Patricia Lockwood is quite brilliant (she didn't even go to college because she had a strange dad who killed her chances by not saving money for his kids' college education). that's her below, writing about the sexual misconduct cover-ups in churches.

"All my life I have overheard, all my life I have listened to what people will let slip when they think you are part of their we. A we is so powerful. It is the most corrupt and formidable institution on earth. Its hands are full of the crispest and most persuasive currency. Its mouth is full of received, repeating language. The we closes its ranks to protect the space inside it, where the air is different. It does not protect people. It protects its own shape.

You have belonged to many of them. So have I. The church was one of mine - it was my family. The story of a family is always a story of complicity. It's about not being able to choose the secrets you've been let in on. The question, for someone who was raised in a closed circle and then leaves it, is what is the us, and what is the them, and how do you ever move from one to the other?

In the not-so-far future, Bishop Finn will be forced to resign by Pope Francis, who is proving to be a figure worthy of some study. My father will publish a letter of staunch support in the church bulletin, suggesting that the bishop was being persecuted for his conservative beliefs, that in fact he had committed no crime at all, and that the prosecutor in his case was a mercenary with "strong ties to the abortion industry." I will be so disheartened by this that I can barely speak to him or meet his eyes for weeks. Though later he will tell my mother, with perhaps the first stirrings of doubt, "I'm beginning to think any one of them would have done it. That the position is more powerful than the man."

i am lonely, conceited, proud, and a self-made failure. what do I do now?

it cannot be a coincidence. a lot of my last few posts have been about reading, the act of it, the process of identifying with the author and with the character, the religion of it, loyalty to it, about how mostly I've been left alone to love it. etc. etc. for the first time in my life also, the words I've been reading have been coming from people as old as me, almost, round about. this is the age when geniuses begin to shine, have been noticed, been known and start to live upto their introductory fame, and often to overtake that. one of the last few writers I got impressed by - and then felt disappointed by because all her books are like that, beginning with a lot of excited promises, then they pause midway somewhere, kinda lose what they were trying to do and then become little shadows of themselves and wither into some endings - got her PhD the same year that I did, went on a road trip through a similar route that I did (a little before in time than me but hey I didn't know that then), got pulled over and was scared by it in Arizona somewhat like I was. and now this writer I'm reading and am totally in love with right now is guess how old?! just about two months older than me. its not a coincidence, its a sign. but some signs die out, repeatedly, stopping short of manifesting what they portend.

one thing is clear. I will die with an unfinished book on my kindle, in my hands, near my pillow, or wherever or on whatever futuristic device people will be reading in those years. I will die with some future plan of travel, if my death still has an element of surprise in it for me; if not I might die while traveling if I plan it. but in saying this I'm assuming Sartre was right and that my life then - the last few moments of it - will be much like my life now. its funny when I was a young adolescent I once told an aunt that she would find me more than 10 years later still wearing my favorite pair of tights and t-shirt that I was in then. when I was young(er) I believed more that I was an old soul, and as I am increasingly addressed as 'aunty' by kids playing on the road, I've stopped asserting that to myself. I don't even know when I threw those tights and if they had even earned it with any holes in them. many things in fact get trashed now because my marriage is too old to count anymore, and one's husband has to see too much of the things one loves too much. at some point you have to sacrifice one love for another.

about that by the way. I don't remember too many people writing this in too many books but the tenderness in one's marriage grows with the waistline of the husband even though occasions of sex (or the desire for it, or is it quite the contrary and age and this country kill desire by making it ludicrous when there's more urgent stuff always to take care of) dwindle, and a rubbing of cheeks and a peck on the ear feel lazily satiating. and yet I want to share more and more with him. so much so that I have become a running commentary on our surroundings, our friends, his friends, our family, the movies (and other things) we watch, don't watch, pretend to watch, and are forced to watch for lack of choice. I have become like my mother but only in the volume of talk that comes out of me. the nature of it is thankfully different. in short, I am my version of my mother. and I don't even have enough lived life and experienced suffering to my claim. not even the accidental or planned creation of new life for my entertainment that grows out of its purpose, and therefore not even the torment at its (his or her) hands. all that I have gifted myself is a pointless continuous rebellion without a goal and in the process lots of lost friends and earned detesters. and I do have enough to be ashamed of. time to write that book. only if I can muster the guts to come out clean. before I'm much older than the people I read.

okay, buckle up. its time to get some discipline in life and finally grow up. somehow it took this month of travel back in amreeka for this to dawn on me, and not the whole of the year gone by in which it now seems I've aged a million years.

this really needs putting down on paper.

