Unsold

Dear capitalism,
I am a woman
And for quite some time now
You’ve been trying to convince me
That you’re on my side.

You say you respect me
Because you believe in me:
No, not so much in my ability
But in my capacity,
My “purchasing capacity”
To buy your products
Without having to depend on men.

Then you go ahead and tell me
How those products
Would make me a more lucrative product
For those men.
Who writes your copy?

First published in Ethos Literary Journal, November 2018.

Whatsapp blues

There are friends who get upset
If they learn you’ve seen their messages
But did not respond.

One would think they must have gotten used it to it by now.

After all
There’s so much we witness,
So little we respond to.

The trick is not to take these things personally.

First published in Ethos Literary Journal, November 2018.

How theatre in Delhi has been finding and creating stages beyond Mandi House

A theatre is not a blank page for editorial, it is not a soapbox or a Tannoy system: it is a conscience that wakes with what is happening in the space, and wakes further still in response to what people are making of it.

-Andrew O'Hagan

When I joined the Hindi dramatic society of my college in Delhi University in 2003, it was the mention of the National School of Drama (NSD) that used to get us all starry eyed. To give us a flavour of the city's theatre, our seniors took us to Mandi House for a show of Premchand's Rangbhoomi. We sat enraptured as we watched professional actors play out the subtleties and complexities of each character, and of a bygone era. It still remains one of the most memorable performances I have witnessed.

Therefore it was only natural that when those interested in theatre walked out of their colleges, NSD was one of their top priorities. Of course with few seats and state-wise allocations, not everyone could join. Some people trained at other places in and outside India and brought to Delhi their experiences of physical theatre, theatre with dance, theatre as therapy, theatre with communities, children, theatre as clowns . . . As these specialisations developed, the theatre circuit in Mandi House expanded to make way for a larger, more organically shaping theatre scene in different parts of the city.

In Shadipur, Studio Safdar has a small rehearsal-performance space and also a book cafe, which hosts readings, talks, music sessions. Groups have been hosting intense performances in small cafes. There are "alternate theatre" groups like Third Space Collective that have been successfully staging their shows on bigger stages like Epicentre, Gurgaon. The group I was associated with, Aatish, and the project I was part of, Genderventions (by The Pocket Company, directed by Niranjani Iyer), transform atypical spaces like parks, gullies and bus stands for interactive theatre on ongoing social issues. And then there is solo theatre by people like Maya Rao and Mallika Taneja deeply invested in issues like gender justice, power packed deliveries that have broken the myth of such performances being navel-gazing exercises involving dull monologues. Mohalla Festivals organised by the Lost & Found Trust hosted performances in residential colonies, supported by the resident welfare associations and the inhabitants of the locality. Trees people jogged beneath in parks were used to prop halogens.

Almost all these groups are travelling troupes, performing outside Delhi and, at times, outside India too. Apart from NSD, there are theatre courses in Sri Ram Centre and in newly emerging institutions like Shiv Nadar University and Ambedkar University. Courses are being designed keeping in mind people in other professions so that they do not have to thwart their love for theatre because of being in full time jobs. At the same time, schools have opened up to teaching theatre and theatre practitioners are being appointed by them. Theatre Professionals, Mumbai, is a group that has been identifying such artists in Delhi and placing them with schools here. Kingdom of Dreams in Gurgaon is seen as many as an elitist, commercialised theatre space while other actors feel the pay they get there allows them to do other, more "soulful" theatre. Slam Out Loud, an arts group I worked with, is pushing the envelope further and taking theatre to children in government schools.

This varied mix of theatre groups, spaces and methods has been a welcome development in Delhi where theatre enthusiasts do not have to settle for a narrow definition of theatre but can choose to get involved in the kind of theatre that relates best to their individual interest and ideology.

First published in DailyO, 10 Nov 2018.

V for Vendetta: A film I do not tire of watching

As Guy Fawkes Night has been observed for Centuries because it is imbued with a timeless symbolism, so are certain films which become a part of you — and increasingly relevant — over time.

Like most films, V for Vendetta too is not able to perform highly enough to meet the expectations of its illustrious parent, the book with the same title by Alan Moore and David Lloyd. The occasional attempts to insert mush do not go well with the overall flavour of the story.

Having disclaimed that, it is safe to say that the 2005 movie made by James McTeigue and written by The Wachowskis holds a claim to distinctiveness. It is special enough to make me and my partner watch it when we wish to compensate for being away from our families on festivals.

