A vocabulary for care

One afternoon, recently, K. and I sang together. We meandered towards Malhar. K. explained how the raag’s notes had to be sung in a way that reminded you of lithe trees swaying in a monsoon storm. They shiver violently, seem to pull back, and just when you think they would come to a rest, they jerk back — you have to evoke that tremor with the notes, and not let it resolve into ‘Sa’, which lets you feel grounded. We then giggled about how every song on saawan or monsoon is about how I am lonely and this idiot saiyyanji has not arrived yet.

K. has a tattoo of a line from the Faiz poem, ‘Mujh se pehli si mohabbat’, where he tells his beloved that he has now found other sorrows, the sorrrows of this cruel world that seem to occupy him so much that even drowning in the depth of her eyes isn’t temptation enough. Here’s Surekha Sikri reciting that poem, and dwell awhile in the depth of her eyes.

All of this and a podcast I heard recently, made me think about community, advanced capitalism, and romance novels. This letter, dear reader, is an attempt to crochet all those threads, and hopefully something emerges.

Whenever I hear podcasts talking about relationships in the USA, I end up thinking of these lines by Gulzar, a mix of the poetic and demographic insight; there are so many people, and yet, why so lonely?

तन्हाई क्या है आखिर ? कितने लोग तोह हैं ।  फिर तनहा क्यूँ हो ?

What is loneliness after all? So many people are there. Then, why lonely?

The term used in this podcast I heard was ‘loneliness epidemic‘, a curious mix of the poetic and pathological. And this made me wonder, like Gulzar asks, तन्हाई क्या है आखिर ? What is tanhayee, loneliness?

It seemed to me that whether it was a woman singing in Braj bhaasha, the women from Sangam times lamenting about ‘Love Stands Alone’ or Aamir Khan singing tanhayeee in Dil Chahta Hai, it is about missing a romantic partner. Here is Shobha Gurtu singing in that gorgeous, heartfelt voice of hers, the rains have come but pritam, the beloved, has not:

Yes, this heart ache and missing feels for romantic partner is as old as the Sangam times, but nowadays, I think there’s something curious afoot with romance, and that’s because, cue drum beats, advanced capitalism. What happens when capitalism toys around with romance?

I found the answer when I recently re-read an essay from Thick by Dr. Dr. Tressie Mcmillan called ‘Dying to be competent’, where she speaks about the promise of competence in a neoliberal world, and how that’s a chimera. We all desire it, sometimes desperately aspire for it, but the system is rigged for some people that it becomes almost a cruel goal to aspire for. Now, read this paragraph replacing competence with romantic fulfillment:

“I am not the only one in love with the idea of competence. It is a neoliberal pipe dream that generates no end of services, apps, blogs, social media stars, thought leaders, and cultural programming, all promising that we can be competent.”

We love the idea of romantic fulfillment. It is a neoliberal pipe dream that is about infinite scrolls on dating apps, unlimited matches, and a promise of happily ever after, at any time, as per your convenience, at the click of a button or right swipe. That promise of guaranteed romantic fulfillment, if you take a lifetime subscription for a subsidised fee on the app is a lie. And now, people seem to be increasingly see the lie for what it is.

For starters, someone has sued dating apps for turning users into swiping addicts. And, even the one industry that needs this promise of romantic fulfillment to remain afloat, the romance novel industry, seems to be struggling with the happily ever after.

I like to read romance novels and have read different authors, and there is definitely a strong inclination to break picket fences and pitch a more inclusive tent — from queer romances to ones with neurodivergent characters, authors are trying to ensure more diverse people can see their stories being reflected. At the same time, there is also a sense of being tired; that the promised neoliberal dream of guaranteed romantic fulfillment is a chimera is something I am sure these authors think a lot about. And so, perhaps, there is a bruised and cynical hearts section on the romance shelf.

