was awful. This is my story. No, scratch that. An anecdote. 

No lessons or conclusions here. 

SOME UPDATES

This should tell you why I haven’t been writing much. I intend to use my summer and crystallize a few writing projects and applications, you may either hear from me more or less. It’s a toss up, really. 

There is so much I want to share — but for today, I will use this space to highlight a very special project. 

As you all know, I handle editorial + publicity operations at Radix Media — a worker-owned, independent publisher and union printer in Brooklyn, New York. Defying the hierarchical nature of traditional publishing, Radix Media offers a democratic model. At Radix Media, the team makes all decisions in consensus and through that, we hope to champion inventive literary projects. 

One such project is our upcoming publication — Many Worlds, a science fiction anthology edited by writers Cadwell Turnbull and Josh Eure, forthcoming June 13, 2023. 

Many Worlds is the effort of a cooperative writers group called the Many Worlds Forum. The authors in this forum pool in resources, share conceits and the fruits of labor equally. Together, the writers are building a shared, infinite multiverse. But unlike other anthologies where writers are paid a nominal amount and the bulk of profits are divided among the editors, the Many Worlds authors and editors share all profits equally. 

I had the privilege to edit this anthology for Radix Media and I can attest that it is absolutely brilliant. The worldbuilding, the shifting realities of the stories made me question everything, including the timeline we populate. But even more, there is such empathetic understanding of temporality — the characters in this collection try so hard to hold on to a world slipping through their fingers. Certainly, that is a desperation we all understand. The collection has in fact earned a starred review from Publishers Weekly who wrote “Readers will be wowed.”

Today, we launched a Kickstarter campaign to offset the printing and production costs of Many Worlds. As a small business, the COVID-19 pandemic continues to affect our day to day business — this has compelled us to reach out to you, our community, for help in publishing this project. You can support the book by pre-ordering a copy through Kickstarter — only for today, you can pre-order a copy with a $5 discount. You can also add other fun rewards we have set aside for you: prints, bookmarks, other Radix Media titles, and even a tattoo!

If you love science and speculative fiction, you will fall in love with this book. If you gravitate to storytelling that expands our lived imagination, you will swear by this book. If you are a reader, then you will be proud to add this book to your bookshelf. 

Your support will ensure that a radical, worker-owned publisher can continue to champion fearless, audacious literature. 

Do consider pledging your support to our Kickstarter campaign; we will all be very grateful. 

Read more about Many Worlds, its blurbs, the Many Worlds Forum, select excerpts from the collection, and support the campaign on Kickstarter. 

Pre-order MANY WORLDS

amma quiet. PC: meher

In a few minutes, H will leave, taking the storm with him. For now, having just finished my therapy session where I spoke and spoke and spoke for fear of silence, I will relish the sound of his becoming one for this world. I hear the shower turn on at that maximalist severity where water lands on skin like a leather whip. I bristle at the loofah rubbing circles on his coarse limbs. I hum along to his electric razor and try to remember the little hairs that have grown along his jaw since our return from India. I am enlivened with the electric toothbrush and its circular insistence inside my loved one’s jaw. There are other soundless indulgences here which, bless the part of his being that makes everything voluminous and lively, H acts them out with the subtlety of a mime artist. I hear the friction of the towel rubbing the skin off wetness, the brusqueness of the comb on his thin, sharp hairs, the slap of hand on skin as he lathers fat dollops of moisturizer to smoothen the dryness, and eventually the zipping of pants, the buttoning of shirt, the lacing of shoes. Between the commotion of the morning, I hear the soft mewling of our cats, pregnant with expectation, soon to be disappointed that they’re begging for food from someone far too occupied to spare them any. In a few minutes, I will upload this, pull myself off the bed, and savor the opening of the tin can and pinch my nostrils to the pungent saltiness of cat food. 

But once H leaves and the cats have been anesthetized with an abundance of food, there will only be me, the sound of my furious typing, and the absolute deafening silence of this New England home. 

Outside my home, this city is besieged with a kind of still quiet that even moving vehicles are too polite to disobey. No one deigns to honk and certainly not again if one is compelled to honk that one time. Feet land noiselessly on pavements and dogs scurry about their tiny paws, plump with love and attention, barks lodged deep in the pits of their stomachs. If I walk east and keep walking for ten blocks or so, I will come upon the yuppie college streets where the young are listless and restless with their movement and sound. But among them, I feel like a voyeur leeching on their uncertainty. Eventually, after corresponding with them in the cocoon of a classroom, where I’m paid to pretend I know better and have it all together, I will once again retreat into the quiet of my home. I will play music, switch genres, the velocity and chaos of music amplifying with every switch but there is far too much discipline and order to musical arrangement that cannot compete with the unforeseeable chaos of unordered company. 

There is a whole bit here about my prevailing dissatisfaction with New England though writers better than me have surmised it far better. I chuckle quietly and think of Faulkner who writes in Absalom, Absalom!, “I don’t hate it, he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark; I don’t. I don’t! I don’t hate it! I don’t hate it!” Here, Quentin Compson, the narrator of the novel, is speaking of the American South, but to my ears, it could just be an indignant tantrum on crusty New England and its sorry weather. But that’s for another Substack. 

For two months, I was enveloped by sound, in Mumbai, but also in cities big and small: Visakhapatnam with its domesticated humdrum, croaked alleyways, and singing buses; Kochi, with a more resigned humming not quite descending into complete quiet and its hooting guard dogs; Chennai, feverish, undomesticating its contours to the tune of competing metropolises; Delhi, forever, insistently wearing its roughness like a badge of honor; and Agra, a precocious paroxysm of need, so eager to be heard and seen and attended to. I traveled the country, lived in muchness, where everything diffused like a shroud on everything, and the world unfolded about itself to reveal more world, and solitude was a thought bubble of what if distilling through poor air quality. This is to say, that the world I know with absolute comfort dwells in sound, where silence is a luxury hard to come by, a fearful premonition of things gone wrong. Sound is the constant assurance that the world is moving about its axis as it is meant to: vehicles moving, industry growing, community expanding, and hearts beating where you most, desperately need them. 

In the quietude of my New England home, I’m constantly fearing the death knell of ominous news. I check and double check the online presence of my loved ones and call and call again to ensure I hear sound on the other end. When my parents forget I’m there and descend into an argument, I don’t rush to shut them up but instead dissolve into the cacophony of their married voices. When the other half of the world is asleep, I chase my cats to hear the pitter-patter of their nails on the wooden floor. I run furiously over the keyboard, tuning the click-clack to the acceleration of my worries, big and small. And when H will return in the evening, I will boil over with relief, and regurgitate my insides on the bed for him, grateful for his kindness that receives everything escaping my mouth with love. 

