The space between the words

Today morning, I woke up to a dream so depressing that I couldn’t stop sobbing. I didn’t know why I had the dream today of all days, and now that May’s nearly over, which has been so insufferable and hurtful already. It probably means that the anxieties are still there, multiplying like the tentacles in a hentai you read late at night when life’s too disappointing and nothing’s actually erotic.

Later in the day, after I prepared excitedly to attend a Zubaan panel at IIHS, a scooter crashed into my Yulu. I rolled over dramatically. The scooter middle-aged man made the disgusted bangalore face, then considered leaving, but decided against it, parked nearby and demanded 2000 rupees from me. I made the mistake of saying sorry. He said fooking North Indian, but not, like, the American fooking, but the Kannadiga fooking, and so he fooked at me, and he kept fooking, and I kept saying sorry, I’m a student, I can’t pay my bills bruh, but not without the bruh, of course, I said sir, because I’m nice, but like, not nice enough, and at this point, my bruised knees were bruising harder and I could feel the pain in my patellar ligament, and my back was all sweaty, so I said sorry again to compensate and asked why he’s doing what he’s doing, to which the scooter middle-aged man pointed his finger at me and started finding dents on his scooty that fell at the speed of a terrific 5 kmph, then he said come with me to the mechanic or the police station, I was like no bruh, but not without the — you get it — so I did what Indians, regardless of North or South, do best — I negotiated and brought down the collision bribe to 1000 rupees, wishing he runs into those double-deckers that don’t even operate in this city; what matters though is that I ditched IIHS, parked my yulu and walked back home feeling all brittle, but then walking got tougher, so I called Healthy Puker and said, can you come pick me up bruh, and then he came vroom vroom full-macho and I whined and grunted all the way back to his place, where he disinfected my wound and I said aaah aaah aaah, then he patched me up and I fiddled with the idea of going for IIHS, which, after the recent sabotage, would be a bad financial decison, but anything for a sexy interior life, right?

In the panel The Space Between The Words at IIHS, poet and educator Theyiesinuo Keditsu narrated how she managed to begin a conversation on reviving the indigenous Naga textiles through her instagram @mekhalamama, all despite an obdurate patriarchal society.

Vanity can be so empowering

But for me, the highlight of the panel was not the discussions on rural identities and queerness and feminist spaces that the panel members helped create in the North-East, but when Theyiesinuo said, “We cannot speak all the languages. We need to be kind to each other.”

Later after the talk, I gathered up courage and said hi to two of the panellists, a behaviour that any acquaintance of mine would classify as antithetical to my existence. Then I foolishly said bye, booked an auto, and smiled throughout. It seemed the ride back home was shorter, maybe because One Direction was singing nicely, or since I was texting K from an auto after a long time.

In other news, I realised enajori is the closest Assamese word that can describe the red cord between Taki and Mitsuha in Kimi No Na Wa, which, if you haven’t watched, is basically the anime version of would you still love me if I touched your boobs and you were technically dead .

A while ago, K ordered me Domino’s. I feel content right now. The morning dream feels distant, almost.

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Will the guy at Sapna also get excited by the falling of rain

On the swings,
you talk, because
gravity
isn’t lost on us

since the words, otherwise
also heavy, such as
at what age did your parents like you
the most

(until I was eleven
I listened to my father & spoke well
to my mother)

or what is the wait-time, really,
for forgiveness that must be given daily;
to grow a stomach for the bellyaches, &
carry safely the six eggs on the way back.

Afterwards at a grocery store,
looking for something
I can’t put a finger on,

humming an unreasonable song, &
scratching my ass —
wishing I were
a tote bag man.

The park must be covered in rainwater now
and the subjectless swings must be wobbling in the breeze still,
continuing to describe
the afterthought of being uncertain.

Third Year Complex

All good things begin and end on the 2nd floor.

The juniors might not remember, and for seniors, it might have not existed, but for the greater half of 2022, there used to be an abandoned and overturned treadmill near the stairs, under which I would regularly hide, read and become an object of fascination from passersby. This included students who would either flinch at the jumpscare or casually fish for their phones to take pictures, and also priests who would cross their hearts, either dramatically or internally. Nobody complained though, or looked twice, it was my spot, and they let me occupy it.