One author who belongs in that section is Mhairi Macfarlane. The first Macfarlane book I read was ‘Mad About You’. The premise is this — a woman breaks up with her boyfriend and is now left without a house. She is a wedding photographer. She runs into her ex in a wedding. She has two friends who are a riot. She decides to do something that upends her life entirely, and so on. Mcfarlane’s writing, her quips, descriptions, are all hilarious; I even laughed aloud at times.

In all this, you may wonder, where is the romantic angle, where is the meet cute, where is the first kiss, the exchange of numbers, then fluids and you are right to wonder, because it is there, but like the smell of dishwashing detergent lingering on your coffee cup – it intrudes at times, but you are too busy drinking the coffee. I was a bit surprised, and wondered what is going on, and ended up reading four other books of Mhairi Mcfarlane, and I can tell you with reasonable confidence, dear reader, she belongs in the bruised and cynical hearts club.

Macfarlane wants to write stories of women, more specifically, stories of women in emotionally turbulent situations: One story deals with the sudden loss of a friend (Just Last Night), one story is about being darkly discomfited if the intimate details of your life are being used in a script plot (Between Us), one story is about a disturbing incident from childhood (Here’s Looking at You), a trip down nostalgic what ifs and what may have beens (You had me at Hello, my least favourite), getting over the break-up of a long term relationship (If I never met you, again, a bit weak), and so on.

Every Macfarlane story deals with the politics of adult friendship groups. In every story, the romantic angle wafts in and out. And somehow, it feels right — that’s all is the purpose of that romantic angle in these books, it helps us know which shelf to pick up these stories from, for we don’t want to completely escape from it too.

If I were to choose another shelf to stack Macfarlane’s books, it would be that of adult friendships. Every book has a protagonist with at least one close adult friend, or a larger circle of friends, the kind who live nearby and meet every week. Every book deals with the messiness of adult friendships, the petty power plays, insecurities, little cruelties, and, of course, warmth. In some ways, romance seems to be a wrapper for Macfarlne to talk of women whose lives is not completely defined by ‘pritam ghar nahin aave’ feels.

Macfarlane’s books seemed to be the perfect book gift to add to the podcast I linked earlier in the letter. The author Ezra Klein interviews in this podcast is the author Rhaina Cohen whose book is called ‘The other significant others’. I haven’t yet read the book, but there were many things discussed in the conversation that lingered on.

One is that there’s no real ‘ladder’ in friendships, unlike conventional romantic relationships where after a while, people decide to move together or get married, and so on. My close friends and I have struggled with this lack of vocabulary to describe what we feel for each other. Every time we meet, it feels as if certain dormant parts inside me have come alive, sparkling and soaring, and I feel a sense of comfort and belonging that all other petty struggles of one’s life seem bearable. Very simply put, these are the people who make it easy for me to laugh at myself; there is no judgement, there is ease, there is no need to explain because we have known each other for decades. There’s that term ‘best friend’, but it feels something that insists on a hierarchy. If this person is your best friend, then who is that, your not best, but better friend?

The author Rhaina Cohen speaks about three things that are necessary for friendships to thrive and escalate — time, togetherness, and touch, and I was forced to agree. I don’t as a rule like such three Ms of life, four Rs of work, seven Ss for success and such lists, but there was something assured and appealing about these three Ts. Of course, it is about making time, as if time is cake and you can bake it. Of course it is about togetherness, because where else did we have that kind of together time but in college? And of course, it is about touch — these are friends I have no compunction hugging; even the grumpy ones.

No, this is not about romanticising friendships. Ha. Friends can hurt you. You will hurt them, which feels worse. Friends can be grumpy. Then there are those friends, who don’t even want to deem your relationship as a friendship, for that makes them antsy because they despise being vulnerable. It sometimes feels like friendships come in all shades of purple and painful, like bruises.

