Growing Out

Today I learnt that none of my friends from college are happily married. Almost everyone I went to college with is married, and/or a parent. These were things that elders always said would solve all our problems. You don’t know what to do after an M.A? Get married. Trouble in marriage? Have a baby. Tired of baby? Have another one. Tired of them both? Get one married.

Elders lie a lot.

And I’m glad I didn’t fall for any of it. As it turns out, the most miserable people from my past are not only married but also seem to think that not being married is the worst kind of punishment, and that telling someone they are going to be alone for the rest of their lives is an insult (giggles). Being married or in love has given them neither a life nor an escape from it. I am grateful each day for having grown up with them and grown out of them because if they were still in my life, I’d probably be like them.

I wish I had gone to a different college for my undergrad though. In *Main* College, where the Savarna spoiled brats ruled, there was very little space to find oneself, especially when one is so busy hiding oneself. The friend from college I blocked yesterday sent me a message from her husband’s phone today. It’s perhaps the only reason to get married

She said that I’m going to regret being alone, that she has a life because she’s got work to do (clearly) and that not everyone is lucky to belong to a family that has come up in life by looting people and taking bribes from others. (“I can now see it’s in the genes – no wonder you are this way”)

She obviously doesn’t know that it’s a casteist thing to say. She was merely repeating something she’d heard being thrown around in college by Savarna bullies. But it got me thinking about a whole lot of people who graduate in life with the luxury of never having to unlearn caste, and the luxury of never having to learn how to get a life, keep it, and most importantly – how to just be (alone, without, with, inside, outside)

I used to think that the reason I am no longer friends with these people was because I fell out with them. But it’s also that to be accepted by them, I had to be like them, laugh at the jokes made at the expense of my parents who had no idea that the people they welcomed into their home as my friends, mocked them behind their backs. This was a strange set of friends I had – they pretended to like me, basically called my parents quota parents, and attacked reservation at every opportunity they got.

But because so many of the people I meet today are either students willing to learn or adamant not to, and also twitter people whose engagement with the world begins and ends with the word ‘discourse’, I’ve half-forgotten that there is a whole world out there that only engages with people like themselves. And it’s almost comical that as a result of this, they will only know people like themselves for the rest of their lives and continue to mock people who aren’t like them.

More than anything, what seemed to upset them was that I’d moved on, found the ability to fight back with no more than three words, and didn’t seem to want to remember them anymore. I don’t remember them because a) They were horrible b) I was worse c) Thinking of them reminds me of who I used to be, which is the most powerless I’ve ever been.

The only good reason to think about them now and then is that it shows me what I was able to escape. In the very brief time I spent using three words for her dukh bhari autobiographies on WhatsApp, I saw that she hadn’t changed at all. That she was still the same person with the same insecurities. A true testament to any kind of growth is not when you are perfectly secure but when you don’t have the same insecurities you once did, or at least not in the same way. I am still an extremely insecure person but not about things I was once governed by. I am insecure about things that oddly enough, also liberate me. Not being as good a writer as my students, not writing, being an incompetent teacher, dealing with savarna people are things that I am insecure about. They occupy me in ways that make me want to do better, write more, write my way out of who I used to be.

But if I had to get married and have children to solve these problems, where would I be today?

Adulting, comrades, is not listening to adults. It also means ignoring people who are best ignored, even when they message you from their husband’s phone (this will never stop being funny)

A word I haven’t used yet but would like to have used on this post by now is the word heteronormative, which I learnt fairly recently so it’s not like I am some fancy-shmancy person, squeezé moi. It’s easy not to be friends with Savarna cabbages from my past because I don’t have to explain what it means to live a life that isn’t bound by romance, men, love, marriage, children, and caste. It’s easier because I don’t have to explain what it means to live days that bloom and make me feel alive because in it are women, teaching, writing, reading, eating, drinking, and remaining perpetually indebted to rumlolarum. But the bestest of them all is that I don’t have to explain what Savarna means. 

*Main* college: In Bangalore. Totally unnecessary to take its name. But rhymes with Main.

Advertisement

Growing Up

At one point in my life, the only thing I wanted to learn was how to be. What do you do when you feel a certain way, when someone goes out of their way to show you their disapproval, when you are misunderstood and there’s nothing you can do to offer clarification? This ate my insides for years together. Every time I thought I had grown up, something would happen and the way I responded confirmed that I had, in fact, not grown up.

Over the last year, I picked some battles, ignored the rest, allowing only my instincts to inform me. And I must say, I am a lot more at peace than I’ve ever been. I used to survive confrontations and the need to defend myself by using too many words in the past. This, as I have come to learn, is unnecessary. I now use the mute option on Twitter generously, the block option on WhatsApp liberally.