I will never get used to this silence, but in a few days, my heart won’t agonize as much as it does now. Until then, if you know me, send me voice notes. Of talking or just being. I will receive them with gratitude. 

P. S. 

Incidentally, I’m re-reading Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky for the Multi-Genre Creative Writing Workshop I’m teaching at RISD this semester. It is about hearing but also unhearing, witnessing and recusing yourself from scene. I return to this line again and again—

“The deaf don't believe in silence. Silence is the invention of the hearing.”

I urge you to think about it. 

SOME UPDATES:

I’m still getting my bearings together and I am severely jet-lagged so forgive my brain for not working. But I’m working on a visual micro-essay, and I haven’t edited video in so long. What will come of it? More on that soon.

(picture credit: meher)

It’s the new year and I remain immersed in locationality. If you missed my last Substack (as you are well within your right to), you might know that I’m currently in Mumbai for two months—the longest I’ve stayed at home in about six years. Given how long I’ve been away, I’m awash with a reckless hunger to see and do everything, meet everyone, and consume as much as home allows itself to be consumed. So for every two days I spend at home, I am out again in this world, if not to revisit a beloved corner of my city with grown eyes then to see pockets of this country with leisure for company. And as is paramount to this kind of frenetic movement, a deep unsettlement follows me wherever I go. Where in the first two weeks, I had to relearn the rules of codified behaviour in my household that I had gladly forsaken during my time away, I also had to renegotiate the memory of places frozen in love with what I see in front of me today: a time-tested world now wears a shiny, glossy cloak in a country that aches to look like it has arrived even as it trudges toward an uncertain future. 

(picture credit: meher)

***

Two weeks ago, I took some days off to visit Kochi with my friend Apeksha, in particular to witness the sites of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. For the uninitiated, the word biennale (etym: Italian) has come to refer to contemporary art exhibitions that happen every two years — inspired by the curatorial standard set by the Venice Biennale, the first pall-bearing exhibit of its kind. The Kochi-Muziris Biennale, now active for a little over a decade, is a prominent exhibition that takes place in the Fort Kochi district of Kochi, Kerala. For about four months, vast, generously spacious structures and small cafes are overtaken by art pieces, both big and small, from paintings, sketches, and photographs, to installations, interactive videos, and looping performance art. 

People visit the exhibit from all over the state, country, and the world. Kerala, already a tourism hotspot for its stunning backwaters, all year-long humid climate, and of course, its rich cultural cache — where longstanding dravidian ethos meets a syncretic society of Hindus, Muslims, and Christians — has endured with a people open and inviting to visitors. Many of them come to Fort Kochi, an idyllic coastal neighborhood boasting Dutch-colonial architecture, tranquil cafes and restaurants, and a quiet, almost eerie stillness. It’s the perfect place for an exhibition that is in no hurry to amass its visitors—that the Kochi Biennale is held over four months allows art enthusiasts a great deal of time to plan their visits. Visiting as I did in January for instance, not synchronous with a holiday weekend, is an exercise in indulgence. There is no waiting or crowding around a work of art; I had all the time in the world to walk, pace myself, and linger by an arresting art piece for as long as my heart desired. 

And how exquisite was the art! As someone routinely immersed in the literary, cinematic, and musical worlds through practice and journalistic interest, I can rarely bring myself to appreciate visual culture as much as I would want to. I find the task of going to a museum daunting and very rarely can I afford days with long berths of time to simply stand and take in a work of art. I love photographs and photo essays very much and yet, I tend to take the easier way out, check out work on my laptop at home than haul my ass to a gallery. So you can believe it was a joy to find myself in Fort Kochi, even if for three days, to do nothing but watch some of the more interesting work being fostered by artists in India and beyond. 

I was moved by the capacity of art, by roaring ambitions and quiet musings alike and wished my work — my words — could ever so capture the precocity of human spirit like the exhibits I had the privilege to see. It’s been days but there are certain works I cannot seem to forget—

The lovely and elusive Santhi EN who created a brocade of paintings capturing life in small town Irinjalakuda in Thrissur; young girls in stark white planted against muted monochrome blue palette. Girls playing hide-n-seek, girls headed to school, women tending to cattle — it’s a child’s eye view of a simple life made even more painful by the unobstructed romanticism which holds grief that a return to such a time is near impossible. 

Seher Shah whose Notes From a City Unknown fused sparse poetry and black and white structural renditions of capitalist structures to document a city coming asunder with grief, the memory of trauma, and the desire to become. While the work claims to reference Delhi, I found myself evoking Mumbai as I waltzed through the work. 

“Women’s Public Life,” a large, multi-narrative encompassing photo and memory project curated by the Nepal Public Library has had me spellbound. Carefully amassed over years, the project traces the feminist undertakings of Nepalese women who defied dictum and sought education, Marxism, political struggle to be seen and heard in the public sphere. 

Ali Cherri’s “Of Men and Gods and Mud” in which the artist attempts fantasticism outside the realm of historicity, where neither the past nor the desperate progressive lens of the future can tamper with his use of mud as both a catalyst and a progenitor to movement. Smitha GS’s gargantuan multi-colored artwork capturing life and sentience through metaphysical depiction. Vasudevan Akkitham’s 365 paintings over the year of the pandemic — one for each day — through which the audience can trace mood, anger, delirium, need, loneliness, hope. Devi Seetharam’s “Brothers, Fathers, and Uncles” featuring men in white mundus occupying space so exclusively that the absence of women becomes a glaring and intentional oversight. 

(picture credit: meher)

And more and more and more. What became obvious as I circled around exhibits, many times losing my way to return to the same room — which felt like divine intervention demonstrating the point I want to make — is that artists of every caliber, genre, and intention are deeply inspired by locationality, of their past and present, to create work that aches to belong if not represent with either perspective or accuracy the space we occupy. While women’s narratives, accelerating climate change, civilizational ruptures are some themes that have led to resonant works of art, the works live by being rooted to a milieu or a landscape that the creator is deeply invested in. Again, this landscape isn’t always real — and often is a culmination of the true and the imagined — yet, within the scope of the artist’s work, it rings truer than the three-dimensional temporalities of breathing cities. 

