A Requiem for a Song Bird

This is a piece I wrote in a graduate-level public health course in February 2017.


I have been thinking a lot about George Michael recently. He died alone on Christmas Day in his home just outside of London (“George Michael,” 2016). His body is still with the police (“George Michael,” 2017). They determined that he died of heart failure and that it was not suspicious, but they are still conducting additional tests (Reed, 2016). I don’t know what they are looking for, but I have a feeling it may have to do with substance abuse. He was only 53 years old (Pareles, 2016).

My earliest memories are of one of my older brothers dancing and singing in front of the television to George Michael’s Wham! era music videos. This was in the early 1980s when the singer was still a teenager. He went on to become one of the most famous (and stylish!) singers in the world. I genuinely loved his voice and spent many years singing along to his recordings. Since the late 1990s, however, he became known less for his music than for his run-ins with the law. He was arrested for a “lewd act” in a male public bathroom in Beverly Hills in 1998 and subsequently came out as a gay man (Lyttle, 1998). In 2010, he spent four weeks in prison for crashing his car into a shop while under the influence (Swash, 2010). In the decade before his death, he became reclusive and suffered a series of health problems, particularly an episode that resulted in hospitalization and near death (Walker, 2011).

George Michael was one of the most sought-after sex symbols of his generation. He struggled with his sexuality, however, and hid it under a veil of super-charged heterosexuality. He began to seek out sex with strangers while still in his teens (Newman, 2016), and as an adult, wallowed in depression during the AIDS epidemic in which he lost a much-loved secret boyfriend (Moore, 2016). In his words, he suffered from “grief and self-abuse” for most of his life (Newman, 2016).

So I found it interesting to read a 2015 report on the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) website about the incidence of substance abuse and mental illness in sexual minorities (Medley et al, 2015). This was the first time they used sexuality as a variable in examining these issues (“SAMHSA report,” 2016). According to the report (Medley et al, 2015), sexual minorities are more likely than those in the sexual majority to use illicit drugs, smoke cigarettes, and drink alcohol. Further, they are more likely to have substance abuse disorders and mental illnesses, and according to other material on the website, also more likely to experience issues such as heart disease, cancer, and even violence (“Top health issues,” 2012). Given how I feel like I am grieving for George Michael, this hurt.

I was also reminded of a project I am working on with a professor in my department about gay athletes in the United States. The project uses interviews to gather data, and I have heard one elderly gay athlete talk about how some closeted gay men use drugs like amyl nitrate in order to get through having sex with a woman. It’s upsetting – it’s not fair to have to live like that. As if life isn’t difficult enough.

I am currently taking a gender studies course, and I’m learning about the androcentric nature of science and society. Also, in this public health course, we have learned that the way our society is organized is bad for some people’s health (California Newsreel, 2014). With researchers now paying attention to the role of sexuality in health, they may find that our heteronormative institutions have been setting up sexual minorities to die early and to have a poor quality of life until then. I feel that the slides on racism that we saw earlier in the semester could help us understand how that happens (Jones, 2000). SAMHSA even has a dedicated page for LGBT health on its website (“Behavioral Health Equity,” 2016).

George Michael, however, is still dead. That will not change no matter how much I want him to be alive and out in the world somewhere. It hurts, and I’m surprised by how much. I mean, I’m a media scholar, and I understand that people can form bonds with other people in the media, both real and fictitious. That probably happened with me somewhere over the years. My earliest memories of him are of a young, fashionable song bird, and really, all I ever wanted for him was to enjoy his life and be happy, the way I would wish for an older sibling, a cool uncle, or my own child. Maybe the way our society is set up made that impossible for him. Maybe all it could offer someone of his sexual orientation was a path of substance abuse and mental illness. It could have been different. And we will never know.

Rest in peace, dear, dear friend. I’m so sorry that I could not take care of you.

References

Behavioral Health Equity: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) (2016, November 9). Retrieved from https://www.samhsa.gov/behavioral-health-equity/lgbt

California Newsreel. (2014, October 22). UNNATURAL CAUSES – Trailer. [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXBkOYMCAro&list=PLayHb3ehfKbfxdMAmIkFm2wlRikR4Ka6f

George Michael: Coroner yet to release singer’s body a month after his death. (2017, January 28). news.com.au. Retrieved from http://www.news.com.au/entertainment/celebrity-life/george-michael-coroner-yet-to-release-singers-body-a-month-after-his-death/news-story/c03ca7a2fb727c2e3976c7d481ac90ec

George Michael: Pop superstar dies at 53. (2016, December 26). BBC. Retrieved from http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-38432862

Jones, C. (2000). The impacts of racism on health [PowerPoint slides]. Harvard School of Public Health. Retrieved from https://blackboard.sc.edu/courses/1/PUBH700-J50-SPRING-2017/content/_10122663_1/camara%20jones.ppt

Lyttle, J. (1998, April 8). George Michael arrested over `lewd act'. The Independent. Retrieved from http://www.independent.co.uk/news/george-michael-arrested-over-lewd-act-1155246.html