Doggo-chan at Healthy Puker’s (formerly known as Meta Volunteer) home doesn’t actually let you pet him. He’s going to growl and then pretend to bite. But he will sleep on the stairs and get in your way. I’m not sure if he expects us to accidentally step on him, so that he can make a big deal out of it, or if he just wants to make walking a difficult process, so that he feels noticed. 

Doggo-chan smells like five-year-old laundry, and Healthy Puker checks everyday if he’s dead. It’s probably too emo to say that Doggo-chan has quite a lot in common with me. In the months I spent disappearing into what I considered were cavities of the institution but couldn’t have been any less public than the Stone Benches or the Anime Bleachers, I was indulging in the fetish of being observed while I retreated from social activity.

“I make myself cry, in order to prove to myself that my grief is not an illusion: tears are signs, not expressions. By my tears, I tell a story, I produce a myth of grief, and henceforth I adjust myself to it”

– Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse

The myth of grief is similar to the pleasure I derived from the fact of being noticed in my state of voluntary isolation. My loneliness is perceived, and thereby legitimised. 

Loneliness, as Olivia Laing describes in The Lonely City, is incommunicable by the one who suffers it. And unlike other non-communicable emotional experiences, it cannot be shared via empathy. Since the second person’s empathic abilities could be obstructed by the anxiety-arousing quality of the mere emanations of the first person’s loneliness.

Loneliness feels like such a shameful experience, so counter to the lives we are supposed to lead, that it becomes increasingly inadmissible, a taboo state whose confession seems destined to cause others to turn and flee.

This shame was made easier by being looked at, through the lonely carnality of pretending to sleep, or wanting to sleep, in the recesses of public architecture. But it didn’t manage to replace physical touch, something I wouldn’t be privileged to experience until much later.

A year has passed now. Just a year of actual college. I got lucky and made some really good friends. I also got unlucky and lost many friends. But I’ve become someone who’s okay with the prospect of being alone, even the kind of unfetishized aloneness you feel when squeezing out toothpaste first thing in the morning, coming home and switching on the lights and realising there are leftovers you had forgotten about, combing your hair and noticing how much it’s thinned out, doing dishes and finding the bottle of Pril empty, or hearing the rain on the street and remembering that it’s always been like this.

In Normal People that I recently finished reading, Marianne was “…feeling a strange sense of nostalgia for a moment that was already in the process of happening.” While Connell was consumed by “a sense that he is in fact two separate people, and soon he will have to choose which person to be on a full-time basis, and leave the other person behind.” 

I am Marianne and Connell. I am dependent and I am fraying into several. I am my first attempt at re-discovering an inner life (or whatever they call it), a truly private space, not one of those lonely exhibitionisms or self-fulfilling prognostications, but a proclivity towards self-respect that I can say is entirely my own hard work.

During association graduation, Stokley Patron saw me crying and walked up to me and told me a joke without my consent. I forgot the punchline, but some boyfriend and girlfriend were there in a cinema hall and some skirt things happened. Later at Healthy Puker’s home, Mallu Nipples (formerly Fake Real Estate Agent) got tricked into wearing a skirt. “These aren’t shorts!” he screamed from the other room. It made me laugh, despite the ridiculousness of the situation that had not even begun bearing down on me that night.

On CPE Day, Mallu Nipples put a balloon under his shirt and started pregnant-dancing. Despite the balmy grief and my best efforts to withdraw, I was moored to the conviviality of an ending that was not even mine; I already had one fucked-up graduation under my belt, I couldn’t afford another; so I grabbed a balloon for myself and ran from anyone who attempted to burst it. I even put it in my tummy and started moving my hips. This wouldn’t have been possible, had I not cultivated in less than a week something I should’ve long ago — a firmness for myself, a confession that I don’t know shit about how shit works, that I don’t actually need people to remind me of my existence.

In the letters that Sunny Witch wrote me, she mentions that loving is not the easiest thing to do. Not the hardest, but not the easiest. We fear disappointing those we love. That might be a stupid thing, but it is such a relatable stupid thing. My willingness to love and to take care of others, I have realised, can be nurtured by something entirely private – a necessary perversion of the self and for the self. After more than 365 days of inhabiting the 2nd floor of Arrupe, this is my third-year complex.

As John Steinbeck writes in Mice and Men, “Maybe ever’body in the whole damn world is scared of each other.”

