As the auto chugged through Chennai’s late morning sun, I saw two young men at the gate of a house. One young man stroked the other’s cheek, fingers mapping that stubbled terrain, while the other young man held still, arms loosely held at their side, ever so slightly leaning in. That slight tilt of their head seemed to throw the sentence in my head in disarray; it was unclear what the subject and the object was. Was it the young man stroking the other’s cheek, or was it the young man’s cheek pressing into those exploring fingers. Framed by the gate, they formed untitled tableau, for, sometimes, words do not know the difference between static and stillness.
As I got ready to leave for the early morning train, I hesitated by their bed. They were asleep, their body quiet and still, the fan’s whooshes insisting nothing had changed, the sky outside dabbing out the night’s dark was not their concern. The door had to be latched, and so, with the fan looming its disapproval, I woke them up. We hugged, their limbs still thick with sleep. I did not need to say good bye.
I want to write something. I type and then retype, and then go back to the book. There is so much I want to say, I think. After a while, the phone pings, announcing another bot who wishes to say hello and offer discount on pest control services. I watch the moon with its jaw punched in. I message, saying, ‘Send hugs’. I get ‘Hugs.’, and emojis.
I wake up thinking, maybe, I will write a letter. Maybe, I will write the letter in my journal, with the pen’s nib scratching out my thoughts like a gramophone needle. I woke up before the alarm marked time, and I have not yet written anything. Something inside feels still. I think I shall wait till I see them someday, and I can hug them again.
Maybe, there’s something feral in us when it comes to love.
Laxman Singh Bahadur, the Maharaja of Dungarpur, visited the home of Ustad Zia Mohiuddin Dagar at ‘Rukmini’, in Chembur, Bombay on April 12, 1968. The Ustad along with his brother Fariduddin performed on the rudra veena and sang for over an hour, some of which were described as ‘puraani bandish hai‘. They told stories about the songs, and one such song is in the raag Suha in Jhaptaal, ‘Shubh mahurat’, which is a coronation song. The story goes — Akbar called out to Tansen, ‘Arre Tansen’, in an informal register, and Tansen got miffed. They both were intellectual peers, and so Tansen declared, if you call me ‘re’ once, I’ll say ‘re’ four times, and you can listen to the song, hear the story, and count the number of ‘res’ here:
The person on the album cover here is Maharaja of Udaipur, Bhupal Singh, in whose court Ustad Ziauddin Dagar, the father of Ustad Zia Mohiuddin Dagar, used to perform, more than a hundred years ago.
That’s why when Ustad Zia Mohiuddin said ‘puraani bandish hai‘, I began to wonder about what is it about the charm of such compositions. If we take the literal meaning of the word bandish, it is a ‘binding together’, say, a binding together of the raag, the rasa, the lyrics, and rhythm, and I think the charm is in all these elements coming together, saturated with all that beauty. It is like in writing you come across those gems when the mood, scene, characters, dialogue, setting, intent, and all those other layers come together, and you know you have connected at this complex, human level through the complications of this particular medium. Such a binding takes time; you need to experiment, break, fail, and then try again, and over so many hundred years, I think people crack it, and that’s the charm of such ‘puraani bandish‘. Here’s one from the album, ‘Sakhi thaado’ in Desi, where the way they play with the first two words is delightful, and where they also sing to show you how it is sung nowadays, denuded of that binding charm, and saying how the ‘original cheez ko bigaad diya‘.
It is an album of many delights, from the compositions to the banter (whenever he says ‘Dum laao’ to the tabla player, I always smile), but the one piece that has completely caught me in its grip is the one on Shyam Malhar. That raag has both the ‘ma’, and the way it weaves two completely different moods is something I do not have words for; it feels like something magical, something that escapes whatever description I try to bind it by, any analysis, or articulation.
On the train to Chennai, as I sat looking out the window at the swathes of brown, green, and pale blue ribboning along, there was a moment when the lines between the land and sky began to blur, and I blinked. The image resolved itself as the sounds of an elevator ad in Hindi, a woman screaming at her captor to let her go in Tamil, and a one-sided conversation in Marwari jumbled up, slapped me awake. For a few seconds after that, I remained still, inhabiting that moment on that seat, on that train, where nothing that happened before or after seemed to exist. If it sounds like a state of philosophical fugue, it was; I felt unmoored, untethered from what had happened before, and what was to happen after — will we get auto, will we take the route by the sea, will the summer warm the night air — nothing intruded. It was as if everything that came into contact with this pool of stillness dissolved within it.