Every letter I write originates in Mumbai, every sentence I conjure owes its rhythm, musicality, and turn of phrase to the vernacularization of multiple tongues that call it home, every paragraph I construct hopes to carry the city’s beating heart while always pointing to the future of its frailties. Recently, I had been worried about whether I could claim belonging to a city that was changing in my absence, as all dynamic bodies do. But the bigger worry I held was for my writing — whether it could withstand being compared to a home eager to shed its skin behind. Imagine then what a relief this was to me, to learn that not just in poetry and literature, place and belonging is intrinsic to works beyond the written word and that this place need never be static or arrested in factuality, but can be a fluid zygote borne from memory and leaps of imagination. Mumbai can be what I remember of it, what I want it to become, what it holds true for me, in spirit and love and faulty wiring, all beauty and ugliness contained in one. 

*** 

At the end of my short three-day stint, I walked into an government-run artisan store to purchase a gift and saw all of Kerala reduced to the trinkets that flaunt its tourism brochures: houseboats, elephants, banana leaves, coconuts, and statued Kathakali dancers, their heads bobbing about their necks to suggest a semblance of similarity with those eager, expressive eyes of the real ones. It was a reminder of how cultural and tourism industries actively participate in their own colonization for survival: how local artists and makers create objects that satisfy the colonizer’s image of their land as a static backdrop to visual culture that can be arrested as trinkets. It’s a complex conundrum: at the end of the day, the purchase of such items support the advancement of indigenous crafts and arts who attempt to overpower capitalist industry through persistence, yet their creations, in catering to the foreign visitor (here, I count myself and other Indians who come to Kerala with a romantic view of its backwaters) can’t tempt complexity and must indeed be accessible and obvious to the pastiche. But then, the works I had just witnessed at the Kochi Biennale had me convinced that these are all decoys for simple distraction, we collect the places we visit and live in and store them in a place deeply embedded in our psyche. Scent, touch, sound are the superficial encounters — an indescribable feeling, a warmth hotter than physical touch, the kiss of even evening sunset, memory is so flexible and manifold and perhaps the most unbreakable collectible item of all. 

I bought a marble statue of an elephant with a smaller elephant in its womb and left for my home. 

(picture credit: meher)

SOME UPDATES:

— I’ve been busy working even as I’m trying to milk every minute of my time at home. I dove into the nepotism debate for The Juggernaut, arguing that instead of trolling every young child of someone-something, we could do better by outlining the insular caste solidarity of the Indian film industry and demanding public funding for the arts. 
​

“As grating and unnerving as nepotism is, the solution does not lie in demanding that producers and distributors running private businesses hire people according to some mock ethical yardstick. Because there isn’t an ethical yardstick in the arts, where merit is subjective. Modern cinema is also no longer an earnest artistic medium, in India or the U.S. It lies at the crossroads of capitalist profit and diminishing audience attention, where gimmicks, memes, and even bad publicity drive viewers to the movie theaters. At such a time, who can fault a filmmaker for really believing that casting the daughter of Sridevi, arguably the greatest woman superstar India has ever had, might not lead to a hit at the box office? 

The real solution, if there has to be one, is in the strengthening of an independent cultural body, one that is committed to innovative scripts and independent talent.”

Read the full article here. 

— I’m so proud and honored that Zein El-Amine’s gorgeous short fiction debut Is This How You Eat a Watermelon (out from Radix Media) has made it the longlist of Pen America’s Robert W. Bingham Prize for debut short fiction. If you don’t know, I had the privilege of editing this collection. Buy a copy of this incredible work on the Radix Media website today. 

— This past weekend, I got to see my friends Smriti and Vishnu get married in Chennai and it was a lot of fun and my feet are aching from dancing. More later!

(Apeksha & Priya the evening of enthusiastic bugs and cicada rhythms)

Etel Adnan says it best in Night:  “Eternity is non evident. There’s this endless rotation of the sun in the skull, the stillness outside, and a storm within. At least a river is always flowing in some part of the country. Winds, always gathering speed, shatter the order of things. We return home, in tears.” 

I come home in the same way that the hungry come to food, the thirsty to water, the loner to friendship, arms wide open with expectation even if my calm demeanor suggests soft affectation. Why is that? I’ve been home for a little over two weeks and certainly nothing fantastic has happened, yet, though there have been ample moments when my breath has turned wispy with a strong feeling of déjà vu, my body convulsing with the reminders of love, companionship, and humidity. Holding Apeksha and Priya after so many years when even touch felt like a radical undertaking, basking in the warm glow of their attention, taking the train, jostling next to strangers, eavesdropping on tongues ingratiating with my own, hearing my parents squabble in the next room, the damp wetness collecting on the basin above my lips, taking in the perpetual smell of the city, the strange concoction of people, urine, rusting metal, and sea water, which to me feels like the most glorious scent in the world—everything I experienced once is here still, for me to consume and experience anew. 

But that is a hedonistic pursuit, which clarifies itself in plates of roadside chaat and pani puri and vada pav and fresh creamy coconut water, endless autorickshaw rides, and a breathful of crisp December air. And hedonism that operates with any degree of self-awareness ends sooner rather than later. My craven desires retreat into the stillness of the night and I’m no longer at that age when my hunger was ravenous and all consuming. What I’m left feeling on most days, now that I’m here, is that now that I’m here, where else is there to go?

Since before circumstances made travel and stay precarious, in the last six years that I’ve been away from Mira Road (a suburban nook in the northern part of the megalopolis), from Mumbai, from India, whenever I, painfully and with great love, devise a plan to visit home, I always say “I’m coming home” rather than the more grammatically and contextually accurate, “I’m going home.” The sentiment is obvious, but let me elucidate anyway. Home, to anyone who has spent a considerable part of their life in one little corner of the world, reads like the northern star—static and dependable. Every other shelter, no matter how robust and enduring, feels like a diversion, a detour to enable the mundanities of adulthood: education, career, travel, before the eventual return. The northern star always blinking in the deep black sky, with a steady reminder that a comeback, if desired, is possible for a lucky few. It is where you return to, not travel to.   

When you leave home at a later age — as I did at 23 — so much of you is already formed and crystallized from years of nurture; your parents, community, neighborhood, stepping in to formalize specific parts of your identity. And no matter how far you travel, as I did when I went (see?) to the US, no space feels as consummate as the one you left behind which feels, even in its smallness, as the symbolic ideal of domesticity. I feel this way about the little apartment I grew up in, but also about the building, the compound, the amateur garden gracing my window, and certainly about Mumbai. I feel this way still, so strongly, so passionately, that I’ve been resolute in my disaffection for every address I’ve collected since. I have looked at every five-digit US pin code with considerable apathy, its shortness a stranger to the music of the six-digit codes of home. I scoff at every roof, every wood flooring, aged baroque window panels and imagine instead a future of my own making, a modest two-bedroom with a balcony, in the neighborhood of Mumbai that smells perpetually like filter coffee. 