And as Jack’s mother says in Anxious People, “Boats that stay in the harbour are safe, sweetheart, but that’s not what boats were built for.”

And as Alan Watts puts it, “The menu is not the meal”.

Erde and Sonne

I discovered only recently that a certain staircase on the third floor is known as the breakdown staircase. I didn’t know this because all my breakdowns happen on the fourth floor. It’s a convenient location. Nobody I’m friends with has any business going there. For a whole year, it was an agreeable arrangement between me and the late afternoons.

I don’t know what led to this situation. A hysteria participates and I can’t get my fingers to stop trembling. The centipede wriggles away from the bossman toad back home, Brahmaputra rises and falls like an ocean; my family too, plunges.

I’m looking at pictures from last week, and then pictures from every week; wind picks up into open balconies in Shantinagar, clothes wet and dry in a self-fulfilled prophecy; I cry in front of multiple friends again and again for an entire week. Very humiliating. If I had waited a little longer until graduation, I could’ve successfully established my supremacy over the public sobbers.

The German word Torschlusspanik doesn’t have an English equivalent, but it’s something we all endure in a capitalist state of affairs. It’s the fear of time always running out, that you haven’t done much in your life, and if you don’t act soon, time will pass and the gates will close.

Another German word, Erklärungsnot, can be loosely translated as the moment when you’re caught in the act of crying, and need to explain quickly why, where, how and what led to this situation.

Torschlusspanik and Erklärungsnot, two words of a language that’s often made fun of for its inability to be gentle, can only together describe the process of my declining stability, where I engage in a very Freudian anticipation of the end. I dread new beginnings like the same weeping child in an amusement park 15 years ago who couldn’t find his parents, who started calculating all kinds of changes he would need to survive without them.

I’m such a baby. A friend lends out his arms, I reach out for a finger instead and hold on. He once told me about the problem of intellectualising my feelings. It’s important to feel things, all the bad ones too, he said. The child me in the amusement park made the same mistake of overthinking the end. I think I haven’t grown up since then.

I desire the annihilation of vulnerability that has exasperated my life. I require a willingness to become indebted of someone’s kindness; a queer confidence to resurface from the big river that still drowns me, that I could never leave behind.

Last month A excitingly told me that Coimbatore has rivers. Then I showed him the rivers back home. Then he told me about the waterfalls. Then I showed him the waterfalls back home. Then he shut up and ate his dosa. Quietly, he said he wants to come to Assam.

I realised then that there’s no reason why the earth chooses to orbit the sun. It’s easy to say they love each other, but they might as well be tired of each other. What I do know is that they look so magnificent together.

The sun and earth also spin, possibly for themselves, just like the fan, which has definitely the most boring job of all the appliances, to spin and to spin. But upon slowing down, I think, the fan too revolves around the sun.

What I wrote is what the Germans call herumlavieren, talking without knowing how to get to the point. I wonder if there is a fixed destination the earth and sun need to reach before calling it quits. Or is the whole point to circle each other until neither are around?

Is it to live life mundanely?

Desperately Seeking Rain

Journaling without thinking; making Naruto type hand signs at the sky, summoning clouds; it works slowly, the breeze gets stronger; I make a triumphant face, Meta Volunteer disapproves and eats his curd rice. I’m in the nicer balcony. It does not rain.

Condition of stomach just like this stuffy weather; not looking forward to graduation, it’s too soon, everyone seems to want it though, everyone’s always excited to grow up. Why? It does not rain.

Disgusted with myself. Recognise those showers that are neither hot nor cold? Supposedly pleasant, but are irritating in-betweens. It does not rain.

The MH Abrahams I’ve been anxiously reading was sold to Blossoms by Sneha, who had signed her name and her degree (BA Journalism) on the first page. I wonder where Sneha planned to apply to, what she’s doing now, what she would tell me if we were friends. It does not rain.

Finding alone time to pick my nose. Remembering to wash under my feet. Squinting at the toilet flush to make sure shit disappears. It does not rain.

I encounter two kinds of characters in MH Abraham. Flat characters are built around a single idea or quality. Round characters are complex in temperament and motivation and are represented with subtle particularity; they’re capable of surprising us like real people do. But if you live in Bangalore, you know there’s another character — the scam character.