I read the rest of Em and the Big Hoom in the train, and when I finished, I messaged K. that I had fallen in love, both with Em and the Big Hoom. I had resisted reading the book for a long time because I was miffed with Jerry Pinto. No, I have never met him, of course, he doesn’t know me (ha!); rather, it is one of those random grudges that I nursed all alone inside the cold dark dank recesses of my narrow heart. Sometime ago, Jerry Pinto wrote an A to Z ode to Mumbai and all that he chanted about in it as familiars were distant, faces I only knew as photographs, and places as postcards. My Mumbai was was tucked deep into the Western line, and so, miffed, I made my own list, shaking a typed fist into the internet void. As I teared up after finishing the book, looking away at the window, now blurred again, I was glad to pay this salt tax the best books demand of you. Everything dissolved into those droplets, petty grudges and pointless lists.
Why did I fall in love with Em or the Big Hoom? Was it because of her ambivalence toward her motherhood, her sniggering ‘mud-dah’? Was it because of the familiar confusions over adulthood’s demands, the muddling over money, her love for sweets (I don’t even have a sweet tooth, but it felt so right that she would). Was it because of the darkness that leaks out of her, something I have witnessed friends and loved ones growl and grapple with? And the Big Hoom, whom I began to think of as the beloved Hornbill, mating for life, guarding an entire forest). It was of course silly to think of it as one or the other, for it is all of it, everything blurs, all of it, dissolving and seeping with every scene, dialogue, snark, and sob.
In the morning, the one I love asked me, “What are you doing now?” She was tucked inside a nightie, her head sprouting out of that tent, her hair now grown into thick, steel gray sheaves. (I had hated it when they had chopped it short; lice, they said. Lies, I wanted to snarl.) I started to answer her, and then paused, for I did not know what to tell her. That was not the script; the confusions were hers, mine was to assure her everything is ok, all is well, and everyone is ok. It was what we did on the phone every morning; she would ask, is everything ok, and I would assure her, yes. Suddenly, I wanted to tell her about all my confusions, how the definitions I had stood on seemed to be blurring and dissolving. I felt dissolute — indulging in stories when the world, well, continued to be the world.
One afternoon, standing at the entrance counter of the Madras Literary Society, staring at an application, once again, I felt this moment of dissolution. There it was, a form, with lines where I had to fill in name, occupation, address, and for a while all the lines and words seemed to hover uncertainly in the warm post lunch air exhaled by the brick walls. As the words dissolved into each other, I giggled, silently, for I realised I needed my glasses.
—
And dear Jerry Pinto (I feel I can’t yet take the urimai to call you Jerry), here is my love letter our beloved:
A is for Andheri, rather the dog that used to sleep in the middle of the foot overbridge. Every morning bleary eyed, for four years, I stopped, looked at it sleeping and thought, I envy you.
B is for batata vada, the kind A. made one day as we sat in her house chatting. We were supposed to be studying together, tenth standard and all. We didn’t. I never kept in touch with her*.
C is for Chunabhatti, where D. lives, who now has a music studio in a room in his house. Mumbai is edgy like that, you have secret rooms in bylanes of Chunabhatti where D for Dopeadelicz has recorded their music.
E is for Elco Arcade, where everyone bought nighties. When feeling adventurous they bought batik kaftans.
F is for falooda. Rose falooda.
G is for Goregaon. My always.
H is for Hiranandani, the place, not the builder – a place I knew of watching all those 90s songs. Then Dil Chahta Hai happened and everyone suddenly wanted to go to Australia to nurse a heartbreak.
I is for Inorbit in Malad – the mall that is built on top of a landfill. Till some time ago, when you flushed there, the scented memories of the buried khaadi floated up. Such a terrific sci-fi location.
J is for Jogeshwari. S. used to stay there and we went by the same bus to junior college. Her handwriting was like cursive print and she liked Lucky Ali. A lot.
K is for Kalina. Site of my first protest.
L is for the Local.
M is for Mankhurd. The station I always wanted to explore.
N is for Nerul. The steps, the vada paav shop, and the platform were second home.
O is for, what else, Oshiwara. More stories ought to be written about Oshiwara. It is an unsung star.
P is for popat. And R is for rokda. The twain never meet for there is Q in between.
Q is for Qasim Khan Qayamat – the best on-screen don. If you are not asking ‘Kaun Qasim Khan’, you don’t know your Hindi cinema.