I have a sneaky feeling, one that is not supported by any evidence, that neoliberalism doesn’t much care for such friendships. The idea of ‘friendship day’ never quite caught on. No one invites a crowd to witness a new friendship and rents a place for the said witnessing. Most of my friends dislike celebrating their birthdays. There isn’t really a business case to be made around friendships, for they are so varied and diverse, it doesn’t quite fit into any convenient box. I think.

I shall pause here, with something Ezra Klein said talking about his friend, which I think speaks to something that’s not often spoken about when it comes to friendships; making that choice:

“I have a friend who both lives in what I would describe as a commune — I think the modern term that gets used is intentional co-living community — and also helped set them up. And I was asking her about this once, about these trade-offs. And she said something that is always stuck with me, which is that she’s decided to choose the default in her life being the problems of community as opposed to the problems of not having community. She wants the problems of connection rather than the problems of how to find that connection. And it seems so obvious when she said it that way, but I’d never thought of it that way.”

Notes on the shrug

Dear reader,

I hope you never have days when you totter in that half world of sleep and awakening, listing all those things that annoy you about life. It is a long list, and making that list itself is annoying, and so in a sort of self-referential loop, which even Douglas Hofstadter would approve, it unspools seemingly without a halt condition, into the early hours of the morning till you discover that changing your position on the bed does affect your brain’s chatter, for now you are wondering why did you sleep such that your ear folded against your head and now that cartilage is shouting that it should not be mistaken for a flap.

In the meanwhile, I had spent a lot of time thinking about a particular word. I am not sure how this word translates into other languages, such as Hindi and Tamil, which makes me wonder if the ‘shrug’ is a, pardon the thoroughly uninformed and perhaps useless speculation, a Western import. The shrug, or the lift-drop of the shoulders according to a search means ‘I don’t know’ or ‘Don’t care’, but I think the definition is not quite there yet. 

Just take the act of lifting your shoulders and letting go; try it, it is a sort of warm-up exercise, which, my yoga teacher usually follows up by rounding your shoulders and rotating it. It is meant to remind you that this muscle is there, tracing a boat between your head and your arms, it needs to move, and in doing so, you let something afloat.

A shrug, I think, is about letting go. It signals that you want out, you want to be let free of expectations of meeting rituals of conversations and the appropriate steps of social dances. Imagine this — you want to signal that you don’t wish to participate in a conversation, and if you explain that, you will end up participating in the conversation, exactly what you wanted to avoid in the first place, which turns into another self-referential loop, and the halting condition here is the wordless shrug.

A shrug is less of a ‘I don’t know’, more of a ‘I don’t care if I know, and moreover, I don’t care enough to find out, can I go back to doing the utterly pointless thing I was doing before this whole thing started?’ sentiment. A shrug is not loud. It is not a protest, with your upraised shoulders raising a placard of non-conformity. A shrug is perhaps the gestural equivalent of a murmur; you wish to say something without committing enough air to it.

Think of all the people who use the shrug a lot; teenagers, adults who wish to imitate teenagers, old people who decide they are now teenagers. There is a subtle power dynamic that comes into play. The shrug needs an audience; it is a joint action, the way Herbert Clarke described language (unfortunately, these pieces of information get tucked away as references, you can ignore the link without worrying). We have spoken of how the shrug is not a protest, but it is still defiance, a murmur of a demur. The non-commital aspect of the shrug is essential. It is neither I don’t know, or I don’t care, but ‘I don’t want to say’, and any refusal establishes a power dynamic — on the one hand there is someone who wishes for the action, and on the other, someone who refuses. (Perhaps, not refusal, as the shrug signposts ambivalence.) The person doing the shrug is signaling that they are disinterested, and if the immovable object meets an external force, who knows what laws come in to play. The person receiving the shrug could push back, a verbal equivalent of shaking those shoulders to rouse the other person. Or the other person could grumpily walk away; grudgingly. Or the other person could remain unmoved, pretend to be Buddha, change their position on the bed, and go back to sleep.