But the northern star is never really there because none of us, least of all me, can read constellations or the sky all too well. Honestly, the northern star is whatever blinking knob you can spot in a polluted sky. The world rotates about its axis as it’s meant to, and every minute you spend away from home, it transforms about itself, revises its glitches and opens new fissures through which both light and darkness filter. The home I know, remember, love, and crave is arrested in desire, but the real one left behind is a breathing organism grunting, growling, fighting its way to survival. What do I know of the fractures breaking its bones asunder? What do I know of the smog choking its innards? What claim can I stake on the sweat infused sea water that declares itself, no matter where you are, with shameless abandon? 

So I return with a snapshot frozen in the past, to a city that I can no longer pretend to be tethered to—a chasm will forever exist in my memory of home and what it has become in my absence. Allow me to turn to Edward W. Said for a second, even if he is writing about the more permanent, unreturnable kind of exile in his text Reflections on Exile and Other Essays.

Said writes, “exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted. And while it is true that literature and history contain heroic, romantic, glorious, even triumphant episodes in an exile’s life, these are no more than efforts meant to overcome the crippling sorrow of estrangement.”

This is a divorce that clarifies most prominently when I’m here, bearing witness to all that has changed—it softens only when I’m away, when I can take recourse in memory and reflection. 

I mourn for what it was but amidst that feeling of forlorn melancholy, I never need to grieve for who I was when I was here because the way I am seen, touched, held, regarded takes me right back to those years of absolute ingenuity, to the beginnings, when I was witnessed growing and becoming by those who knew me before I came to know myself. There is a regression here certainly—I often have to remind myself that the last six years happened and that I am, in so many ways, a radically different person to who I was. But still, there is great relief when I am seen, all my affectations and pretensions of adulthood swiftly ignored. When a building Aunty says, “I remember when you…”, or when a friend jostles my arm with unforgettable intimacy, the deepest corners of my little heart swell with joy. You were here, You were here, my insides beam. And in many ways, a part of me will always be. 

I read Edward Thomas and his poem “Home” again and again with such well of deep feeling and a quiet sob lodged in my throat—

Often I had gone this way before:
But now it seemed I never could be
And never had been anywhere else;
'Twas home; one nationality
We had, I and the birds that sang,
One memory.

They welcomed me. I had come back
That eve somehow from somewhere far:
The April mist, the chill, the calm,
Meant the same thing familiar
And pleasant to us, and strange too,
Yet with no bar.

I’m stuck on two parts of this poem specifically—I read “..now it seemed I never could be / and never had been anywhere else,” and know with certainty that no matter the chasm that has chafed my relationship with home, the memory of our relationship is a tactile body, suffusing the ease and comfort with which I flit about, with nary a concern, completely sure of my footing; I read “They welcome me. I had come back” with gratitude for all the eyes that light up at my arrival, even if I painfully do not deserve it. That someone would take a moment in their life to retain some memory of who I was, however hazy, seems to me the most generous offering in the world. What a joy to be witnessed, to be remembered, to be recognized, to be greeted, to be welcomed, to be regaled, to be heard. What a compelling proof of a storied past. What an absolute gift of personhood. 

The city may be changing, as all breathing bodies deserve to. I may run through it, a little confused but mighty delighted. I may fear the growing separation from the only home I have loved without prejudice. But I take comfort in the fact that for as long as someone remembers me, I am here, tucked in some small, unchanging part of the fabric, sticking out like an unignorable, rigid little thing. 

SOME UPDATES

Not much to report. I had the great joy of spending some beautiful days with Priya & Apeksha before Priya left to go to B-school in France (fancy pants!!). Now, I have more or less lodged myself in Apeksha & Akash’s routine, spread out on their green couch like a gremlin happy with attention. 

I got to join Apeksha for her 30th birthday and I don’t know if she enjoyed it, but I enjoyed myself immensely given how many pivotal moments I’ve missed in my friends’ lives the last few years. Look at this photo—

I am happy to continue my commitment to tennis, even if my play has been wonky since my arrival in India. That I wake up at 6 am and show up to 7am practice—my twenty-year-old self would be in disbelief and thrilled. 

I get to watch a bunch of my friends get married in 2023—I can’t wait to dance at all their parties. 

I feel too lazy with food and the abundance of family to bother with a year-end recap of my writing. Just scroll through my Instagram if you feel curious. 

I’m bringing in New Year’s Eve in Vizag—easily my most uneventful end of year in recent past. I’m struggling with being surrounded by family but there are worse pains I suppose. More on that after I’ve had some time to consider it all. 

Happy New Year loves. Everything that hasn’t been done yet, can be revisited. 🙂

Today, I turn 30. And my mother 58. We share a birthday, among other things. There is also a whole lot we are unable to share: values, ambitions, thoughts, secrets, laughter, joy. To be born on the same date as my mother tethers me to her in a way I read with more significance than normal mother-daughter tethering. In that every thought thunk, action done, choice made, path taken seems to reflect back on her with the kind of sparkling clarity that would put electro fuzz nostalgia to shame. If femininity succeeds in rebellion, by casting out the old in favor of the new and progressive, and in the gleeful mortification of the prudish and the watchful, then I can be kinder to myself by admitting that the life I live, by antagonizing my mother daily, is at least a successful one. But it is hard to take any pride in the joy or self-sufficiency that is unable to thrive independently, which declares itself always in opposition to my mother. That there is forever a wide berth that separates her from me is the grand truth of our lives. 

But that isn’t the point of this Substack—though it subliminally informs what I’m feeling. 

Today, I am reminded of the childlike enthusiasm I harbored in the days leading up to past birthdays and its dimming light with the advancing of age. Vijay Seshadri writes in his poem “Memoir,” how “The real story of a life is the story of its humiliations.” Perhaps then I could dedicate a whole chapter to the giddiness of November, the glee I experienced with the arrival of the month, the shameful leap of my heart at the passing of every week, the degrading dizziness of November 27, knowing that with every hour I was closer to the day I could pretend to be important and necessary and that no one would be cruel enough to walk over my small, expectant heart. How very narcissistic and frankly puerile—that I can’t pretend to be completely over it is also embarrassing, that the mere mention of the number 28 still sends a warm whistle down my back is my silly secret.