Today, I blocked a friend I went to college with. She unleashed a barrage of accusations that were both untrue and painfully long to read. I said what I had to and refused to be dragged into a conversation I had no energy for. A year ago, I’d have fallen for it, explained, over-explained, analysed, taken screenshots, sent it to other people for clarification, sympathy. I did none of that today, and I am happy. Before blocking her, I said two lines. That I hadn’t thought of her since 2012, that it’s been close to a decade, and that she must please, please get a life.

I’m sort of joyful that after years of whining about not knowing what to do, I seem to have found a way to deal with things that no longer bring joy. I am drinking to that today.

Ann Patchett

• 

I am drowning in Ann Patchett. When I read her latest essays now, I catch a fleeting hello, a nodding glimpse to something she has mentioned in her older essays which I am also reading. It’s like I am stitching. She is making me re-arrive at the personal essay as a form of journalism. Many gods of journalism, who cannot stand that other people read and write will die about this. But what else is new? They die about something or the other every day. But read Ann Patchett – she is remaking journalism, both the ‘serious’ one and the chota bheem one.

Whiny muffins like me who cry about too much work should read her essay ‘Nonfiction, an introduction’ where she outlines the beginning of her journey as a freelance writer. She says she learnt how to swallow pride as she watched some of her best sentences get chopped up by editors who worked with knives. She learnt, she says, how to write better by anything and everything that came her way. One day she’d be writing about ballroom dancing, another day about boutique farming, and some other day, about a lip balm. She soaked in everything she wrote and didn’t complain. In the end, it would all come together as she returned home to write what she really wanted to write – fiction.

“Somewhere along the line I learned to experience only the smallest, most private stabbing sensation when I watched my best sentences cut from an article because they did not advance the story. Ultimately, this skill came to benefit my fiction as well. The conversations I had had so often with magazine editors were now internalized. I could read both parts of the script. Did I think that was a beautiful sentence I had written? Yes, I did. Did it further the cause of the novel? No, not really. Could I then delete it? It was already gone”

AM had once said that to be a writer, one has to become small. There was so much to carry in that sentence that it made me afraid to think that I’d never be able to do it. But it’s true. Becoming small is the only mark of a writer thirsty to learn, a journalist hungry to see.

Wait for me in the corner and I’ll tell you how I ran away from home: On Reading Dawn Powell

I wrote this essay in September last year for the Los Angeles Review of Books’ new channel Literature Around the World. The edited version of the essay is here.

I was 11 when I first ran away from home. I ran because I wanted to see how far I could get. When it began to look like if I went any further, I’d forget my way back- I turned around but the idea that something exciting lived right around the corner, that my life wouldn’t truly begin until I turned around that corner stayed with me. What a delight it is then to discover a writer from the 1900s who not only ran away from home when she was 11 (she never returned) but also never forgot what it’s like to want to run away.

Dawn Powell wrote short stories, reviews, plays and novels through the 1920s and after. It is surprising that despite the body of brilliant work she produced (barely making any money out of it) she is still not as well known. I first heard of her last year, in this 2002 video where Fran Lebowitz talked about her as one of the greatest American writers. When I think of how many male writers I am able to name from the same time, I am amused. There are far too many. Somehow there is always room for one more boring male writer and yet Dorothy Parker is the only woman we are given when we want funny female writers. As if two women cannot be funny at the same time and so it is that the saying goes that Dorothy Parker got credit for all the jokes that Dawn Powell made. Let’s not bother setting up two men against each other. After all, no one wants to plagiarize boredom.

Dawn Powell ran away because her stepmother burnt all her short stories [“I burnt all that trash you were writing”] accidentally setting in motion Powell’s destiny to be a writer. There was very little for Powell to do after that. Where I come from, women run away from home to elope. Sadly, they all return with swollen eyes and a divorce. See? They all say – it’s what happens when you run away. As a child, I kept looking for stories of women who ran away alone and lived happily ever after, but they either didn’t exist or were hidden from me.

• 

I wish I’d discovered Dawn Powell then whose writing is replete with women who ran, women who couldn’t, and women who didn’t. In one of her earliest short stories, The Rut, Anne and Marjorie are friends who grow up to want different things. Anne wants to leave town, Marjorie doesn’t. “I am going to get away and do something different and even if I don’t make a success, I’ll at least be out of the rut–this miserable, deadly rut!” Anne says. Years later, they meet again, and Anne envies that Marjorie, married with two children, looks content. Marjorie asks Anne if she’s happy. “No, I am not what you would call happy,” she admits. “I believe it is the people in the rut who are happiest after all. Once they get resigned, they make the most out of it and things are so much easier. Ambition seems to be the obstacle to overcome on the road to happiness”

As if this isn’t enough sting, Anne tells herself that happiness isn’t what she wants after all. “What I want is work” The image of a young girl determined to overcome her failure to prove to her friend that she has achieved what she left to achieve is startling. The clarity of knowing that what she wants is work, not happiness and the ability to recognize that happiness and ambition are two different things is even more startling.