The scam character is both round and flat. They’re real enough but they’re also fake enough. It’s not just you that they scam, but also themselves. Charles VI of France had the glass delusion. He thought that he was made of glass and could potentially shatter into pieces. So he wrapped himself in blankets to protect his butt from shattering. March gave way to the scam characters, who in their blankets have forgotten that Bangalore has no winters.

I’ve forgotten about rain by now. But it falls. In Jorhat I came up with the theory that it rains when I’m sad. I haven’t grown up so I still believe that some part of the world does revolve around me. I got a little sick of mothering others. I wish to be held and fed now, maybe even buried. I wish to be spoken gently to. I wish to be the centre of another person’s world, if not everyone’s. I wish to be selfish, and to make at least one person uncomfortable, to say what’s on my mind, and to become someone else, to live another life, to not have expectations from friendships and to find less disappointing ways to be.

Pondi-Seri!

As soon as the first wave of happiness knocked Fake Real Estate Agent off his feet, he looked at me, mallu-eyed and screamed, “Shit! I didn’t bring spare underwear!” This realisation dawned on him after a five minute debate on whether we should take off our shirts. We decided to do it, not because we reached a consensus, but since we spotted a loafer kid running around naked.

By the end of the trip, we figured that Promenade isn’t a shirtless kind of beach, but more of a Church Street kind of beach, and nobody except the loafer kid and us were happily collecting sand in our trousers. “Shit, dude! You tricked me! I don’t have underwear!” he repeated, until he forgot about it, and went into the deep-end.

After a while, I asked him, “Are those abs or birth-marks?”

“What the fuck, dude?” He looked down at his own tummy, then at me. Meanwhile, Meta Volunteer was cruising the waves, perfect muscles exposed in a tank top never seen before, glinting against the sun and saltwater and in Tamizh fashion, whatever that means. He was no longer the small, derangedly enthu junior who I was familiar with, or the ductile and spongy roommate who would climb the bedroom and balcony walls in various monkey ways and come home saying “why is everything so sadddddddddd?”

Right now, he had become a wave function, the breath of an ocean, the light particle of a dusking sun, a wet Schrodinger’s cat holding my hands and asking me to let go when the sea returns. He was a presence, a comforting one, and I looked at him like I was looking at a person for the first time.

The girls were watching us from a distance, perched on a stone bench, Fake Raccoon giving very cool glass-ceiling-destroying-chic-boss-lady vibes, and Fake Doctor looking like a graceful beach girl. As proper voyeurs, they refused to wet their feet.

Once it got colder, we walked down the Goubert Ave, inside the Bharathi Park, trying to figure our way back to the hotel, spotting a fancy candle shop, realising the products are cheap, and filling out baskets for people back home.

In the two nights we stayed, I woke them up each morning with music blaring from my phone speakers. It felt like I was in a movie, like I was a main character for the first time in my life, and I might just save the world. Nicki Minaj began rapping, and everybody was moving their bodies, then I like to move it, move it was also playing, then everybody collapsed on the bed, and we held each other until afternoon deliberately arrived and we needed to get dressed and do what we came here to do.

Next day at auroville beach, we were changing, and I said, bro I laughed at you too much the other day, I forgot to bring underwear today, so I won’t wear it. “Dude, I think at least four people heard you saying that,” he replied from the neighbouring stall.

It was a rougher sea, the waves came at us harder, we collected lots of shells, and I thought of finding a pretty one so I could give it to my Chick. We played Kabaddi with the waves. Fake Doctor tripped and fell. We laughed evilly, then said, your clothes are already gone, let’s go to the deeper end. We ate shrimp, prawns and squid in the pitch-black from an akka who was about to close because the police would come. Fake Real Estate Agent and I found ourselves naked again in a plastic dining table, arguing whether we would fall sick or not, with nothing but the sound of the closing tides to settle the debate.

Once upon a time, EJP, TEP, CPE, JIP went on a trip, by making up excuses, scamming their parents, and made Eren Yeager type hand signs and said fuck you to the sea.

“There’s a word for it, I can’t remember, when something in the ocean keeps moving closer and closer to the shore in this way,” Fake Raccoon said, holding a shitty burger, referring to the log of wood that kept threatening to smash into us wherever we went in auroville.