I recently turned 36 (I often forget what age I am, not because I'm already suffering from a degenerative mind but because the calculation of years doesn't agree with my intuitive feeling of age and therefore I often let my mind mislead me. in that too, I'm not special), and hubby and me have been traveling for almost 3 weeks now, combining summer work and visiting family and hiking and driving and all the things we miss in the place we now live. as a result, for the first time in 36 years I had the feeling of being homeless: I said bye to him cause we were flying to different destinations out of different terminals at the airport today, and I worked my way to my gate. on getting there I sat down to adjust and pocket all important things in my hands and well just to think about how to spend the next few hours of waiting. and as soon as my bum touched the seat, I felt a lil afraid, a lil lost, a lil lonely. of course I blamed the desi lifestyle for it, the getting used to having people around you all the time such that one cannot spend time alone at all. but then it wasn't just loneliness; I am now a lil also fatigued and as with any longterm travel I suddenly yearned to go home. that was soon followed by a questioning - where is home? I don't know. for the first time in my life there is no place I think of when I yearn to go home, and its not because I'm transitioning or 'shifting' or 'moving' from one home to another.

I wasn't alone in this apparently. he kept forgetting and thinking that he was flying back home, to DC, and had to keep reminding himself that he wasn't.

the one thing, the only thing, that I appreciate, been given time to live in Delhi in these days, is feeling part of the social upheaval and of the huge female emancipation that is going on in India right now. the focus on women in Indian movies, the emphasis on their point of view, on their desires, their pleasures, their sexuality, their freedoms, their refusal (and slow societal acceptance of this) of the social roles they had so far been forced into.

there are many symptoms of this. women are much better accepted in social outdoor spaces today than they were when I lived in this country the last time. men actually maintain their physical distance now and keep their eyes to themselves, and seem to be less lecherous than I remember them being (hubby says this is a function of my age or rather my aging body). women can wear what they want and men are getting used to it. single women and divorced women are more common today than before, and families are so much more okay with that. women refuse to have kids if they don't see themselves fitting that role, and with this although people still keep "helping and advising" against it, their talk is becoming more futile (and they realize that) and is being met with more opposition. and of course, household chores are being so much better shared between the sexes, and most important of all, there is much less co-habiting with in-laws in younger married couples' lives. of course, I'm only talking about the upper strata of urban society, but just that is a huge improvement.

and bad as they are, Indian movies are getting better, more realistic, sometimes overdoing it a lil to tip the scales away from the earlier bias. but still worth it all. lust stories latest of them all. but even veere di wedding. although I still don't understand why the objectionable part in the movie for some of the audience was a woman masturbating on screen; it should instead have been her being embarrassed about it enough to be blackmailed for it and also for considering it an act of "cheating on her partner". really?!! it will probably take India some more time to understand how natural masturbation is.

its been 2/3rds of a year us having moved back to India. some of what people told us: "your life is over, you won't be able to travel like this there" has come true; some of what we were afraid of has splashed over the top of our expectations and bewildered us, broke us out in sweat, and left us literally gasping with our tongues hanging out like dogs. I notice I have written a lot less here during all of this, precisely because. and now Tony is dead, killed himself (?) and Tony used to write regularly. most people are stunned to hear of his suicide because they thought he had it all; why did he want an escape from the dream life. I am saddened because I thought he had figured it all; what then did he fail to come to terms with. there's this video on youtube (yes, we continue to watch more than a few of those almost everyday, even now) where he talks about going into a deep depression for days because of a bad hamburger. if I had seen that before, I'd have thought he was kidding around. but now, what do you say to that now? in the same video he talks about being really affected (saddened) by a quote by Orwell: "a human being is like a tube to stuff food into...". the full quote from Goodreads is below.