S is for Shree Vachanalay – smells like a prayer room with all that agarbatti, and stocks mostly raunchy books. Mills and Boon being an exception.
T is for Topiwala where I saw both Hum aapke hain kaun and DDLJ. It feels like my generation’s adolescence was signposted by those two movies.
U is for made in USA urf Ulhas Nagar Sindhi Association.
V is for VJTI – once Victoria Jubilee Technological Institute, conveniently changed to Veer Jijamata Technological institute. Naam change ho toh aise. No kitpit.
W is for Wadala and allllllllll those memories of the station.
X is for Xavier’s quadrangle – every year that all night music program, where you breathed the same air as Gangubai Hangal and Kishori Amonkar.
Y is for Yaari road – somehow I always imagined hordes of people in those twin scooters choc-a-bloc on the road going yeh yaari hum nahin bhoolenge.
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.”
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.
Once upon a time, around five years ago methinks, I came across the review of a book whose words seem to jump off the screen straight into my zehn. As was and is the ways of my online meanderings, I knew then I would come back and dwell on the review, get the book, read it, revel in it, and, all those new link resolutions were made, and I moved to the other click. (I can almost see B. raise his brows, placarding between them, bookmark, bookmark.) After some time, when I tried to retrace my path, I found no breadcrumbs, the ether had licked them up clean. I tried all the left sites, Jacobin, New Left Review, and what nots, but could not find this review, and I had forgotten the name of the book. The years passed.
A couple of weeks ago, I came across one of those context-less quotes shared by someone in Instagram, and it promptly jumped off the screen straight into my zehn. (I still don’t get the idea of pulling out quotes from a book without context and making a picture out of it, but that’s another rant.) I whooped – it was the book; cue yaadon ki baraat soundtrack, I could have recognised those words anywhere, and when I saw the cover (I mean, look at that cover — it says so much) I knew the search was complete.
The book is ‘Joyful Militancy’, building thriving resistance in toxic times by Nick Montgomery and carla bergman. It is one of those books I made highlights of extensively, because every now and then there would be a paragraph that I would find myself agreeing with, and wanting to discuss with others.
The authors start by acknowledging the general mood of despair around, “we are encouraged to spend more time touching our screens than the people we love; it is easier for many of us to envision the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” There is a sense of inevitability about capitalism; if not this then what? A lot of the novels I read recently too adopt what I started to think of as the ‘capitalism, whattodo shrug’ (a longer letter coming soon about these novels). The plots of these books are as diverse as they are, revolving around the tyranny of social media performativity, class struggles, and the avarice of billionnaires, but underlying all of them is this sense of, yes, all this is bad, but ‘capitalism whattodo shrug’.
Obviously, the authors of Joyful Militancy and those they write about, want to go beyond the ‘capitalism whattodo shrug’, and here, they introduce some concepts that occur through the book. If ever someday, there is that promised book club, I hope each of these terms would have their own discussion sessions.
First is the idea of joy. The authors make a distinction between joy and happiness, which I can’t go into in detail, for you must read the book, so that we can discuss in the someday book club. Here’s a glimpse though, in the words of Rebecca Solnit, whom the authors quote, “Happiness is a sort of ridiculous thing we’re all supposed to chase like dogs chasing cars that suggests there’s some sort of steady well-being… you can feel confident, you can feel loved, but I think joy flashes up at moments and then you have other important things to attend to. Happiness — the wall-to-wall carpeting of the psyche — is somewhat overrated.” That last phrase, the wall-to-wall carpeting of the psyche is something I wanted to underline repeatedly, which the blasted screen would not give me the satisfaction of. It is something people have spoken about in different ways, in different contexts that it almost feels like a banal observation. Even though you have 1.5 million followers, why, like Gulzar said, ‘itne log hain, phir tanha kyon ho’? When you can order anything you want at the click of a button, why do you scroll endlessly, and then throw the phone away, irritated?
I have thought of it as an incalculable friction — we need that friction to feel that we are alive; like when you struggle with a paragraph, and when you hit on that phrasing, it comes as this kick; something joyful. When you take a stand, on the street, in your home, in your workplace, and there’s that moment of transgression. When you sit with a friend you have known for years and they tease you about something silly. I could go on, but in all these interactions, you need to get out of that insulated room with wall-to-wall carpeting. The authors come up with different interpetations and examples to illustrate what they mean by joy, an active passion, a process of transformation, the erotic, and so on, and I found one word particularly of note, sentipensar, ‘the conviction that you cannot think without feeling or feel without thinking’. Then the authors talk of militancy, which is usually associated with combative aggression, but they unpack its different layers, as an active, fertile and transformative process. The authors do not take the easy way of giving easy definitions to these terms, rather, they talk of different imaginations of that word, and what it could mean and stand for, and in doing so, also push for continuing that process.