Memories of evenings spent on pins and needles, a tender little heart bursting with anticipation, are tinged with the image of my mother shrinking little by little, making herself smaller with each year that I grew older alongside her, until the joy of me and the volume of my needs took over every November. This isn’t to say I had great birthdays, or the kind of days I wanted—hardly, if ever, in fact—but that none of us, including my mother, cared what would become of her each birthday. She forsake attention or even joy, every birthday uncelebrated made every subsequent birthday less important until there came a time when it ceased to matter completely. My mother can’t be bothered for even quiet rumination—certainly an emotion every one is compelled to with the successful completion of another trip around the Sun. 

I used to find this insane. At my heightened emotional state on each birthday, as joy, sadness, reflection jostled to defeat the other, I thought it absolutely incomprehensible that my mother went through motions of the day like any other day, that no frenetic energy marked her movements or interactions. But today, I woke up, graded a stack of student papers, drank my coffee, fed my cats, and now as I type this, my heart is latent and only slightly amused. I am neither precipitating with worry nor aroused by expectation. I had a mostly fun and slightly revelatory dinner with some folks on Saturday night and in less than a week I will be in  New York, hugging my favorites. There is nothing that will happen today that will dampen my spirits. I will attend a work meeting, then teach two classes, then maybe grab sushi or pasta for dinner. I will sleep at a respectable time so I can be up tomorrow for therapy (I look forward to it). And I know with certainty that I will go to bed tonight having hugged the person I love most in this world and that at least one of my cats will cuddle its bum close to my chest. And so I too will be following the motions of my life’s making, with none of the dreariness that colors my mother’s days. I’m almost disgusted to admit but this feels a lot like contentment. 

So there it is—I am 30 on a day that is as brimful as I need it to be. Here’s to living a day like any other. 

Oh also, I had a piece of cake for breakfast. How’s that for feeling special?

PC: Ken Levine / Allsport

A singular moment from the finale of The Last Dance, the ESPN x Netflix documentary series about the Chicago Bulls cinching the 1998 NBA finals trophy — their 6th championship win that decade and the last one for one of the greatest teams to play the sport, featuring an all-star cast of Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, Dennis Rodman and coach Phil Jackson — has seared itself into my memory. In it, Michael Jordan is onboard the team bus along with his mates, but Jordan is not with them. He has headphones on and he’s really grooving to the music. His eyes are closed, his lips pursed into a cool pout, a smile ready and eager on the horizon. Man’s really vibin’. He’s picked the very last seat on the bus but he need not worry about disappearing behind the other heads. He sits like a King on his throne, aware that no matter where he is, all eyes work their hardest to spot him, the cameras are hungry for a glance of him, his teammates turn to him like one turns to the Sun, even when one is annoyed by it. And the Sun is enjoying the fuck out of the music singing in his ears. 

“What are you listening to?” someone asks, no doubt having been enthralled by the sight of him. 

“What are you listening to?” they ask twice more before he cares to pull the headphones off his ears. 

“Kenny Lattimore,” Jordan replies before adding, “It’s brand new, not even out yet.” He slips out a cheerful smile at the last bit. 

Jordan then puts the headphones back on and grooves for a very short second. But he’s not content. He has more to say.

“He’s a friend of mine, you know I can get that,” he says. 

Jordan returns to music but the pout is no longer there. In its stead is a smile so smug, his cheeks couldn’t puff any higher. 

Now at the time of watching, I didn’t know Kenny Lattimore (and if this is egregious, remind yourself that I am not an American) but just from the sizeable swag of the moment, I expected his music to be, not hardcore necessarily, but at least a little tougher, less soul, more pump, less Usher, more Run-D.M.C., the kind of music an athlete would listen to on his way to the last ever playoffs he will play with the team he led from the backbenches to world domination. Listening to Kenny Lattimore after, his perfectly anodyne, if softcore, voice, the ridiculousness of the moment really sets in. This guy had Michael Jordan so puffed? But I remind myself, having wolfed down the series in a matter of days, that Jordan required little to puff himself up. He did it very well all by himself. 

I find myself at this latent stage of my life, with no prerequisite fascination with basketball other than the basic knowledge that it was a sport you won by shooting the ball through your designated hoop more times than the other team, quite enamored and, dare I say, obsessed with Michael Jordan. With Michael Jordan’s clear, unquestionable domination, of course but also with Michael Jordan the perennial competitor, Michael Jordan, the guy you could rile up simply by looking him in the eye, Michael Jordan, who even as a rookie wasted no time in going after the biggest players of his sport, Michael Jordan, the asshole, the unbearable teammate, who awed and provoked his fellow Chicago Bulls players in equal measure. 

The series is rife with moments of opponent players enjoying a great quarter or two of play against the Bulls and making the mistake of going head to head with Jordan. If someone was brave enough to stalk Jordan on court, he would be sure to make the poor guy repent. If someone was braver still to look him in the eye, Jordan would have him squared off by the end of the game. As a rookie, Indiana Pacer sharpshooter Reggie Miller, after a quarter or two of spectacular play, challenges MJ. “I thought you walked on water,” he quips. Jordan returns the attempt at trash talk with a spectacular thrashing. He not only leads the Bulls to an easy win but also makes sure to remind Miller, “Don’t ever trash talk to Black Jesus.” Michael Jordan didn’t need others to deify him, he did it all by himself. 

Here was a man widely considered to be one of the greatest players to play the sport but pettiness came so easily to him. An ongoing drama part of the Bulls narrative is the enmity between Jordan, fellow player Pippen, coach Jackson and team manager Jerry Krause, a short, stout, blancmange of a man. Krause felt slighted for never receiving the credit for building the team touted for its greatness, and used every possible opportunity to undermine the players and reroute attention back to management. Jordan, on his end, took every opportunity to ridicule Krause for his height and weight — that’s right, the GOAT is kind of an asshole. But when Krause recruits Croatian basketball player Toni Kukoč and calls him the future of the Bulls, Jordan obviously takes it personally. When Jordan and Pippen as part of the Dream team, a crew of the best NBA players representing the USA at the Olympics, meet the Croatian basketball team at the competition, they target and attack Kukoč mercilessly, use every possible shot to humiliate him, and by extension Krause. 

Sometimes, Jordan didn’t even need a reason to cough up hostility with a fellow player. In one of the most insane moments depicted in the series, the Bulls, now two-time Returning Champions, go head to head with the Washington Bullets. Bullets shooter LaBradford Smith, an otherwise unremarkable player, has a great night which coincides with one of Jordan’s poorer shows. Smith hoops 37 points and leads his team to victory over the Bulls; meanwhile Jordan has missed most of his baskets. Now, according to Jordan, Smith allegedly runs into him on the way out of the restroom and greets him with a “Nice game, Mike.”

