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.
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.
The third course was about using my hands. The flank of muscles, a sheaf that supports it, rising from the back and fanning out like thickly knit branches of a slender tree. I was never very curious about the human body. Probably because of a statement made by my dad – pray that you never go to a hospital or a court unless you happen to work there. And I never wanted to work in these places, they seemed to be full of unnecessary drama. I think instead of unnecessary I’d like to use the word concentrated. Life dilutes drama. Workplaces act like soda. Should act like it, but these places don’t. They inspire and require drama. My dad wasn’t a big fan of theatrics.
I was never interested in learning about how the body functions, what did that organ do and what chemistry went behind determining its biology. I still tend to think of the human body in terms of these boring subjects at school. Another problem with the education system, for those who are interested. The body-mind dichotomy, how can I introduce a thought that would change the way my body behaves? It has to, for as Padmini says, it is silly calling it your body and your mind, they are both the same. Instead of ‘fragmenting’ it in your head (another meaningless division), your vocabulary should encourage thinking about the unity.
So, let me define this sense of ‘me’. I can change the way I move by thinking about it differently. When I thought about that, a certain fear cropped in (I think at the end of this, I am going to end up with a list of my paranoias). What if I could end up inducing a disease by thinking about it? Perfectly possible. And so, I should not think about it. Would it become like that king asked not to think about a monkey while having a medicine? Maybe if we had a different language, maybe, just maybe, there could be fewer diseases? Does naming cause something to happen?
I am slowly moving toward yoga, which I think is a form of an ‘Indian’ way of being. Letting go of meaningless dichotomies – body-mind, soul-spirit and what-not. Past-future should be added to that list. Being present, mindful, for after it passes, it becomes a memory. Malleable, a story. Maybe that’s why I like stories so much, unable to live in the present, all I am left with are pieces with which to make some sense of what I am right now.
During my second course, I was taught to think about my neck. Poised on the tip of my neck was my head, with support just enough to let it free. It seemed like the relationship between a parent and child, a healthy relationship. Often, as is the case, it is not so. Clenched, is the word. In my head, it is closely related to stress of the teeth-shattering kind. I can’t remember the last time I had a situation where I had to subject my molars to a verb like grinding. To think I do that with the most ordinary of activities was a small revelation. And such small revelations, hopefully, bring about change. And yes, I have begun to think any change is great. So it is a redundant adjective.
I on and off practice the supine exercise. More off than on. My excuse: My life is too transactional at the moment. The days can be reduced to lists, which happens to be much less a state of being. When your thoughts are focused on somehow moving on to the next moment, the moments cease to matter. I can’t explain it, the lack of reflection almost negates the moment for me. For instance, some close friends came to visit us this Friday and half of Saturday. Lying awake, unable to sleep on Thursday night, my mind seemed to race past Friday and Saturday. I could visualize their visit and mentally ticking off preparations, yes, I have enough milk and ok, instead of a movie we could do a game night. I don’t know why I couldn’t sleep, I was in this semi-awake state where my thoughts were lucid but my eyes felt heavy. In the dark I would open them at times and stare, focusing on the fridge’s regulator’s two points of deep red. Glowing, they seemed to be the only indicator that I was in this reality rather than the one fleshed out inside, where I was already moving toward Saturday. I hoped to get the parcel of things I had ordered for them, it would come, there would be surprise. The joy of gifting those select few with whom you still find a bond despite years spent together. And so when the actual thing happened, it seemed to lose its relevance, not fully, but a bit. People have a way of making events funnier than how they happened in my head. But there was a sense of déjà vu, which seemed to act like that chequered cloth I use to rub the dust off my working table. I was trying to scrub the ‘been there, seen that’ feeling away. And the worst part, lying awake on Thursday night, I knew Friday and Saturday would run past. And I’ll lie awake on Saturday night wondering how that time went past, left to sort out memories and see how different they were from what I had imagined. What I am doing right now.
Why do I dwell so much on what is going to happen? And what does that have to do with Mr. Alexander? I thought of that when Padmini told me she is going to make me sit up. I was lying down, my arms and legs relaxed, my neck being cajoled to let go and my shoulders relaxing slowly. The table that doubled up as a bed was comfortable, I was wondering awhile whether it was really a table or was it like a different kind of bed. And the view outside her window, the mixed-up greens of different trees growing in the park opposite, seemed to enter into the room too, it infused the room with a sense of green. I don’t know how to explain it, maybe it is because of the lack of noise of people around or the lack of vehicles rushing past. I felt I wasn’t in a place where there are buildings all around with a certain level of constant ambient noise. All these fundas on closer analysis. At that moment, all I could feel was a sense of the park entering through the window into that room and me sensing its presence despite facing a shelf on a wall opposite.
When Padmini said she is going to help me sit up, direct me, and asked me to imagine myself sitting, I found myself being apprehensive. What will happen? Will my stomach be able to support me? Will my back cooperate? I wasn’t thinking of the end, me sitting up, rather the process, what would happen in the meanwhile. It was different on the first day – I didn’t know what was going to happen, so I just let myself be. I told myself, trust. That’s the word I kept repeating. Trust her. And relax. It was easy to do so, with her capable hands on my neck. They inspired trust, unconsciously. You can tell from different kinds of touch, the good, the bad, the sexual, the clinical and the friendly. This was one of trust. And one of guidance.
But the second time, I couldn’t get past the fear. There was fear, a sense of what is going to happen, am I going to be ok, and questions that came fast and furious without me being able to give an answer. I wouldn’t know until I went through it and to go through it I needed to have these questions answered. As I sat up, I wasn’t as comfortable as I had been the first time. Which makes me wonder, if I know what is going to come, am I more anxious? Then, I think about the future, and have these questions. Rather, if I have no idea of what is going to happen, then I go with the flow. And I like going with the flow. Maybe I should stop planning for the future. List-less rather than listless?
Middle aged 