The authors then speak of how the basis of any social movement is a sense of friendship and community, and the attendant prickly problems of trust and solidarity that accompany any such community space. For there is always the question of power, the location of people, their conditioning, and their own personal idiosyncracies. All of which complicated by the context of capitalism and other oppressive structures such movements are embedded in. All these pressures could result in what the authors term ‘rigid radicalism’, where the rules of who is in and out become rigid, where the same processes that are being critiqued get reproduced, and unintentionally, the same relationships that made us sick get reproduced (paraphrasing a quote by Zainab Amadahy in the book).
Then comes the paragraph that every time does the zehn jump, “There is something that circulates in many radical spaces, movements, and milieus that saps their power from within. It is the pleasure of feeling more radical than others and the worry about not being radical enough; the sad comfort of sorting unfolding events into dead categories; the vigilant apprehension of errots and complicities in oneself and others; the anxious posturing on social media with the highs of being liked and hte lows of being ignored; the suspicion and resentment felt in the presence of something new; the way curiosity feels naive and condescension feels right. We can sense its emergence at certain times, when we feel the need to perform in certain ways, hate the right things, and make the right gestures. Above all, it is hostile to difference, curiosity, openness, and experimentation.”
The authors term this phenomenon ‘rigid radicalism’, ‘a fixed way of being, and a way of fixing’. Don’t worry, there is no prescription of what to do about it; the authors are careful to not go down that route. There isn’t a binary too — for instance, ‘calling in‘ is not framed as an opposite of ‘calling out’. There isn’t a senseless free for all approach to say whatever anyone wants, however they want, because oppressive structures are real. They also speak about their own fears — even in writing this, they will be dismissed as too naive, too woo-woo, too oppressive, and add that this fear (performative? performing?) also imposes self-censorship. What I found valuable is that they share insights of different people involved in varied movements, and so there is a plurality of voices and ideas, people speak from their own experience, and there’s an underlying texture of care, they do not speak in the language of accusing and punishing, rather more in the register of transformative justice.
I shall pause here, for I don’t think I have yet absorbed all the ideas that come after to provide a summary or a key highlights sort of ending. I also think it makes more sense for you to engage with the material without any such preludes; you can then sift it from the lens of your own experiences. I also hope for a similar book in the Indian context. I shall leave you with these lines, which I wanted to underline again and again:
“Don’t be in such a hurry to condemn a person because he doesn’t do what you do, or think as you think or as fast. There was a time when you didn’t know what you know today. – Malcolm X”
There is a raag called Shyam Kalyan. It is supposed to be an evening raag, but I think you can listen to it anytime, as I have, doing some chores in the morning, or traveling through Kanakpura road, or just to fill the silences of the evening when I am alone with my chai. It has a soothing quality, the notes aren’t low or melancholy, rather, they are soft, and fall to the floor like petals would, nudged by a moody breeze. It also has a romance to it, the romance of the sea breeze, pigeons flying off like movie extras caught mid-move, and the promise of an ever after, the lilt of hope. That’s why Ilayaraja chose it, perhaps, for the song ‘Nee oru kaadal sangeedam’ from Nayagan.
The Shyam Kalyan I listen to is by Ustaad Rashid Khan. When S. introduced me to this piece, he did so with that knowing assurance; he knew I would be addicted, and I was. Even as I damn that irritating foreknowledge, I am grateful, for this piece of music has become, less a fixture, more a flowing river in my musical sanctuary; it ripples through the day, softening its contours, and somehow, everything becomes a bit more bearable.
How do I express my gratitude to someone who has changed the very shape of my days, and will continue to do so, in such a profound and lyrical way? How do I tell him, I wish I could hear you sing live, not just one more time, but again and again and again? How do I tell him that I heard your Durga in Mumbai almost two decades ago, and even now, that raag inside my head is sung in your voice. How do I tell you that I heard someone describe how the stage was hot, burning hot, after you had finished your performance, and she wasn’t sure how the audience would react to her next, and this was just over a year ago, what happened? How do I tell you how my heart breaks now, listening to you sing now, and at the same time, I can’t help being moved by the way you caress the notes, the way your voice carries those notes, unafraid, the way your voice melds the music, the moment, and the magic in a way that I understand now is art? How do I tell you that every time I listen to you, I fall in love, with not just the music, but all the possibilities of what can be, like discovering love itself anew?
