Ludo

One lockdown morning, after a fight with a friend whose mobile ran out of charge before either of us could, I took a long shower and assembled my hair. I imagined I was reassembling my life with every difficult strand I was able to bring to my palms. Thinking we were over, I went and played Ludo with my family. And thinking we were over, I continued to do various other things I didn’t know I’d have the strength to do.

The memory of playing lockdown Ludo with my family reminds me of love shamefully. I can only scare the shame away when I choose courage. Without courage, I am afraid that it’s too absurd a memory, playing as it does against the backdrop of Covid 19. Father, Mother, Sister, Brother were in bed. I was sitting in my father’s chair, head wrapped in a towel, my underpants wet from laughing at my father. In his lifelong half-kannada, half-konkani way, he said ‘marakagalla’ when I told my sister to ‘maar! maar! maar!’ (konkani for ‘hit him! hit him! hit him!’)

I played with the same sense of fun I always tend to have with family. I don’t know what that calm was but I was surprised by my own ability to muster it when I needed to.

In my 20s, I struggled with letting go. I didn’t know when to give up, whom to trust, and couldn’t resist giving in to the promise of company even against my best instincts. Today, my instincts have better control over my actions. I listen to the songs my intuitions sing for me just to see how much I can rely on them. Sometimes I worry that this whole instinct business makes me uptight but it’s the only thing I know to rely on in a world that is seeking supreme comfort from remaining Savarna.

There was a certain work ethic that the generation before mine had. They were able to give themselves to work so willingly and uncomplicatedly that it didn’t leave much room for caste to be a participant. They had/have a general all purpose collegiality, a niceness that showed itself simply by smiling and simply by asking how are you? A kind of steel resistance to gossip, bitterness, and the ever ambitious arm that reaches for you at work, grabs you out into the corridor where Brahminness can converse without interruption.

I think of MMB’s smiling face and her many bags – how despite tough times and tiredness – there is respect for work, food, conversation; and always a spirit of fight in her body. It’s her Happy Birthday today. Then I think of the bearded bro who gets zero in return for all that he gives.

Then I think of students. Mad ones like these. And other madder ones as well. Two days ago, a girl brought her fears of graduating to my table and we talked about why it’s exciting to be a student, what waits for her on the other side and just how much fun there is in imagining your days as if they are carry-bags from shopping with mother — filled with all the fun things that you cannot wait to get home for. My student smiled her toothy little student smile and I fell, picked myself up and remembered why I’m here.

Advertisement

Morning loffs

I remember this time when posh girls I used to teach would roll their eyes every time I spoke about Elena Ferrante in class. It made me wonder if I should talk less about the writers I love and more about writers that were dead.

But my way was the only way I knew how to teach which was to take my fears, curiosities, love, and immense love into the classroom with me. It was only after I realised that rolling eyes was their standard response to anything that I learnt to laugh about it.

It taught me that teaching does come from a position of fandom. Franny’s exquisite writing captures this sentiment more efficiently than anything else can. Read her essay here. It’s a testimony to what’s possible when we open our minds a little more and remove ourselves from our heads when we read.

It reminds me that what we do in the classrooms must continue – despite eye rolls, the great shakespearean sighs of boy babies, and general intellectual/political snobbery.

****

In other news, fother was reading Udayavani and laughing loudly this morning. It was a news article about a young boy in Patna who went to write an exam and fainted. Why did he faint? He found out that he was the only boy in the exam hall with 500 girls. When he regained consciousness, he had also developed high fever and shivers it seems. Fother, mother, and I sat together on their bed and laughed.

****

I must remember to write about the Social Justice Film Festival we organised last week. Watched some super documentaries and now I have a slow itch to make one small kutti video.

Speaking of which, Meta prep is in full swing. My baady is sometimes dying sometimes ok sometimes alive. Last evening we made reels for JAM promos. Just A Minute is fun to watch and now perhaps funner to play. I made only 11 seconds but I laughed a lot.

All my stoods are mad. Reels will be available here.

****

On good hair days, there are springs in bum also

I want to remember today because I am grateful for it and want to be just as grateful when it ends at 11:59 PM. I woke up at 5:45 in the morning and knew I had slept well because I hadn’t heard the cats crying at 3 am, like I had heard them the night before. I snuggled back into my bed after giving a good shite. I dreamt restlessly and woke up an hour later, having missed the first show of sunlight in my room.