It takes a supreme will to be like Anne. But what does it take to be a Marjorie? Especially since the Marjories of the world are just as important to Powell. In ‘Such a pretty day’, another short story, Powell gives us two Marjories – Sylvia and Barbs – friends and newly married mothers who go shopping one day to escape the boredom of domestic life. Standing in front of an affluent store with barely enough cents in their pockets, ”Barbs and Sylvia clutched each other’s hands to keep up their courage before the hostile clerks.” Inside, Barbs sees a dolphin rubber float, snitches it and stuffs it down her front. They escape quietly and quickly, hitch a ride and when they get out of the car, tragedy hits. Barbs discovers that she has forgotten to steal the stopper, without which the float is useless. She is devastated and begins to cry, noting between her sobs, “I would forget the stopper. I’d have to forget the most important thing”

Powell is not interested in saving her characters and this, Lebowitz points out, is why she was a commercially unsuccessful and at the same time a superb writer. What does it mean then for a girl sitting far away in Bangalore (dreaming of running away) to discover Dawn Powell one hundred years later? For anyone learning how to write, Dawn Powell is a gift. She was so accustomed to the silence that followed before and after writing that it is impossible to imagine now, even momentarily, a silence like that. It would be too deafening. Dawn Powell is teaching me how to write in silence, to ignore silence and to write despite the silence. I believe it is what will save me from becoming too spoiled, even if Dawn Powell never intended and doesn’t care about saving me. Remaining undiscovered is the default state of many women writers, but it must have meant something else to Powell entirely. An early childhood lesson for her was that in order to keep writing, she had to remain undiscovered. When Powell and her sister hid from their stepmother to paint and write, Powell said, “Since our creative labours made no noise, we were happily undiscovered for a fortnight”.

Happiness is double its shape when there are female friends to share it with, ambition too, but for those of us who grow up friendless, these women and their words become a blueprint for surviving both ambition and writing. Women’s writing from even a hundred years before us has the capacity to carry us when we run away from home, walk away from a relationship, or just plain set out to explore a city they’ve lived and died in. This is what friendship with the women I have only come to know through their words means to me. I borrow gumption from the firmness and sureness of their writing, how strong and irreplaceable they look in the shadow of my love for them. Their ghost-like presence and the strength of words they’ve left behind for us is the legacy of female companionship, greater and bigger than any other kind.

“Never forget geography. New York is heroine. Make the city live, so that the reader walking about thinks – here is fifth avenue hotel, where so and so came” Powell writes in her diary in 1951. When I was in Los Angeles last year on a scholarship program, it took me a while to remember that this was Joan Didion’s city. When I realised, it was too late, and I was mad at myself because her words had carried me across the city even if I was barely paying attention to it. The possibility that I had perhaps walked on the very street Didion might have, passed by the very same house in Hollywood where she lived and wrote The White Album left a painful smile in my jaw. As I was leaving Los Angeles, still smiling, Didion’s words echoed in my fingertips “It all comes back. Remember what it is to be me, that is always the point”.

But sometimes, it’s the opposite of remembering “what it is to be me” After reading Parable of the Sower, I went looking for the exact spot Octavia Butler sat and wrote the book in at The Los Angeles Public Library. I was hungry to sit in the same place, imagine her, see what she saw, feel what she felt. I walked to the third floor of the large library where there were huge windows and a few tables. I sat at one of them and decided it’s where Butler wrote from. It was remembering what it is to be someone else, even if that memory was never mine to begin with. But in that desperation to make the city mine, to see what these women saw, I become them, even if for a moment. Such is the pleasure and joy of discovering women writers so far away.

So now I know that if I ever come to New York, as so many others do, I will look for Dawn Powell in the streets of Greenwich, in the cafes, in the parks, and in the hotels of New York. I will look for her in the same way I learnt what writing is all about, which is pretty much the story of “Wait for me in the corner and I’ll tell you how I ran away from home” (What are you doing in my dreams?) After all, history has always hidden women who had gumption, who showed us it’s possible to run away and not look back, and stories always reveal them.

Forbrydelsen: Seeing Sarah Lund

Watching detective Sarah Lund on screen is an absorbing activity. Like doing homework for a teacher you really like. She is the most intriguing person on TV. And I don’t only mean detective TV.