The first time when your heart breaks, you learn all there’s to learn about how hearts and economics are different. You don’t need to read tomes about enumerative violence and the politics of empiricism, you learn by living in the after. You don’t skim but stare at a headline that says more than 20,000 killed. There is no metric that can act as a proxy for ‘drowning inside a growing well of unshed tears’. There is no simulation that will let you model the threads of why, why not, what if, what not if, maybe, oh why, oh why oh why. Yes, all models are wrong, but some models are non-existent. There is no rational actor, there is no equilibirium, there is no predictable irrationality, there’s no multiple choice answer to how to break to someone you don’t love them anymore. All you have are poems, most which don’t rhyme, that let you make sense without understanding. Poems are like that; they get away with writing a haiku about drowning.
When the second time your heart breaks, you know that though we live by metaphors, we are the ones who remake them too. You learn that you are an amnesiac. Just as in summer, you forgot that there was a time when you wore socks to bed. You just cannot recall, in that vivid bone rattling detail, that cold, which made you reach for two rajais. It is a memory, and now you know memories fade. You knew firsthand what happened then, in the after, and yet, you are here now, and you have a suspicion, as of now unspoken, even unthought, that it will probably happen again. As you cry, you manage to giggle too. You understand the word compromise differently, as the original meaning intended it to be, a mutually made promise. You now know that the heart is a muscle, it will bleed and tear, and then stitch itself back together, a little tired, a litle sore, and a little bored too. You read poems, and wish they were songs, because you need something that poems cannot reach for, but music perhaps can. You use perhaps a lot. You know that there is no before and an after, there was a maybe then, there is a maybe now.
“Book-u, book-u,” used to be my mother’s choice words while scolding me. Whenever she called me to do a chore, I used to be in some corner with a book. I don’t know how or when this habit of reading started, but I am so glad it did; even today, whenever life’s boat capsizes into the valley of tears, I hold on to my book-shaped raft.
Apparently, reading is unnatural. There are no circuits in the brain labelled, ‘for reading’. As we read, there are new circuits formed, as our brain is maha-adapatable, or plastic, as they say. I heard a researcher, Marryanne Wolf, who studies how we read and what it does to our brains, talk about this, and some of what she said struck me. For starters, she spoke of something called ‘deep reading’, a state when the brain not just absorbs information, but also ends up making connections to others things that you know. Skimming the net and reading through the infinite scroll just lets you absorb a lot of information, without making those other cross connections spark. She also said that her research tries to understand the mediums through which we read; and a book allows more for that kind of deep reading state.
Then, she spoke of an anecdote. Apparently, before getting into brain research, she studied literature and loved Herman Hesse, especially The Glass Bead Game. Sometime during her brain research life, she decided to go back and read it, as she advocates deep reading, a sort of do what you preach test. And she found that she could not read it; it was boring. She had to retrain her brain for a few weeks, by being at it, to then start enjoying that book again the way she did before.
This anecdote made me think of so many of my friends who say they don’t or can’t read anymore; perhaps, all that skimming has rewired brains, and now you need to literally build those pathways again?
I also think that the skmming and deep reading are perhaps two approaches to knowledge; one more encouraged by the powers that be. Skimming is more transactional; knowledge becomes a commodity to acquire, whereas in deep reading, it is like a relationship, you discover something and are also willing to be changed by it, and be discomfited in the process.
As I was wondering about what’s next for the letters from the middle ages, I realised this non-transactional way of being is something that deeply interests me; how do we form a human bond with art, with those around us, and the larger world? What is fascinating is that there is no ‘natural’ way of making our way into this world of our own making (I use our loosely, as a way to talk of humanity). And so, there isn’t a fixed definition of what it is to be a human. What we then have are three entities, us, the world, and our relationship with it, and none of these entities have a fixed definition, and it all pulses with some possibility, within which we seek to make sense, love, and life.
In the meanwhile, if you choose to, for deep reading experiments, here are some books that over the past year have given me some refuge. N. asked me for book recommendations, and as I thought about the kind of books I encountered, this feels more like sharing gossip than gyaan.