“A human being is primarily a bag for putting food into; the other functions and faculties may be more godlike, but in point of time they come afterwards. A man dies and is buried, and all his words and actions are forgotten, but the food he has eaten lives after him in the sound or rotten bones of his children. I think it could be plausibly argued that changes of diet are more important than changes of dynasty or even of religion....Yet it is curious how seldom the all-importance of food is recognized. You see statues everywhere to politicians, poets, bishops, but none to cooks or bacon-curers or market gardeners.”

apparently this struck a nerve with Bourdain because he ate his way through the world for a living - he stuffed food into himself. Ironically, Tony was one rare chef and food enthusiast who provides an answer to what Orwell finds curious: Tony is one rare foodie who has become a 'statue', and yet one whose words and actions will be remembered long after his burial. what's sad then is that Tony took this quote and derived some sense of futility out of it, some sense of being an inanimate, useless, food stuffing, tube. when he was in fact the polar opposite of that. what was remarkable about Tony was not his understanding and appreciation of good food, but his curiosity of why and how that food, and by who. his ultimate interest always were the people. and he possessed (or curated) such 'extreme empathy' (new yorker's words) for people all around the world, of all shapes and colors and ideologies, that in that he was almost super human. much higher above than all the food he ever ate. I admired him for that. I felt like he and Michael Palin were/are similar in that, to some extent.

Tony was a cancerian by the way, a few days (and many years) before my birthday. and he used to say "be humble".

my country is like gaol

desperately needed some dose of idealism. it was high time I read Nehru. this below, from the pages of 'An Autobiography':

"Fortunately almost everybody in that barrack was known to me, and there were many friends. But the utter want of privacy, all day and night, became more and more difficult to endure. Always the same crowd looking on, the same petty annoyances and irritations, and no escape from them to a quiet nook. We bathed in public and washed our clothes in public, and ran round and round the barrack for exercise, and talked and argued till we had largely exhausted each other's capacity for intelligent conversation. It was the dull side of family life, magnified a hundred-fold, with few of its graces and compensations, and all this among people of all kinds and tastes. It was a great nervous strain for all of us, and often I yearned for solitude. In later years I was to have enough of this solitude and privacy in prison, when for months I would see no one except an occasional gaol official. Again I lived in a state of nervous tension, but this time I longed for suitable company. I though then sometimes, almost with envy, of my crowded existence in the Lucknow District Gaol in 1922, and yet I knew well enough that of the two I preferred the solitude, provided at least that I could read and write. "

infidel preferences

can having choice reverse preference? I hadn't realized the fading of my love for India till my choice of flying out was taken away. maybe in the same way, people from other countries find India romantic because they can come and go when they want.

is this similar to marriage? do people feel chained by marriage, and is that in itself the cause that they unravel? theoretically, marriage shouldn't change anything though, togetherness should always be preferential, optional. walking out is open.

but borders have visas. and passports. and nationalities. and love doesn't decide any of these.

...

on a different note: I never was a fan of Konkona Sen Sharma, other than in the movie Mr. and Mrs. Iyer (she is also good in the recent Lipstick Under MY Burkha). there was something about her in most other movies which felt overdone. I remember I once shared a flight with her, and was completely unimpressed by the excitement in the air (pun intended). then recently I saw her directorial debut. my mind was blown. I think she found her purpose in life. she was born to bring that story to life on the screen, the story of Shutu, Mimi, Tani, Vikram, and the Bakshis. if she died now, she shouldn't feel sad. but I guess she should live on some more. after all it looks like she has just become herself (you can kinda see that in the way she dresses too, as if she wears clothes only that resemble her skin her soul). but yes, she can now never create anything anymore and her life would be accounted for.

