Ammonite

Neck

Mary (Kate Winslet) is looking at Charlotte (Saoirse Ronan) who is sitting with someone else in the first row. They came there together and it doesn’t make sense for them to be sitting away from each other. A little before she leaves, Mary looks at Charlotte’s neck. It is quiet, the kind you want to touch and disturb. It is also inviting, the kind you can never be sure of. Nothing is as bitter in your mouth as the taste of watching their naked neck teased away from you.

Hands

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Women’s hands when they are at work, and in love are the most easiest, most forgotten pleasures. In the picture is an ammonite that Mary and Charlotte heave onto a plank and carry home.

Toes

What does it mean to steal a glimpse of her toes while the rest of her body has already surrendered itself to you?

Face

We must learn to be grateful for art that can lead us into love, pleasure, and desire so ruthlessly. Ask for nothing less. It must be exactly like this.

Letting go

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When does body become bodies? Is it still not one body when they are bodies throbbing together?

Fin

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G for Gumption

The first syllable of this word comes from nowhere in particular. Your tongue hangs about without really touching anything in the mouth, making room for its own stomach to gather the ‘guh’. Indeed, it’s a word that requires more than your mouth to say it. It needs the tightness of your fists & the firmness of your stomach. I first heard it in the film, ‘The Holiday’ & understood its meaning entirely from the way Kate Winslet had banged the door on a man- an asshole, turned around with infectious energy, punched the air with her fists & celebrated having fallen out of love with him. When he asks her what had gotten into her, she says ‘Gumption’

I don’t have gumption. My mother has it, my aunts have it, & mouma who passed it on to her daughters will always have it. It’s what caused amma to hold a broom over her head one day & chase away an old Brahmin man who had stopped at our gate to teach her manners. She was cleaning the front yard & he stopped to tell her that in America, people didn’t do things like that(!) She screamed, ‘saakappa hogu, naavu nodidive jagattu’ (enough man, keep walking, even we have seen the world) 

My aunt showed gumption by pushing an abusive brother-in-law into a chair, her foot firm on his chest, her eyes dancing with fire, while her index finger launched a threat at his face to never ever lay a finger on her sister. 

As a child, I believed that mouma’s gumption was hidden in her blouse and perhaps it is. It’s why she never wore a bra. She barged into temples, ate their food, prayed to their gods because she never believed that anybody should have the right to stop her, even if it’s all they did. She grabbed her paysa & ate it too. And ate it how – standing tall against all the poojaris united.

Savitrimai’s gumption was in the extra saree she carried in her bag because she didn’t have time to fight Savarna losers whose only job was to stand with cow dung to throw at her. She had work to do – her work was her gumption.

Sujatha Gidla’s mother had gumption when she ran after a train that was leaving the platform with all her belongings – marks cards, certificates. She ran with the speed of an athlete, still carrying the water bottle for which she had deboarded in the first place.

It’s the English-language’s poverty that even a word that needs you to thrust your fists in the air like a martyr, like a woman newly out of love, will never fully lend its energy to understanding Dalit survival in this country. And this is why, G for me, is Gumption & I am claiming that word to tell our stories.