It’s a harmless moment, even one of mutual respect and sportsmanship. But it is enough to enrage MJ. Over the next two games, Jordan does not only subjugate the Bullets, but he pointedly attacks and dominates Smith over and over again. Of course, writers and spectators believe this to be Jordan’s sweet revenge for a largely innocuous moment. But Jordan confesses in the documentary: this moment actually never happened. Smith never ran into Jordan, and never uttered the words, “Nice game, Mike.” 

“I made it up,” he says with a sheepish grin. Just to get himself angry enough to win. 

A psychopath, I know. (I jest, don’t come at me)

I don’t know much about sports so forgive me for getting the next part entirely wrong. But watching The Last Dance, I realized that I’d never before experienced an athletic great like Jordan. The few athletes that I’d followed and was aware of were players of incredible skill but rarely supersized (public) personas. Roger Federer — classic boring, unimpeachable. Rafael Nadal — chaotic boring. Tiger Woods — boring chaotic. Sachin Tendulkar — simply boring. Novak Djokovic — chaotic without a cause. In this age of carefully crafted, PR-managed athleticism, only Serena Williams sticks out as a figure with any semblance of personhood, no doubt shaped by the amount she fought both on and off the court (cue: misogynoir). This isn’t a contradiction to their superior skills in their games, but rather my (maybe limited) reading of the public figures they cut, which show drive and an ambition to win, but rarely betray the kind of ego, the willing participation in self-mythologizing, the pettiness that Jordan bares in the series, and certainly, throughout his active career. Jordan isn’t humbly conceding to those who call him the Greatest of All Time, he’s daring you to insinuate he’s not in fact the greatest to ever walk the basketball court. 

Just thinking about the image of Jordan after the Bulls received a resounding defeat by the Charlotte Hornets led by BJ Armstrong, a former Bulls player and Jordan teammate, sends chills down my spine. Jordan sits in the locker room, a cigar on his lips, swirling a baseball bat in his hand, talking about Armstrong. 

“That’s the sign of a good man, if you can talk shit when it’s even score, or talk shit when you’re behind,'' he says. “When you’re ahead, it’s easy to talk.”

Predictably, Jordan returns to absolutely destroy the Hornets and whatever’s left of Armstrong’s ego. 

I’m fascinated with Jordan because I’m thinking deeply about competition and the toll you pay when you compete. The week I started watching The Last Dance, I played my first ever doubles tennis game (amateur). To those not in the know, I started learning tennis last year, progressed to intense cardio drills, and was recently invited to be a part of an amateur league with players ranked 3.0 to 3.5 (Beginner to intermediate-ish) who play doubles games every week. Now in terms of skill, I am almost as good as the other players in the league. My serves land although they are admittedly weak, my backhand is dependable, though a little excited at the net, my forehand a wee bit inconsistent, and I can tackle a mean lob. Not a great player, certainly not even good, but in this league of players, I could be considered competent. 

My very first game, I enter the court, my heart racing with the kind of nervousness that can only come from knowing how to do something but not being good enough to have the confidence to win it. Of course, predictably, I tank. I lose easy shots, send the ball flying in the air out of the court, and my trusted Babolat racket feels new and squirmy in my sweaty palm. I play so poorly I want to cry one set in. Even though the other players assure me with incredible patience that it will get better, that I will get better, in that not so spectacular moment of loss, I feel singled out in my abysmal display.

I felt awful and as is the crude nature of the mind, in agony it seeks more agony. Of course I immediately began counting my losses. I thought first about the personhood-shaping way one loses in their childhood and how those early losses can feel so significant in their insignificance. From neighborhood sports where the only stake is dignity, in so far as a group of pre-teens can pretend to have some, to school competitions where there isn’t enough time to mull over losses because there is something else to get to. I immediately look back at those five years in school when I lost every elocution competition from 5th grade until the 9th when I finally broke my spell only because the genre was switched from poetry to speech and wonder if the good-natured way I took my losses maybe primed me into a bad winner. At the time, I chose to believe that I was losing to better poetry reciters, those more expressive and dramatic than I was, but if I knew what it took to win, why didn’t I just come back and do it? Whatever innate personality was forming inside me was certain that I was not that kind of a performer, and so if I lost simply for being myself, then I would take that loss well. 

Here, I must mention that Jordan famously only got better at basketball when a) his father insinuated that his elder brother was a better player and b) when he was cut from his high school JV team. That spirit of vengeance, the desire to have a naysayer eat their words took shape very early. 

I think about my athletic losses, my quiet acceptance of my poor athleticism, or the latter high school years when I continued to be an academically gifted student but conceded the top class rankings to others without feeling like I needed to trounce my competition. And I wonder if I had maybe missed a key lesson there; that moment in time when I could have summoned enough spirit to flip the bird (metaphorically), I chose to acquiesce. 

But none of those losses cut nearly as deep as the daily forfeiture one experiences as a writer. 

To be a writer (or even an artist) is to work against the steady stream of the unknown. It is to be confronted with rejections on the regular, to be up against a scarcity publishing model where you’re told you're good and yet often find that your work is not the right fit for an editor / agent / literary journal / indie publisher. Where the only counter to rejection is to hunker down and produce more work, of course, without the assurance that your writing will travel, cut through the many voices vying for attention, and find its readers. 

And worse, to be a writer is to acknowledge that there is no victory that will come from writing or publishing or selling that manuscript or even making it into the bestseller lists, if the words that you write do not fulfill you enough. 

So consider this for a moment: how difficult it can sometimes feel to open that dreaded, incomplete document and add another sentence to a long line of sentences in desperate need to become a manuscript. How impossible it can seem on some days. 

This is to say that my current obsession with Jordan — and it is an obsession because ask those around me, I simply cannot stop talking about him (I even brought him up in therapy) — doesn’t come from any love for him. He might even be impossible to love because of his steadfast commitment to being a raging dick at the best and worst times. But I am in awe of that spirit that had him bounce back from the most crushing of days, I’m absolutely floored by the strength it required for him to return to the court day in and out with all those eyes on him, I’m terrified of how grueling it must have been for him to shoulder the weight of proving his greatness, his tenacious excellence, his pure dominance, I’m charmed by the relentless cockiness, that need to compete even in the most innocuous of moments, the compulsion to make it clear that even the music he listens to makes him better than you, because he’s Jordan and he can get that. 

But also, most importantly, I’m moved by his wonderful, shameless display of humanity: his joy, pettiness, anguish, ego, rage, confidence, everything makes him a singular figure. 