I'm still searching, I'm still trying different garbs. nothing seems to fit.

coming back though, regardless of how brilliant her movie is, it depresses me, not because of the tragedy in it, but because it spells out yet one more aspect, one more thing about India(ns) that I hate and that hurts me.

strangely, few people I know who saw the movie, seemed to have understood the last scene. and I guess none of us would have got it if she hadn't revealed it in the first scene. so the movie works better if you're streaming it or watching it such that you can go back to the first scene after the last. if the big screen is where you saw it, the likelihood is greater you will misunderstand, cos then you will think you know, misled by a combination of your memory and your self pity. cos each of us was Shutu at some point. Konkona too. Vikram too. but Shutu cannot grow up alone, if Vikram doesn't, if Mimi doesn't, if Tani doesn't. one cannot drive safely on Indian roads unless everyone does. but we in India don't learn how to grow up. I guess it says something about the self pity in our lives that we feel good with aggression behind the wheels.

rebirth

I'm back here, after ranting aimlessly and complaining endlessly about a sudden turn of events (and location) in my life. with an epiphany of sorts. I don't have to be here. and I don't have to be a star either. I can just be. even within my average (lack of) achievements and my average constraints, I can still choose, quite a lot. and I can still do, quite a lot.

as I understand myself better, and this world, as I grow older, many things become clearer.
1. It never makes sense to do something for the sake of doing something, despite what they tell you.
2. All those "someday I will ... " , what day are they waiting for? Don't expect life and time to be patient with you.
3. Sometimes you have to do what you have to do, even if just to prove you to yourself. But you must have patience with life.
Do (1) and (3) seemingly contradict each other? Or do (2) and (3) do so? But if they do, then they must only for those who don't really understand, and that shouldn't stop you from writing them.

some words emerge out of the chaos between what I've been taught and told, and what I've managed to forget and unearth. privilege. access. sharing. time. effect.

there are many trade-offs in life. but one will always be in some form, in many different scenarios, that to change yourself or not. some vices are dear, and would alter one's character too much. what is the story one wants to leave behind, even if one leaves no one to remember.

so I was wrong. some years ago when I was questioning the boundaries of a life, as separate from those of the lives that produced it. there is a dividing line, I think I understand better now... every individual life has its own inherited genome, a mixture from those of it's parents. even before the umbilical cord is cut, the child is a person different from it's mother. the more I learn, the cooler it all gets. fascinating really.

fame, popularity, impact, influence, and then memory.

the first two are not perfectly correlated with the latter two. and of course, memory is fallible. and trends.

its amazing how many important people were barely known for what they were doing while they were alive. their works went ignored or forgotten until after their deaths. and posthumously they become legends.

and their stories of the stories they unraveled are brought to you and me across eons by some third person. inherited tales.

I'm reading a fascinating book
https://www.amazon.com/Gene-Intimate-History-Siddhartha-Mukherjee/dp/147673352X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1510146369&sr=8-1&keywords=the+gene

I've almost just begun, so its too early to attempt anything like a review. but I'm glued, even in a yellow green auto in delhi's poisonous (so-claimed) november air; it keeps me reading on my kindle, and i smile while i take in the interwoven stories, the images created of the people who brought meaning to the idea of heredity. and i shuffle through the contents of my bag because i must write down some words from it. in a scribbly scrawly hand as i jump over potholes and careen dangerously close to other honking unruly automobiles...

"one's imagination must fill very wide blanks" - Charles Darwin

"how small a thought it takes to fill a whole life" - Ludwig Wittgenstein

... inspiration. perspective. meaning in the trivial. i look at people around me. what fills their lives? as they seem oblivious to the question.

photopost

the weather. the poor. the curious neighbors. potholes. social inequalities. family overload. some things cannot be clicked. reverse culture shock.

if change is healthy, how and why do you unravel growth?

I was very sweet to Peter, from Bangalore just now. I used to get annoyed when my calls as a customer were answered by a desi voice affecting an accent and missing the nuances in my problem because of a lack of translation of context. but today I smiled, was patient with him, overlooked his difficulty in understanding my address, put myself in his shoes for a moment, put myself in Bangalore's traffic for a minute and gave him a concession for that. Indians deserve a break if they have to deal with other Indians every waking moment of their daily lives.

but no, I wasn't being nice. If you're leaving a place, or have left and don't plan on coming back, you can be honest and brutal with what you think of it and of them. but now I'll be at their mercy again. I have been disenfranchised.

is there a word, an emotion, that implies wanting to flee one's country because one cannot stand one's people.

there are two kinds of Indians in America. those who are just people, like people from any other country, and those who underline their Indian-ness.