At 7, I went down to clean the kitchen. An hour later, father was getting ready to leave for the railway station. I was afraid. I am afraid when they leave home. They are now in the age where I must feel afraid. But then it’s also that I am in the age where I must feel afraid.

Mother wants sachets of Equal sugar free which are on the top shelf. I haul the green stool and stand on top of it. My father is in the kitchen, telling us that years ago, before leaving for a Delhi trip every other month, he’d give 2000 Rs to the office staff and now, post retirement, he barely has any for himself. He is laughing but his eyes are singing the song of how times have changed. I feel a parental urge to hug him and tell him that whatever he wants in the world is his.

We have never hugged.

I go back to my room carrying a wound which I am worried will become smaller through the day, In fact by 1 pm, it’d have become so small that I might not have any recollection of the morning, and the railway station and the 2000 Rs, and all that would remain is only the faint memory of thinking it would be nice to message father and ask if he’s reached.

I come to my table at work and feel arrested by the sudden sunlight the day has found at 9:30. I attended a zoom meeting calmly while putting on pinkish purple nail polish. I have an hour to prep for my horror fiction class. Read Cortazar and want to keep reading him. I think of my long ago love for Keret and feel renewed.

Read another story by Cortazar where a girl vomits rabbits. Felt surprised and then happy that I still have it in me to feel surprised.

Then I see my hair on top in the dept bathroom mirror and love how it is standing? sitting? being? — am taken over by the sense and the truth and the fact that I will never be as young or old as I am today. Feel a great urge to appreciate today.

My only black pair of jeans goes well with the olive green canvas shoes which goes well with my loose white shirt. Feel richly alive and there is spring in my bum when I totter off to class.

In class, I don’t have a sense of how time runs. Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe the rules of time don’t matter when a good class happens. I leave class feeling new and more alive than I was when I’d entered.

I want to spend all day reading Cortazar.

At 1:30, I messaged father to ask him if he’d reached. He said he will reach in 20 mins.

Keliri Makkale

I cleaned out my table for the 18th time this week. I am purged.

In other news, I was on two podcast shows run by two interesting men. One is with the very excellent Anurag Minus Verma. The other is with the also very excellent Aditya Sondhi.

Keli heli. okthanxbye.

This week, I ate one persimmon and many tangerines. I’m loving this fruit love I have developed. It is not sudden. It was always there. I am only noticing it more and more now.

Words to live and work by, brought to you by a friend – don’t tell anybody what you are thinking fully. Drop truth bombs every now and then.

FFF

There is a young girl who lives inside me. She is hungry for something that I don’t want to give her anymore. Bitch wants female friends. Where will I go looking for them at this age? She wants it when she sees it in others, in films, in books, in songs. She isn’t happy just seeing them, she wants them for herself and then eats my head all day all night asking me why I can’t give her that. It’s not that I haven’t tried. But there’s this whole caste thing. I can’t say for sure that it’s why all of my female friendships have flopped in the past but I do know it’s why they leave, it’s why I leave.

She doesn’t believe me. She gets the caste bit but doesn’t think it’s a reason – she thinks I do something wrong, that I mess things up somehow.

I am going to be a year older soon and am already tired. I don’t have the energy to sit and wonder whether things happen to me because of who I am or whether I let them happen to me because of who I am not. Also, no energy for so much self-pity. All the worst things in the world don’t happen to me because I am Dalit. They might have happened to my father, my mother, their parents. But not to me. Especially because they didn’t work their butts off to give me this life only for me to sit here and cry about not having female friendships. Fuck Female Friendships.

Having said that, because of how much they’ve had to lose to give me this, because I wan’t born into the life that they left behind, I am often stupid and ungrateful. I have a very warped understanding of what untouchability is and am sometimes too spoilt, too blind to admit that it is happening when it is happening. Kindness returned with a stamp that screams no thanks, behaviour that automatically corrects its posture to stand and bow down to savarna/male presence, gifts that are returned without explanation, intimacies that are withdrawn and rejected again, again, again.