So no, while I can’t be needlessly competitive (because my life isn’t basketball), and I can’t afford to be cocky (because I’m not Jordan), I am very seduced by the idea of channeling his unbeatable spirit, tomorrow when I walk to my desk and open my unfinished manuscript, and the day after when I find myself on the tennis court, about to face an approaching serve. 

As Michael Jordan says, “Why would I think about missing a shot I haven't taken?”

And I damn well feel like making this the mantra of my life, from today through the best and worst of days. 

P. S. When I finished The Last Dance, I rushed to re-read Hanif Abdurraqib’s great Michael Jordan poem, “It Is Maybe Time to Admit That Michael Jordan Definitely Pushed Off,” and shed a little tear. I would really recommend you read it too. 

SOME UPDATES:

Thursday, October 6, 7:00 pm: I’m doing a reading after a very long time and it will be an in-person, public reading in New York City at my favorite Pete’s Candy Store with Rally Reading Series. I’m also going to be reading something very fresh and very green and very political so come through if you want to catch my forthcoming project at its nascent stage. Learn more here.

Friday, September 30, 7:00 pm: I helped put together Radix Media’s first official bookend event for the Brooklyn Book Festival. Catch Stories from Brooklyn at City Reliquary to hear some exciting contemporary writers discuss what it means to live and write in Brooklyn. Ft. Bishakh Som, Bernard Ferguson, Ghinwa Jawhari, John Dermot Woods, and Sasha Fletcher with Margot Atwell of Feminist Press set to moderate. Register for free here. 

Saturday, October 1, 4:00 pm: Radix Media will be joining other independent publishers for an unofficial BKBF book party. Zein El-Amine, the author of the forthcoming Is This How You Eat a Watermelon? (which I edited), and Hal Y. Zhang, author of Hard Mother, Spider Mother, Soft Mother, will be reading on behalf of Radix Media. Register for free here.  

Sunday, October 2, all day: I’ll be tabling for Radix Media at the Brooklyn Book Festival which, if you don’t know, is a free festival where publishers, journals, and authors celebrate all things literature. Come to booth 523 for a quick chat and to learn more about the publishing project at Radix Media!

PC: meher manda

“At times, as I watch,
it seems as though my country’s body
floats down somewhere on the river.”

In his poem “Freedom,” Jayanta Mahapatra, a vanguard of Indian poetry in English and, dare I say, my favorite lyrical misanthrope recreates the scene as seen from the banks of the Ganges, the holy water where Hindus bid goodbye to their dead, a bed of decay and withdrawal, its proximity littered with mystics, forgoers, the desperate, and the disavowed. 

Mahapatra imagines the corporal form of the country, deadened and in decay, floating down the water, a consequence of the failure of religion which is now represented by man-built temples and eager priests, while God remains hidden (or in hiding?), and the failure of a political system flanked by eager ideologues and their empty movements. The solitary poet meanwhile finds himself immersed into the Earth, unable to move, 

“Left alone, I grow into
a half-disembodied bamboo,
its lower part sunk
into itself on the bank.”

incapable of aligning himself to either faith (religion) or hope (political thought), 

“In order for me not to lose face,
it is necessary for me to be alone.”

He bemoans the country’s 50 year-old-freedom, when a woman and her child in the hills could barely afford rice all these years while the tall white columns of the Parliament House turn bloody at the kiss of sunset. In this land, forsaken by God and the revolution, the poet searches for freedom in death—the absolute solitude: 

“Trying to find the only freedom I know,
the freedom of the body when it’s alone.”

(Read the entire poem here)

It’s a cynical poem, its poet eremitic in apathy. Yet, when Mahapatra grieves for the dying state, he seeks the freedom that will come after it, that will no longer be burdened by the baggage of becoming. Freedom from materiality, from tangible loyalty, from collectivism. It is almost an anarchist's dream, a radical call for doing away with the rotting carcass, to seek the wonder that lies in the aftermath of total desecration. 

***

My English teacher, Julliet Ma’am thought me morose for wolfing down Mahapatra’s poems in 8th grade. But she needn’t have worried—I knew little of cynicism then, not when I’d assemble with others of my age every August 15, to sing songs of India’s independence, our voices bellowing from the deepest, most trusting part of our guts, where every word is sung and swallowed for memory. We belted out songs on national unity, anthems that decried our differences and necessitated our oneness, chants that reaffirmed our commitment to the flag, this land, and its most foundational values of secularism and democracy. In our prim, neatly ironed uniforms, we stood looking up to the prim, neatly ironed Indian flag, that spent the rest of its year in a cardboard box stowed away in the sports equipment room only to be brought out every Independence Day and Republic Day, and imagined that the emotion welling in our throats would one day translate into greatness of service. 

To grow up in the 1990s in India and be young at the turn of the millennium was to imagine that anything was possible. Our televisions were getting larger and flatter, and you watched in real time the blooming of coffee shops, the foods that you only associated with the American shows playing on TV— burgers, fries, pizzas—were suddenly here and waiting to be eaten, art had been dusted off its grain and retro imperfections to become slicker and more stylized, and the young were everywhere, on television, in cinema, on MTV India (which launched in 1996 and quickly came to embody a pop funk coolness we would all aspire to). The world opened itself to you like an offering and all you had to do was be interested in it, and yet, you weren’t left unmoored in this age of persistent onslaught because the old world, slow-paced, familiar, anecdotal was still thriving like a warm blanket underneath all the newness. 

So when Dr. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam, an aerospace engineer at the forefront of the Indian Space Program, promised the vision of a developed country by the year 2020 in his book India 2020, published in 1998, the goal seemed just far enough and achievable enough to buy into. We didn’t know what it meant to be developed yet, but we trusted the words of a scientist, who in four years time would assume the Presidency of India, when he pointed at such states as China and Israel and suggested that all we had to do was chart a path inspired by their growth. The book treated the first fifty years of India as a nation learning to become, and that its next 25 years as the year it would emerge into the global superpower it was meant to be. 

In 1998, I was dawdling between ages five and six, blissfully unaware of what earned China and Israel their reputations. But for a generation hungry to live in a country that paralleled the smoothened pictures of global cities we now had access to, we understood that to be developed was to have our rough edges chipped off. To have our trains cleaned and air conditioned, to eradicate poverty from our lives and imagine every child in neatly pressed school uniforms, to be rid of the trash from the streets and live in urban utopia of cleanliness and accessibility, to jetset across the country at unimaginable speeds and find in its deepest recesses clean water to drink, good food to eat, and lovely people to be in conversation with. Small dreams for small people. 