I met a nine-yr-old American born of Indian parents, whose idea of American food was a Subway sandwich. she was ignorant even to the name 'Subway' while she tried explaining why she loved Indian food because the alternative - American food - was too bland for her. I asked her what American food she was talking about, "was it a pizza, a burger?". She was blank on that and her parent had to fill that in for me. I haven't been able to get that conversation out of my mind.

its almost like she was a different person, she who drove my car across this country. bits of what she saw come back now and then, when I close my eyes, or look at the pictures. or like last night when I was talking in my dream to him, about how I would take him across the lands in four more days.

I was she who panicked and cried and made an SOS call to him, believing it was beyond her just the night before the second leg of travel.

its difficult to be contained in this lil apartment after spending days out on the road under the vast skies.

I used to live there nearly 30 yrs ago. and was skyping with my parents today, while they visited the place. and the people. everything seems to have fossilized in that place. but of course so much time has passed. most of those same people, I used to know them so well then, they were the bulk of the world I knew in those yrs. now some have passed away, some others moved like I have, and those that stayed have grown older, and have grown branches - families of their own, kids who remind me of my childhood, of how full of hope, and how ignorant childhood in small town India is. his/her life can go anywhere from there, or can remain there. anything is possible. makes you wonder, childhood is so full of expectations, those small playful moments, in fact, waiting, biding time, choosing one of the many paths of life.

I've been very curious. asking my parents about how things are there. asking my sister, who went on a much shorter visit, and is now back home, her home, in a city which itself reeks of my past. feels a level lower than where I am now. and this place that I'm talking about, feels further removed, a lower level still. like in video games, you pass a level never to go back. unless you die out and have to re-start, all over again. going back is defeat, in a strange never-mentioned way. no one proclaimed it be so. but your heart tells you that.

but I am defeated. and maybe in this defeat is a cloaked blessing.

I wish, in ridding myself of all my grime, I hadn't come away loathing my origins. I wish I could still connect. cos there are some I left behind I would want to care about. I carry that guilt. without knowing how I could have done it differently. yes, I would have betrayed and ignored again, if it came to it. don't demand too much from me, whether you are a place or a people; I often am blind to it, and when I see I rudely refuse. I was taught to be self sufficient, although I have myself been saved and rescued many times. but I ditch any call for help, always finding the sound of it a burden or a taken-for-granted-ness. I am not apologizing, I wish I were.

the past. was it those stone floors and pillars. those corridors where we invented, mimicked, told tales, grew taller, ran about, learned how to use our legs. or was it the people. those who died. and those who are alive, for god knows how much longer. cycles. memory. complaints, of course complaints. why wasn't everything perfect. if only they had done this or not done that. blaming circumstances, and the people, for what I know was (is) my lack of generosity, my lack of gratitude. I was never a generous person, was never grateful. but I do want to go back. to those last words exchanged. where we left a conversation, it must have grown so much, what does it say now? what and who are you? are you happy? do you hope? do you want to see all that I have? do you want to show me and share with me what I missed? before one of us dies? I thought it was sacrilege your confidence then, in this world being godless. I thought it was over-confidence your sacrilege then. do you want to sit down and listen to mine now? do you agree, or have you changed?

sometime later this year, it will be 10 yrs since I created this blog and started scrawling stuff here for posterity. or did I do it to enable imagining myself as a writer, to start off a quiet dream? even I cannot answer that anymore, I don't remember. probably both. probably more the latter.

but over time its taken on quite a different role, much of the time. its become my space to argue with myself, to spell things out to myself. myself. myself.

that's probably also cos I lost all my audience. or since then. cos one thing is for sure, although I self elevate myself to being this talented exceptional person in my head, I am very shy about exhibition. this blog gave me the cover of anonymity that I needed to experiment with showing the world what I wrote or drew. of course, I had to tell that one person then. he was the only one who knew I was writing here. and then I let one more person in - to boast while still feeling shy? I don't know. maybe also cos I was reading hers then and I felt it was unfair this one-sided sharing of secrets. and then another person found out, a lil by accident. but that was it. that stopped there. and anyone else who came here was a stranger to me outside of these white pages. a couple of them became regulars too. but now, now they have all gone. left me here alone, to dig in deeper into myself, to self-censure, to self-pity, to self-aggrandizement; and also to why I called this 'tree house' in the first place - to this secret hiding hole of mine, from where I could shit down onto the world when I so wanted to. without being seen.