The film doesn’t fail expectations at all. It is a high tension electric wire running through the audience’s minds and hearts as the anarchist revolutionary V, played by Hugo Weaving, orchestrates a series of events to expose the government, very much in the vein of the Paris revolution’s “No replastering, the structure is rotten.” It is art done elegantly, when a dystopian theme like this could have resulted in a lot of confusion and muck flying around. Its finesse does not gesticulate towards its beauty but rests in its place after it has been created, to be appreciated by those who will.

I believe it settled in some part of me because after I saw it, one of my delirious dreams, conceived during some sickness, was this:

A feminist revolution has achieved the complete eradication of sexism. I know the overthrow has been successful because some of the revolution graffiti is also sent to my new phone as a text message. The first line reads: “It may seem to you an occasion of bereavement but you’ll soon discover that it is one of joy.” I read the message and am immediately reassured that the efforts made by me and my compatriots to bring in equality of all genders have not been in vain.

It awakens unstirred parts of you: vestigial parts that haven’t been used in a while so you can’t immediately locate the vibrations. So you don’t want to talk about the movie after it’s over but close your eyes and wrap yourself around you and listen to those stirrings and eventually act upon them, when you are hit hard by the truth of these words uttered by Valerie, a character V fondly recalls in the film: “Our integrity sells for so little, but it is all we really have. It is the very last inch of us, but within that inch, we are free.” I know I want to live each day, no matter what the span of my life, when Valerie’s voice in the film gives credence to her persona in the book: “ . . . for three years, I had roses, and apologized to noone.”

Without pouncing upon you with some cliched declamation, it touches you in places you had not thought of for some time. You see it as a long-forgotten friend but don’t know how your present world will absorb it and so you quietly pull it into a corner and keep it hidden, to visit when no one is around. You know that it is not vendetta that V needs; he needs love and out of that love for him you want him to have his vendetta for isn’t he wonderful and shouldn’t he have everything he desires?

And of course, most of all, the film is about the fearlessness everyone wants, fear being the only real obstacle to living. I had been hugely impressed with the part where Natalie Portman is angry with V for making her go through torture, until he makes her realise that it had been to rid her of her fears. There is solace in the routine of torture because you seem to know more or less when it will be, even if it is every day, and can actually prepare yourself for it, and then be tortured and have even more time to prepare for the next day. This is not in the nature of a calamity, which catches you unawares and demands immediate attention. Isn’t it true that the only way to defeat our fears are to go ahead and meet them, to look them in the eye, rather than to keep looking over our backs all life?

A lot of fans have tried to guess at who the character of V “really” is, to speculate on his relations with other characters. I do not want to do that, to indulge in the “paradox of asking a masked man who he is”. Because I think what the film, and V, wanted us to know and believe was that V is all of us, and that we have it in us to be V if we can go through a fire and come out burnt but not broken.

First published in  thREAD, The Hindu, 8 Nov 2018.

Life as we knew it: How my three years in college shaped me into the person I am

I had around 74.6 per cent marks when I came to Delhi in 2003 to apply for college courses. 75 per cent was the cut-off at most places to even take the test (yes, I sure am glad I finished school as long back as I did and escaped the current day rat race young people get forced into). When in the sixth grade, I had been told there was a course where all you had to do was read novels. I had waited for years before I could get rid of maths and science in class 11 to opt for humanities. After that, I had been waiting to come to college and woo English Literature with single-minded devotion. I had secretly resolved to study literature through correspondence instead of choosing a subject I 'did not mind'.

As it turned out, I didn't have to go for a 'back up' option. Unlike in other colleges, the English department of Miranda House, Delhi University, allowed candidates to take their test if they had 65 per cent. When clearing the test got me both a college and a hostel seat there, I could tell that this was going to be a relationship where we understood each other.

I didn't find popular stereotypes about big city institutions to be true — either in the college or in the hostel — where your clothes or your accent were more important than what you did. And there was so much to do, apart from classes you didn't want to miss: Super(hyper?)active societies, protests, festivals, inter-college presentations, sports . . . everything laced with the camaraderie of brilliant women (peers, seniors, teachers and other staff members) who inspired and supported us. In my first few months in college, when someone asked me if I felt homesick, I realised I never got the time to. It was also my first time in a women’s only institution. But, if anything, I only felt more comfortable and confident here.