There are many ways of seeing Sarah Lund but they are not enough. I only know that I can tell when she sees something while solving a murder and it’s not because the soundtrack seems like it was made for her face or because the tingling sensation in my arms means that she has solved something. I can tell because even though I am dying to know what she has seen, I am more distracted by her eyes which open like mouths to swallow details that are meaningless without her.

I like that no one in the show or outside can tell what she’s thinking. Earlier this year, when I was watching Drishyam 2, there was this delicious realisation that the film’s premise is built on the discipline of not using more words than necessary. I wanted to count the number of words Georgekutty used between Drishyam 1 and 2 because I was convinced there were very very few with his family and fewer with outsiders. It’s a good practice, I thought. More words means more talking means more revealing. Less is always better, especially if there’s murder involved.

• 

• 

• 

Sarah Lund ties her hair in a ponytail. She wears sweaters that later became the iconic Sarah Lund sweaters. She carries a brown hand bag which she is very mindful of. She chews on nicotine gums mindlessly, sometimes even while talking to suspects. But she removes the gum from packets very carefully. She falls in and out of love through the three seasons. She has a son who doesn’t like her but she cannot do anything about it. She doesn’t respond to people who bother her with too many questions. She isn’t available for any explanations – neither expecting any nor giving any.

There is thoroughness in the way Sarah Lund sees people as if they are not people but photographs, as if they are their own memory. All she has to do is look long enough for them to reveal themselves. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t but her eyes are open regardless. She is not always right even if it seems like she has every right to be. That there are consequences to the things she does, to the things she doesn’t say make her touchable, reachable, knowable.

I don’t care that she isn’t though. Everyone who falls in love with Sarah Lund must prepare themselves for an Ek Tarfa Pyar. This does not mean that she doesn’t know how to give love, it means that you don’t want her to. You just want to spend your days watching her solve crime using as few words as womanly possible.

Watch Forbrydelsen here.

A word with you

Very few writers have the courage to laugh when they feel like laughing. Siddalingaiah was one among them. In Ooru Keri, I discovered a way to read and write, yes. But what I learnt more than anything was a way to laugh. Before that, I am not sure I knew how to laugh. Sometimes I stole laughter from my father who laughed with his stomach. And everytime he broke into his hiccupy laugh, the room held its breath for him to finish. I don’t know if Siddalingaiah laughs like this but I like to imagine he does. 

Siddalingaiah left me with many stories. 

I will leave you with four.

The first one I shamelessly find excuses to tell is the Boodisaheba story from Ooru Keri. The story of young Ambedkar falling into an ash pit from a tree, people teasing him and calling him Boodisaheba was something that might not have happened, need not have happened. But the image of a young Ambedkar saying that he might be Boodisaheba now but will be Babasaheb in future gave me goosebumps for how true it turned out to be.

I stood nervously in front of Townhall during the Anti CAA NRC protest one evening, my legs refusing to hold me. I clung to the mic with my heart but didn’t know what to say so I told them the Boodisaheba story. I could conjure only Siddalingaiah that day because no one wrote protest like he did and that’s because no one wrote poetry like he did. That Boodisaheba story is poetry, protest, and song.

The second one still puzzles me. When Bangalore Brahmins refused him a home for rent, he wasn’t bitter. That the home that was promised to him was taken away after the owners discovered that he was Dalit didn’t leave him angry. That when they made it worse by saying “we like you & would’ve given you this house if only you weren’t Dalit” didn’t make him want to scream. He put his hands together, said thank you and walked away.

That story continues to be a lesson that I still haven’t learnt.

The third is a story I am fascinated by: his love for graveyards, for the silences they offered him, for the muffled secrets they teased him with, for how magically poetry came to him when he sat in one and began to write. 

The fourth is a story I am stunned by: his capacity to hold multiple truths. He was being felicitated at a hostel in Bangalore and when he went on stage to receive it, he saw his mother standing on the first floor, a broom in hand, watching him. She was a sweeper there and he leaves us here at this point to take what we want from this truth. I don’t know what he took. I am scared to ask.

The fifth is a story for me. For all the laughter he taught me, the hardest to learn was laughing at myself. There is steel in my mouth when I think of the time someone called me a Brahmin for writing in English. The steel becomes grit when I think of how according to this beautiful logic, even Ambedkar must be a Brahmin. The grit shatters into 4 meters of giggles and 5 kilos of laughter when I think of Siddalingaiah. 

‘O world, I must get to know you

And so I must have a word with you’

P.S: He doesn’t say if a word should be in English or Kannada or Konkani or Urdu.

Boo

Three things from today.

1. Parodevi in this lively and lovely talk.
2. This super story by Holly Pester in Granta
3. Roland barfs film diary is how I want to live my life.

ciao.