I've always been drawn to writers using the people in their lives for their stories. also comedians. it smelt of betrayal, of cowardice, and yet strangely was the bravest thing I could never do. not unless under cover.

for starters, how do I ever write about the little moments of embarrassment my people cause me time and again. of moments when I have steered away or have wished to disown my loved ones, simply because I was embarrassed by their small behavioral oddities. or by their large gaping weaknesses.

nah, I still can't do it.

there's this hard topic to try writing about - self-assessment. I used to think I had some talent with moving my pencil to capture an image. copied images; from photos or life or others' drawings.

this last weekend I saw a lot of skilled people's works. at an outing with them. my sketch was hardly visible, almost childish, not worth looking at, in comparison. since that day I've been turning the pages of my old sketchbooks, wondering if I never had anything.

how does one know? how can one tell?

was I lying to myself all these years? or am I trying to fit myself into the medium of others?

even now I do like my old sketches... and even some of my newer ones. is it just my outdoor stuff that's not good? or was it just this weekend?

how can one tell? esp. when friends and family feign appreciation. when one's own assessment is so biased.

the same in many ways, goes for my aspiring-academic work as well. and maybe also for my writings here, on this very blog.

like a friend used the words 'subjective' and 'objective' to describe academic criticism.

how does one tell?

I have ignored you, my blog. and I just read two lines of some memoir-like-writing that gave me a sudden strong pang of nostalgia for my own. life happened while I was away.

its creepy how signs and symbols exist in my life. an out of nowhere flashback comes, only as a precursor to another end. I kept telling myself not to wish for something. to fear the wish coming true. and here it is. no more the certainty that was making me complacent. here I go, all over again. wish I had made this choice rather than be blown again.

I wonder why everyone else is so worried about my lost job. guess, I really was expecting this, despite appearing not to, cos people didn't think it would happen. like the Hiccam's dictum, or maybe just the occam's razor. sometimes two opposites can describe a situation, cos you don't know which side you were on.

when I was younger, my friendships and niceness would wear off in a place with time, such that by the time it was time to leave I was more than relieved; almost dying to go. but the last few places I have left, I either never warmed up to them at all, or didn't want to leave. unlike all that, here, socially and personally, I was just warming up. professionally, I think I was gathering dust. but what now?

some people become symbols after they are no more. some couples do too; the idea of each fighting and loving the idea of the other. merging and standing out with the other. multiple symbols, co-intersecting, bouncing off.

Plath and Hughes are one example.

Kahlo and Rivera another.

ironically, for both, the woman's memory, her symbolism, somewhat overshadows the man's. (aside: we have been made to believe there are two genders in humans; we are wrong; there are at least three and maybe a spectrum).

ironically also, Plath and Kahlo are somewhat opposites of each other. Plath alive in body but tragically seeking and feeling death in her mind; Kahlo so tragically half-dead and propped up in body but so ambitious and craving to fly in her dreams.

tragic. both symbols of feminism.

Kahlo's story made me want to cry. her stoicism, her detailed efforts at hiding her disabilities alongwith her frankness about her nude body, her exasperated fretting and hopeless despair on her inability to procreate. Frida and Rivera's story hits you with a harsh reminder of the smallness of us all, our vulnerabilities, our being at the mercy of nature and of our mistakes (which is nature again), of our wholesome imperfections, of erring and forgiving, of the hopelessness of fidelity, of the desire and the passion to live and to create, and of course of the beauty of curiosity and acceptance and of a continuous chiseling away at ourselves; because we each leave at least one sculpture in this world - that of ourselves and the symbols we will be used for, if ever remembered.



notes: Kahlo painted from a wheelchair, and sometimes lying down on bed with an easel that propped up above her.
Rivera had an affair with her sister, friend, and mentor.
They divorced for a year, only to remarry again.
My mood right now also influenced by the raw grief in this:
http://www.npr.org/2017/03/16/520013269/first-listen-mount-eerie-a-crow-looked-at-me