An intimate history of humanity
How did people flirt with each other? How has this amorphous thing called culture shaped loneliness we experience over time? How have we cooked? How has sex changed? I have never seen such intimate activities carefully examined, except maybe in restaurant menus that suddenly tell you about how cotton from India went to Japan and people in Japan dressed themselves with ‘sarasa’, a sort of kalmakari cloth. In this book, Theodore Zeldin looks at ‘an intimate history of humanity’, very much from a Euro-centric eye. He does draw here and there from the Asian contexts, but, the perspective remains clear. I didn’t mind it, for he interviews women (giving some convoluted reason in the beginning, which I wasn’t too convinced by ), and the stories of the women he speaks to leavens the commentary in a lovely way. I especially love the story of a woman in France who chooses to live a life that’s saturated with aesthetics; she runs a restaurant where she conjures themes for the patrons and everyone comes there dressed, the space is designed just so; all to give a specific experience to those who come. As opposed to ‘immersive experiences’ that seem at best a marketing ploy and at worse a code for we shall drown you in the light of Edison lamps, her commitment to that sort of aesthetic seems genuine given her complete surrender to it. In a way, it feels like an artistic quest.
Shape
How many holes does a straw have? Apparently at some point the internet was besotted with this question. In the book ‘Shape’, Jordan Ellenberg not just tells you how to count holes on various surfaces (said with a straight face), but also how geometry is again making a comeback in different contemporary fields.
When I read about eleven dimensions of the universe and what nots, I used to always wonder about how do you understand a reality you cannot visually imagine? Of course, you use mathematics for that sort of wizardry, but there’s something very appealing about thinking about the world in a way we can visualise, map, and come up with axioms and theorems for. There’s a certitude that is very comforting, in a world where probability and statistics rule the roost.
Be warned — how much ever Jordan tries to put enthu for geometry, it is still stuff that requires you to pay attention and go back and re-read.
The hundred years war on Palestine
“I have only read Exodus. What can I read to understand what’s going on?” M. asked me, and that question spiralled into weeks of reading different books. My first answer was going to be ‘Fateful triangle’ by Noam Chomsky, the book I read almost two decades ago, but I hesitated and asked M. to give me a couple of days.
M. is not unique, for Leon Uris’ Exodus was a bestseller and shaped the imagination of millions when it came to Israel. It is a book of fiction, and many historical facts have been shaped to give the book its narrative heft. There are many articles that give you details about the inaccuracies. What struck me is how a story managed to shape attitude and imagination, which is critical when it comes to politics, very evident given the continuing horror in Gaza.
The book I told M to read finally was ‘The Hundred years war on Palestine’ by Rashid Khalidi. He is a Palestinian-American historian and belongs to an elite family, whose history he intertwines with the history of Palestine. Somehow, that makes the book incredibly powerful; you are seeing history not just as events, mishaps, and betrayals, but you keep thinking of the people involved. There is also the careful detailing of the scholar, the promise that academic rigor makes; you know where my sympathies lie but my sympathies will not let me lie.
It is not an easy read; as in, it doesn’t give you that sort of black and white understanding of what is going on that can be summarised in a tweet, and I think that’s where the book’s power is. This is perhaps the sort of complex and complicated understanding that’s needed for any kind of truth and reconcilliation, any kind of lasting peace to happen.
Nora goes off script
I think there should be a genre called romance for the tired soul, and I invented this genre after reading Nora goes off script. There is a woman who isn’t unhappy that her husband has moved out. As she says, it is a ‘self-correcting problem’ — they don’t want to be with you, it is best they leave. She seems sorted, with detailed schedules, and a tea house where she writes, and then comes a hero; literally, the leading guy of the movies, and an escapist romance begins, but with the sensibility of someone who has been hurt, and yet cannot let go of hope, i.e., the romance for the tired soul. She has a dry sense of humour, and as with all the best romances, you like the other side characters, who are drawn with flesh and bone and all the gore inside.
The cheatsheet
Of course, I can’t tell you one last book and then let you go, because I could not decide what the final book in this series will be. And so, here goes — a list of books you can read in one sitting, as I did.
The Last Courtesan by Manish Gaekwad was released this year, and tells the story of Rekhabai, a spunky and dildaar woman in her own voice. Qabar is one of those books that do things to your insides; it layers a tired heart, magic, politics, and a dry sense of humour. And then there is Claire Keeghan’s Small things like these, a book whose lines you know will linger on you like those on your palm.
Middle aged 