It was midnight, and I thought of myself — about that one morning I woke up and realised I needed the ocean or else I would die. The last beach I went to was in Puri, in 2010, when my grandfather was still alive and my parents weren’t half as crazy as they were going to become. Since then, I’ve never relaxed. It felt like I was that log of wood, all these years, floating closer and closer to a coast but never satisfied enough to slow down with where I was.

“I got it! I got it!” she said later. “It’s called longshore drift.”

Attack On Titan, the Not-Final Final

I cried, I screamed, I remembered, why nearly a decade ago I sat down and thought, isn’t this the coolest show on earth?

META, full moon tarrying, & Paromita Vohra

“To be able to say we really love something is to be less lonely”

They say the distance between the basement where we discuss love and k-dramas, and the third floor where the blue chairs are waiting for adoption depends on the Merchant Female waiting for her lift and the desire to fulfil her Pokemon Card fantasy. But I’d like to believe that the MF’s love language is simply based on a vertical delight — after all, elevators are the most intimate variety of liminal spaces. There’s no comfort of sitting while travelling. Everyone’s supposed to stand closely with nothing but a mirror and each other to gawk at, fully aware that we’re not actually covering any distance, that we are merely going up and down in a kind of liminality that doesn’t make its presence felt until the lift breaks down and you find yourself trapped between four walls, a very obvious understanding of the ghazal that goes asman ka na raha aur zamin ka na raha.

It reminds me of the time at the Bangalore International Centre when we went to watch Stokley Patron give a talk on becoming the heroine of your life. Acid Enthusiast rushed into an already packed elevator and somebody said, it’s alright there’s still space. An unfamiliar, beautiful woman then said, don’t crowd like sardines, covid isn’t over. The room fell silent. The lift took off in this awkwardness. After a while, Acid Enthusiast looked at me and whispered, what is a sardine, bro? The unfamiliar, beautiful woman was very angry now, and told him to Google it. More silence. The elevator was still in motion, but T slowly answered. Fish, they’re a kind of small fish. Acid Enthusiast did his thankful head bob thing and smiled. The woman found her floor, and once she darted off, we laughed, and someone said, posh people.

Anyway, chairs in a lift possibly constitutes this violation of liminality, because technically we can sit on them. It only appears that the MF had a problem of sardines, but I’m certain that she comes from a place of love for this intimate space that couldn’t afford the perversion of chairs.

Like Paromita Vohra said, it’s not always an escape from but an escape into something. Lifts are extremely difficult to escape from, but they can be easily escaped into. That’s why you run towards them. That’s what makes them liminal. I relate to the MF as her devotion to protecting this space is similar to my obsession with getting out of it. Lifts are awkward, vague, quiet, too subtle for my comfort. They’re hard to let go of. They’re addictive substitutes for stairs and emotional permanence.

An observation made by Meta Volunteer and I — the moon’s been full for about four days. Either we are blind, delusional, or life’s actually slowing down. All three make equal sense. Take the previous week. Between homelessness and the end of the two-day-long Social Justice Film Festival, we decided to watch Pathaan at midnight. I didn’t realise until the film’s over that we had been watching documentaries continuously for at least 12 hours. Are we blind, delusional, or is life actually slowing down?

Listening to Paromita Vohra reassured me that I’m not naive for wanting to give myself wholly (because what’s the point otherwise?), or for spending so much time “recuperating”, or for making a fool out of myself by not playing the 5D chess game of keeping control. Like the Agent of Ishq herself put it — if you’re always woke, when will you dream?

Suddenly

VJ ma’am throws an orange and asks us to peel it un-suddenly. I sit on the floor. I close my eyes. What’s a piece of orange called? N answers first, slice? No, I say, it’s something else. N turns around, makes a shape with her fingers, what is a single orange called, ma’am? Prof D looks down and looks troubled, slice? piece? Relief washes over her as she says, wedge? That’s it, I close my eyes, I hold a wedge of orange with so much care as if my hand’s been newly replaced with a biomechanical one, I stare at the wedge and say to myself, slow, slow, slow, just like Lightning McQueen says “speed, speed, you’re speed” before he gets on the racetracks. Now that I think of it, McQueen after he ended up stranded at the idyllic town of Radiator Spring, learns exactly this — to turn left if you want to turn right, to not live suddenly. I look to my left. K is done with her wedge and is now pinching the peel. My cheeks are lightly sprinkled, the scent of citrus doing all kinds of chemical reactions until it turns into a feeling instead, unsolvable and unsolicited like anything that enters your nose, suddenly.