To live with the hope that such dreams were possible and indeed assured and passed down by thinkers we were taught to trust made it easy to be in love with a country that was on its path to becoming, that was swimming in the greatness of its past toward a promised future of its making.

***

Adulthood clarifies the world by scrubbing some of that shine off. We know now that to live in a country is to reckon with its multiple realities and narratives taking shape. For instance, 1998 is the year when Dr. Kalam offered a treatise for India’s meteoric rise to development but also the year Arundhati Roy penned “The End of Imagination” as a response to India’s burgeoning nuclear program in which Roy, writing about the chest-beating unanimous cheer for the country emboldening its nuclear front in retaliation to neighboring Pakistan, offered this metaphor: “The bomb is India. India is the bomb. Not just India, Hindu India. Therefore, be warned, any criticism of it is not just anti-national but anti-Hindu.”

You could argue that both represent two very distinctive worldviews: one, a scientist looking toward the future with fervent belief that advancement held the cure to India’s deepest fractures; the other, an author who was known to be transparent about those fractures, who could only dwell on the now and how its sacrifice was no worthy casualty for a future. 

Of course, 2020 has come and passed and we know India is not the developed country Dr. Kalam promised us it would be. If there has been advancement, then it has only deepened the divide between the haves and have-nots. And curiously, the author (or the cynic) has prevailed over the scientist: arguably the image of Hindu India is emboldened by the actions of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party that has placed the cause of Hindutva at the forefront of its revision for the country. Any criticism of the carceral, militaristic, violent institutions crystallizing the Indian state with Hindutva is met with violence, arrest without bail, death, and if you’re lucky, then you get to be on the receiving end of digital hate campaigns that will reduce the online world to an unpredictable minefield. 

And we look back at the 1990s and discover that the promise of the new millennium was nothing but the distraction afforded by shiny objects under capitalism. That the privatization of the Indian economy kickstarted in the nether end of the 20th century would ensure a complete dismantling of India’s public institutions. 

But more importantly, we understand that not everyone has the privilege to be distracted, to be swept up in the euphoria of a country becoming, to be enthralled by shiny, global brands and their deep fangs into the Indian social fabric. Not everyone could love and hope for the country. 

Because, we realize, there have always been many parallel realities operating in the country. 

One in which a scientist lays out a blueprint for India’s advancement, another where a poet writes about a woman and her son feeding on forest berries to survive. Where the Brahmin finds his likeness in politics, judiciary, education, in statements upholding the casteist, subjugative text of Manusmriti, and the Dalit child is still punished for daring to drink some water. Where tribals are murdered for fighting against the encroachment of their land by corporations while their honchos are lauded for leading new India’s expanding wealth brackets. Where an entire country celebrates their prowess by animating their online personas with likeness of the Indian flag, forgetting that not too long ago, a region that the country has seized as its own was submerged in a complete digital blackout. Where the Prime Minister creates a fund that swells with private and corporate donations as the country suffers its worst migrant crisis during the Pandemic. Where the rapists of Bilkis Bano walk free, while a Jesuit Priest dies in custody for the crime of advocating for India’s Adivasis. And now, when the country rings in its 75 by encouragingforcing a flag in every home—which private corporation are the purchases of these flags benefiting?—the image of gullible children singing honestly to a flag seems misguided in hindsight. 

These are realities coexisting in one country and idealism, love, and hope is only possible for a section of people. 

*** 

And yet…

I’ve been thinking of the relentlessness of love, the incessant humming of its chant in our mind, the warm solvency of its assurance that we are human still for loving. 

I’ve been thinking of Salman Rushdie and how the second ever time I met him, I’d asked simply if he missed Mumbai, and he said, tearing up a little, that he missed it very much and that every word he writes begins in the bylanes of his childhood in the city. How his face turned soft with love and memory. 

I’ve been thinking of the joy of collectiveness, of standing shoulder to shoulder with strangers, as casualties of shared histories, shared pains, shared pride. As familiar nobodies. As kin. As a family. As people who are rained on and rush, en masse, for the shelter of a canopy. 

I’ve been thinking of tenderness and the kindness we are able to extend to each other in the worst of times. The soft, soothing words which we give knowingly, expecting very little in return. 

I’ve been thinking of devotion — how devotion happens with dedicating the self. And whether,  in the absence of faith, I place all my devotion on who we can be, the image of a people drawn from the nation’s most honest ideals. 

I’ve also been thinking of anger, how it arises in care and disappointment. That the critic is only a critic because they love. 

I’ve been thinking of attention, and the way we can transform and be transformed, under watchful, loving eyes.

I’ve been thinking of remembrance. The service we offer when we watch, refuse to look away, jot down to memory, the names, lives, and stories we honor by simply looking. 

I’ve been thinking of the piercing pain we feel when we witness pain being enacted, that we can squirm, that we hurt, that we can empathize and clutch our bodies in horror. 

I’ve been thinking of Umar Khalid, Gulfisha Fatima, Anand Teltumbde, Varavara Rao, Siddique Kappan, Sharjeel Imam, Vernon Gonsalves, and many others, the years each of them has spent in prison for the crime of speaking up against a violent state. 

And I’ve realized that the greatest act of patriotism we can offer in this 75th year of Independence is through honesty, by acknowledging this nation for everything it offers, warts and all, by holding on to radical hope, by loving fiercely, by documenting, by understanding, by remembering, by fighting. 

For a freedom that will be here one day—so what if a thousand pyres must be lit to usher it? 

***

So maybe I’m a cynic, but I still can’t bear to match Mahapatra’s hopelessness just yet. Maybe I can’t bear to match Mahapatra’s hopelessness but I will recite his poem. Maybe I will recite his poem but will be found missing on the banks of the Ganges. Maybe I will be found missing on the banks of the Ganges, because there is work yet to be done. Love yet to be loved. Hope yet to be hoped. 

Happy Independence Day to those who see and hear and love.

Life Updates

I ushered in India’s 75 years with a chat about one of the country’s greatest sons. Catch me in conversation with Aditya Shrikrishna and Arjun Nair about the 30 years of A. R. Rahman on The Other Banana Pod. Available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts,

I wrote about Subhash Ghai TAAL but mainly about Aishwarya Rai’s superstardom. How sometimes having the right person play the right role can transform the zeitgeist. For The Juggernaut.

I’ll be in New York City this weekend for a chat with John Dermot Woods & Matt L. about graphic novels on Thursday and the BOMB Small Press Flea this Saturday. Come say hi!