Hysteria

Grandmother isn’t friends with English.
Yet she said while growing up she had heard
That when women study too much
They get “hysteria.”

She was worried for me.

Sometime between her limited, till-grade-five, formal education
And her infinite informal education
They had made sure to teach her, in more than one language,
The terms for illnesses women can contract
If they seek to expand.

First published in The Sunlight Press, 20 Feb 2019.

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.

Agatha Christie’s unassuming sleuths: How Agatha Christie’s leads broke the stereotypes around detective heroes

Sherlock Holmes, as sired by Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle, is a character that is terse, dashing, and looks as competent as he is. His aide, the poor Dr Watson, has difficulty getting past the “elementary” with him. Holmes seems to rely upon little else other than mysteries to provide him the joie de vivre of life.

With this bowl of curd hung tight in the background, Agatha Christie enters the detective novel scene and starts stirring things up. Her Belgian egghead sleuth Hercule Poirot doesn’t inspire face-value confidence in his clientele. The local sheriff is prone to shooting himself when he spots Poirot’s waxed moustache twitch at the scent of evidence invisible to the cops’ naked eyes. Hercule is as particular about his egg as about his tie, and is allergic to asymmetry. Other characters take these apparent peculiarities as a mark of Poirot being out of focus, when he is actually the precise opposite. He believes in maintaining the order of things, and is greatly perturbed when a crime sets the world in disarray. With his clear goal of restoring this lost order, he proceeds through backward design and succeeds in shining the spotlight on the wrongs done and the culprit behind it.

Christie achieves a brilliant stroke in drawing Poirot’s character, because with it she proves that the hero is the chap with the “little grey cells”, not the fine grey suit. This immediately makes him more relatable to readers, makes him more human.

Poirot isn’t the only sketch, which makes look pale detectives to have come before him. Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie is also the genius behind Jane Marple, in many ways an even more radical conception than that of Poirot. A frail, old, lady is not someone a person usually imagines when thinking of a nimble private eye. Christie knows this and dear Miss Marple unapologetically exploits this typecasting to her advantage. Looking for clues, she wanders into bedrooms and apologises for being lost when someone spots her. People around her expect her to gossip because she is a woman, and she doesn’t let them suspect she is onto something as she lures them with her wide eyed wonder into sharing confidences and rumours.

Tommy and Tuppence, two young investigators also produced by the author, rely on wits and not weapons. They are fallible enough to have started their careers with blackmailing.

All of these characters devised by Christie are trained by her not just to conduct a mechanised unravelling of the case but to probe into the very heart of human condition. Parker Pyne, the hero of some of her novels, “investigates” but calls himself a “heart specialist”. His advertisement is an advisory: “Are you happy? If not, consult Parker Pyne.” In some of the books, the person who decodes the mystery is not a detective at all.

Christie’s characters and their methods tell us that heroes are not extraordinary in themselves but become heroes because of what they are able to make of the ordinary with their wit, presence of mind and understanding of human nature. Neither are villains manifestations of evil descended upon the earth, which is why the author writes: “There is too much tendency to attribute to God the evils that man does of his own free will.” Christie shows us our potential and our possibilities through her detectives, and warns us against some of our frailties and foibles through her villains. She reminds us that it is we who make the choice each time, oftentimes by a narrow margin.

First published in Distinguished Magazine, Mar 2018.