Here’s an orange, here’s nothing, here’s a feeling, will I hold it nicely?

Adventures on the Serpentine Street

Fake Doctor and Fake Raccoon walk behind us. We are heading to Siddiq, to eat rolls and veal kebab that the Fake Real Estate Agent claims to be the best. He’s right. The kebabs are a seated red, similar to that bludgeoned man that Fake Raccoon keeps dragging around in her rucksack. 

We go through Serpentine Street, just like we do to Gully Grills, and to Istoria, to Makkah and to Khazana. The street begins at Richmond Park and ends at Baldwin Boys. Unfortunately, the road is quite stiff and devoid of any serpentine qualities. 

The Fake Real Estate Agent does all the ordering and calculating and paying and fetching plates. He usually tilts his head when doing such things. In this economy, it’s a sign of reliability. 

We can’t decide where to sit — across the street on the plastic stools or the benches on our side. Fake Doctor does the finger-toss. We bum down on a bench. Where are you going after this, Fake Doctor says. 

I’m looking at Delhi, Pondi and EFLU, I reply. I don’t have money for abroad or the skill for scholarship. But also, I haven’t decided. I’m one of those Carpe Diem Fundamentalists, those Time Gangsters, a beneficiary of the Moments Only Clique. I take everything and nothing seriously. Graduation is like Schrodinger’s cat. I won’t know if I want to graduate or not until I’ve done it. Most of my classmates know what to do, they’ve applied to fancy places and already signed their fancy letters of recommendations. Any day now, they’ll be done with this college. I’m not saying this with bitterness. Okay, maybe I am. I get jealous of people with money, and angry at people who use the money towards a more practical education. I am petty like that.

What’s EFLU, asks Fake Doctor. I hesitate a little. I don’t know what it is, I’ve only heard about it from smart people who’ve studied there. I explain it to her – the cafeteria system and its uncertainty now with the NEP –  and then instantly feel like a scam. I’m reassured much later when she tells me she’s a bigger scam. Fake Doctor brings with her a kind of surgical comfort that only two anxious people sitting together chewing non-veg food and not wanting to go home could understand.

Fake Raccoon is going to fall sick in a week. I don’t know this yet. She will be so sick that her gentle and reassuring voice would give way to some anime grandma crossover. She will be having soup in Gully Grills then, along with Meta Volunteer, Cat and Acid-Enthusiast. We will be arguing for and against the fatalism of MBTI theory. I will ask, how did you move on from a constant state of self-pity? And Fake Raccoon will say in her oba-chan voice, it got boring.

Cat lives disastrously close to Serpentine Street. Once, she brought me home and made me the best Ching’s noodles I had ever tasted, but she also made the mistake of asking me to rate it on a scale of 1 to 10. Now, any INTP asking a fellow INTP to objectively quantify their experience into a neat range should be prepared for a 8.8/10. Bitch, Cat said, I cooked for you at 10 pm. To make matters worse, her mother came out of the bedroom, nose-running, eyes-bulging, saying, spicy? Isn’t it too spicy? proceeded by 1 to 5, how would you rate it? It was a tricky situation to be in. Her mother thinks I’m her boyfriend, which makes it all the more weird because my girlfriend is her mother’s favourite. I enjoyed it, aunty, I replied in my most demonstrable INTP impression.

A week later, Cat travels all the way to Ragiguda to help with my Homelessness Problem. She takes a water filter and most of my books after joking that I should sleep in the railway station or under Dumble-Hagrid’s desk. She comes despite running the Social Justice Film Festival from early morning. We order pizza and play One Direction. It’s difficult telling her how much I appreciate her without hearing an automatic chill, it’s all cooool.

The first thing that happened after Cat moved in near Serpentine Street was that a supermarket burnt down. She hates this coincidence, but to me it’s magical. It’s part of the natural order. Serpentine Street is a magical name. It’s also a magical place, with its screwball creatures, amazing kebabs, unexpected cafes, sulemanis, and adventures awaiting inquiry. It’s on this street that I’m glad to be alive.

A Response to Writing Desk 20/1/22