One of the most vibrant sites of this solidarity was my own department. There wasn't a better place to be. From the very beginning, we were taken seriously. So, I started taking myself seriously. We were called “ladies”, not girls. If we scored low on a test, there wasn't anger or scorn, there was concern. I remember one of my test papers where I hadn’t answered some questions and my teacher had written, “why”. I imagined her frown in worry over what I had done, and I wasn't wrong because that is what I witnessed when I met her to discuss the test. This one time I had missed a test, and when my teacher rescheduled it she said I was allowed to sit in an empty classroom and finish writing even without supervision because she trusted me enough not to cheat. I started doing more because my teachers believed I was capable of it. I spoke to my teachers about my problems and angst. We watched films together, in the college seminar room, in theatres, and their homes.

Some of us once bunked class for the heck of it, because it was one of those 'cool' things you had to check-off your list before you exited college. Later, we kept bugging other classmates to brief us about what had happened in those classes, hoping we hadn’t missed another discussion around Uppity Women of Medieval Times, or a heated debate on why there is no such thing as true love. But most importantly, we were pushed to think for ourselves, as one of our teachers said when advising us about our assignments, “If I want to know what the critic thinks, I’ll buy his book.”

Those years spoilt us because after we passed out we looked for similar spaces outside but couldn't find them. I cry each time I watch Mona Lisa Smile because the passion with which Julia Roberts keeps coming up with new interests and challenges for her students, going much beyond the syllabus and the classroom, makes me miss my own faculty. Because before college, we women were aware of gender discrimination. But our teachers gave us the tools to articulate that injustice, and the confidence to fight it.

Now when I go to college I walk with my stomach drawn in and my breath held. If I am taking a friend along and I point to a place where we used to rehearse or eat lunch, it leaves me feeling unsettled because I am not able to describe it properly. Because yes, that happened . . . but then, there was that too . . . and it came to mean that . . . and also something else . . . and how can I make someone else see all this or explain to them when they were not even there.

We carry our Miranda within us and if it won't have us back maybe we'll create some of our own. Something's gotta give.

First published in DailyO, 28 Oct 2018.

My grandfather’s English princess

Meghan Markle’s wedding this year seemed to be an inexhaustible source of articles — celebratory and controversial alike — in the media. But my own thoughts keep floating back to another member of the family whose birthday passed, relatively quietly, in the month of July.

At a book fair, hugging five coffee table books close to my chest, I teared up in gratitude and nostalgia, breathing in their sepia scent. The reason I could buy all of those hardbound editions, offered to me at a great discount, was because not many readers cared for these books on Princess Diana’s life and death — not as my grandfather, my Nana, did.

I had seen my father get such books from England. My grandfather would pore over them intently like a geographer traces the fine lines of a map, charting the route of his next expedition. As I hovered around the exclusive smell of the gloss finish, he would trace for me Diana’s lineage. I was less interested in the family tree and more interested in the affable charm of the princess, as radiant and widespread as the faraway foreign greens framed in our living room, simultaneously creating assurance and aspiration. Admiring Diana’s signature style, for once my short hair didn’t seem like such a bad thing. I became a blazer-skirt loyalist, influenced by her wardrobe, and royally ignored anyone who laughed at me for having worn the two-piece amidst lehengas and salwars on my uncle’s wedding.

Thus, Nana infected me with his penchant for all things British, to the extent that when I joined a publishing house that spelled ‘realise’ with an ‘-ize’, I had a hard time converting.

I wasn’t always a Anglophile, though. Back from college for a vacation at home, I was a hot beaker bubbling with my newfound knowledge. I smirked at Nana's colonial hangover and at what I called his obsession with the British royalty. He wasn’t bothered and I continued to send him similar books from Delhi. My little cousins groaned when I talked to them over the phone, grumbling that Nana would get hold of them and ask them to memorise the entire line of kings and queens.

I did not tell Nana that despite my critique of what my friend Elsie Bryant calls the “British Empire State of Mind”, I still held a secret fascination for the English teacup and other Old Blighty curios, Dorothy Parker’s little things that no one needs. It was just something I learnt to keep to myself, so it did not interfere with my engagement with proletarian politics.

When I was going to Brussels and told Nana that I also intended to visit Paris and Amsterdam, he asked me to forget all that and just go to London and buy myself a nice coat. I told him I couldn’t afford the visa fee for his favoured country, let alone the place. What I did try was introducing a Brit friend to Nana so that he could glean more information about the country and its famed family through my friend’s experiential learning. The conversation came to an awkward halt and Nana went back to his newspaper when he found it too much work to discern the friend’s accent.

The questions I used to pose to Nana as a child gradually made way for the interventions I had to make when he treated Nani, my grandmother, with his patriarchal high-handedness. He would talk of Manusmriti and its approval of gender hierarchies, partially to provoke me, and I would condemn it, so upset at times that I would leave the room before the argument could escalate.