Sample this – it’s also a kind of caste chutyagiri at display when people make it a point to perform their loyalties to specific people in front of other people. A memory comes biting from years ago – a student, of all people, stood tall at my table one evening and thought it necessary to tell me that his loyalty is to his friends and that he would be very upset if his friends were troubled in any way. This was after they had all been called out for being casteist gobi manchurians along with a few older gobis. I now giggle at his hulk moment. But over the years, various people have demonstrated similar ways of loyalty performance through speech-giving and other pointlessly, painfully cute gestures.

In school, I tried desperately to become a part of a girl group. I invited five of them home for lunch one weekend, they all agreed. The next morning, one of them disinvited herself saying periods. By evening, two other girls said they couldn’t come because that girl was not coming. Eventually they all pulled out saying she’s not coming so I also won’t come.

My mother was relieved. I couldn’t understand why.

It took me a while to figure out that it wasn’t their menstrual cycle which was in sync. It was their untouchability radar. When I encounter versions of this today, I am merely amused. I applaud their massive self-worth and move on with my life.

Everything I should have said to them continues to die inside me in volcanic sighs. I am now writing with borrowed rage, and in echoes that are comical to say the least.

Maybe it’s a good thing to not have friends at this age- you don’t have to worry about performing loyalty to anybody.

As I write this I am wondering why this girl who lives inside me is hungry for FFs. But then isn’t that the story I’ve always told? The one about Kottuncheri Devi, that little imp who tricks people into becoming friends with her so they will play with her? She hides their valuables and returns them only after they play with her. Can’t believe I am having this revelation now, when I am bloody 35 – that I have been kottuncheri devi all this while.

It’s raining

Next to my table at work, there is a window which opens to a wall. On that wall there are two windows to classrooms on two different floors. In one of the classrooms, students are practicing dance to rangilo maaro dholna, a song I believe I only know as a song that girl groups in college and school continue to dance to. (Why do only songs and ads and chocolates take us back to the 90s?)

I have just finished a two-hour class on Ambedkar’s Castes in India. It is rewarding to teach this every year because every year, I discover one more thing about him, and the paper. This time around, it was unsettling to discover that he isn’t lazy in the paper. He is working hard at not taking the easy, most visible route to arrive at a conclusion. Even if I knew this last year, it is still nice to reknow it again this year.

I walked back to the department, spent 8 minutes trying to open the steel dabba of sambar. After lunch, I put my head down for a minute and an applause surrounded my window. I thought it’s from the dance group practising in the classroom only to properly wake up and see that it’s the rain.

Today, rains fell like applause. Today, it applauded rain. Today, it rained like applause.

Postcard from today IV

I’ve been catching all the young teachers I know and pestering them to begin an online teaching journal of sorts. I think I am doing this out of a desire to take stock and watch them take stock of how far they’ve come and how much farther we must all go.

Sometimes I return to old posts written here on my blog from a time when not knowing how to take classes was my biggest weakness and strength. I don’t know how much of what I carry each day into the classroom now is a betrayal of what I haven’t been able to reconcile on my own, with myself, inside of myself. I am 34 and I still feel most lost when I have lied to other people, smallest when I watch in amazement when people I admire refuse to lie and are just silent and smiling when lying would’ve been so much easier.

Their refusal to lie sticks to me like pink bubble gum on chappals. Everywhere I walk is heavy with a personal stickiness that no one else knows or cares about.

In class yesterday, we talked about best revenges. I was carried away by own fondness for Lady Di and couldn’t stop gushing about her black off shoulder dress. Nothing tops that- I told them, until a student who disappears into himself every time he speaks (like Salvador) said something that made me laugh and also tore me a little. It’s a self-help mantra, yes but the words “kill them with your success, bury them with your smile” made me think about the gratifying sound of silence and the power there is in not having to do anything when something threatens to eat you from inside and outside.

When I enter a classroom, I am no longer the lying, small, distrustful, jealous, threatened, threatening woman in perpetual love. I am a teacher willing to be moved by students, and their willingness to smile. I am grateful for the reassuring presence of classrooms in my life. It’s here that it doesn’t seem to matter how broken I am.

Late last evening a student who has been carrying water filters in his neighbourhood to make money messaged to ask if I knew any doctors for severe arm pain. This is also another huge part about being a teacher – not having answers but wanting to help.