In the middle of all this, Diana remained undisturbed between us, an inviolable presence that would make us rein in our egos. I did not want to read up on her too much — her fanpages apart — lest I should find something disturbing. I would tell myself that it was her and not monarchy I was rooting for, and that I need not do a critical examination because I wasn’t required to vote for her.

When Nana visited me this time and got engrossed in the books, I lingered for the pleasure of seeing him engage with something other than his usual worldly worries. After some time, he looked up, to say: “You know she was hurt by those close to her; she wasn’t happy.” I nodded quietly, choosing to refrain from talking about the complexity of relationships, and Nana did not express his well-known disapproval of divorce. For the sake of the princess, in that moment, we agreed to a truce.

First published in thREAD, The Hindu, 22 October 2018.

Living with and learning from a futuristic edition of myself

“I think I know what sort of person I am. But then I think, But this stranger will imagine me quite otherwise when he or she hears this or that to my credit, for instance that I have a position at the university: the fact that I have a position at the university will appear to mean that I must be the sort of person who has a position at the university.”

-Lydia Davis, ‘A Position at the University’

Inside me lives this woman: a finer, sharper, surer, more advanced version of myself that I aspire to. Her hair is cut short with jagged ends, trifling now and then with her ears. She might have cut it herself. She smokes with a blank stare and makes love with abandon. She opens her eyes and looks into mine whenever I am slighted: the times I end up feeling hurt while wanting to be nonchalant, and the occasions on which anger surges through me while I wish to remain indifferent.

When I am tired of feeling the room and it is not feeling me back, I go to my own room and shut the door softly behind me. She takes a walk, slamming the door of the house behind her, not to prove a point but because if she lingered to close the door softly, it would be too late already. I stay in, looking at the roads she is travelling; it is foggy. She is bringing in a glow through her cigarette end she has lit just by breathing. (In her released breath, there is taut decision; she does not sigh.) The nictoine doesn’t give her a kick; it’s there so she can practise inhale-exhale with a cylindrical object.

She wears lipstick, matt. I put some gloss; it’s an attempt to affirm myself, my resolve that I won’t get shamed for asserting through my body, would not treat it as incidental baggage. She finished asserting a while ago. Now she walks in, she occupies. She owns the land she walks on and is humbled by it; she couldn’t be bothered about property.

She has seen too much by now to keep focusing on her individual life zoomed in. She has chosen to be a cog because it keeps moving, keeps seeing from different places. Her wheel is wooden. It carries earth and is run down. She is not run out.

She loves with her mouth full and protects with a vengeance. I do too, till I learn to practise caution with passion, fairness with loyalty. Her throat is lined with husk and she sings with a headtilt and closed eyes. She does not anticipate applause/criticism. Her heart is racing. She is running to catch up with the song and become it. I listen to her and sway. I don’t want to answer questions so I do it when people are moving to other rhythms of their choice, when the room has sanctioned movement.

In my dreams I am scaling up fortresses to escape my assailants. She goes out and stands in the middle of the road and dares them to come. If they do, she looks them in the eye. They want to crumble her, they might, but she pierces them clean. There is no win or defeat. Shit happens, it doesn’t. She is there. She is always there. She doesn’t run away from, she doesn’t run towards, she runs when she wants to excite herself.

Sometimes I withdraw. I let everyone see her. Then she laughs with the guests, or doesn’t. But people feel safe anyway because she does, secure and whole in herself. I feel envy on some days but she couldn’t care less. Parties aren’t her thing. Too much unorganised action.

She looks for lava and black holes and epicentres of seismic zones. She bites her lips and makes them bleed and keeps her mouth slightly open. She is not suicidal, or homicidal. She wants all to live and grow in her and to still keep standing. If a shrapnel hated her eye and her eyeball popped out she would carry it in her hand and walk through the fire and smoke and take it to someone who could stitch it back. She knows when to ask for help. She does it rightfully and earns respect for it. She does the same for others, offering help. Because what else is there to do, when you know you are but a dot and would rather be joined with the others, and not be a bot? The next day she looks at her burns and wonders if nature can heal her or if her animistic gods annoyingly witness these moments as her laziness, and scowl.

Where am I? Where was I? I don’t know because I was too busy looking at her.

She goes places, I go to different ones. We don’t know if we want our paths to be one. We are sure we want them to cross. We go and get the same tattoo.

First published in thREAD, The Hindu, 1 September 2018.