Medley, G., Lipari, R. N., Bose, J., Cribb, D. S., Kroutil, L. A., & McHenry, G. (2016). Sexual orientation and estimates of adult substance use and mental health: Results from the 2015 national survey on drug use and health. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Retrieved from https://www.samhsa.gov/data/sites/default/files/NSDUH-SexualOrientation-2015/NSDUH-SexualOrientation-2015/NSDUH-SexualOrientation-2015.pdf

Moore, J. (2016, December 26). GQ. Retrieved from http://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/george-michael-interview

Newman, V. (2016, December 26). Sex, drugs and self-destruction: The dark side of George Michael he couldn't fight. Mirror. Retrieved from http://www.mirror.co.uk/3am/celebrity-news/sex-drugs-self-destruction-dark-9515044

Pareles, J. (December 25, 2016). George Michael, pop superstar, is dead at 53. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/25/arts/music/george-michael-dead.html?_r=0

Reed, R. (2016, December 30). Autopsy: George Michael's Cause of Death 'Inconclusive'. Rolling Stone. Retrieved from http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/autopsy-george-michaels-cause-of-death-inconclusive-w458442

SAMHSA report shows higher rates of substance use and mental illness among sexual minority adults. (2016, October 11). Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Retrieved from https://www.samhsa.gov/newsroom/press-announcements/201610110100

Swash, R. (2010, July 6). George Michael arrested after crashing car into shop. Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/music/2010/jul/06/george-michael-arrested

Top health issues for LGBT populations [PowerPoint slides]. (2012). Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Retrieved from http://store.samhsa.gov/shin/content//SMA12-4684/SMA12-4684.ppt

Walker, P. (2011, December 23). George Michael gives tearful account of near-death pneumonia ordeal. Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/dec/23/george-michael-reveals-pneumonia-ordeal

Nuzhat and Khattu See The World

We were on our way to the airport for that flight back to Muscat. I was in my 20s, a young woman who had been numb for a few years, weakened from the onslaught of womanhood, a shadow of the unrestrained child I used to be, somehow always in a haze, always elegant and struggling to conceal the rest.

The clunky taxi, smelling like petrol and grease like everything else in industrial Lucknow, made a chaotic stop by a dusty gali. My brother, mother and I got out and met a gaunt dusty man at the entrance. Pigs, an unusual sight in the part of Lucknow I knew, snorted and squealed at what I learned was the entrance of the Muslim cemetery. My heart contracted with the indignity – didn’t this bother anyone else? Maybe the world was too tired by now. I didn’t let anyone know. No one would want to hear me.

The caretaker led us through what looked like a large field, dusty and barren with pebbles and stones scattered throughout. Suddenly we stopped, and someone pointed to the ground in front of me. Nuzhat Bua. She lay buried under where I stood. I wouldn’t even have known if the caretaker hadn’t told me. There was some sort of makeshift marker, a piece of wood or stone half sunk in the grass as if left by an ancient child on the grave of a beloved pet long forgotten. My feet tingled, my heart contracted – shouldn’t I not be standing on top of her? I didn’t want to hurt her, even though I knew I couldn’t.

I said nothing. We said a quick prayer. The caretaker hurriedly pointed to a similar spot on the ground where my grandmother, who had died many years earlier, was buried.

We were soon back in the taxi, and my story continued while Nuzhat Bua’s and her mother’s lay at the bottom of the pig-ridden cemetery in some odd corner of Lucknow that I have never visited since and wouldn’t know how to find again.

Many years later, when I had wrestled with womanhood and flung it to the ground, I would think of Nuzhat Bua again and again. She supposedly wasn’t very well-liked. Some people credited her sharp tongue with her never being married. I was too young to understand, but she was the only adult who ever made sense to me. I’ve heard the same things about me too as an adult, although the times are changing and such women are praised.

The last time I saw her, she was championing my journey to America. I don’t remember our last words, but I hadn’t thought that they would be our last. She hadn’t either. She had recently started travelling for leisure – Muscat, Jaipur, and Hong Kong – and was beginning to discover a friend and accomplice in me, a teenager perched on the precipice of childhood, the country of adults and the rest of my life within sight. We had plans to travel together, my functioning as her English-speaking companion as she took me around the world. I couldn't wait. Neither could she. It was so exciting.

Nuzhat Bua would die in six months, and I never saw her again except very suddenly years later at that cemetery where she still lies, possibly some of her genes part of my body as I move forward in life and see the world we were supposed to discover together. Since then I have seen many things. The Grand Canyon, Hollywood, the White House, Native American reservations, and the Ku Klux Klan. I have even been to Jaipur, straining my eyes to catch Nuzhat Bua still amongst the mass of humanity that is Anywhere, India. But I only see her in dreams, always telling her, “you shouldn’t be here, you are supposed to be dead.” I wonder when those dreams will stop and what it all means.

Dream Tenant

On October 3, 2011, I fictionalised myself because I thought it would help me make sense:

"The short, fat, smelly landlady had never had a stranger tenant. The girl went to work and came back, she paid her rent on time, she was always polite and spoke in an old accent the landlady had only heard in her childhood. Lately the girl had stopped going out. She still paid her rent on time, but sometimes the landlady could hear her crying in her room. In the middle of the day when all the other girls were out at work or at school. The landlady didn't know but the girl would cry at night too, but on the terrace where she wouldn't disturb her roommate. That strange foreign tenant in that room. Not really foreign, the girl was Indian but had never lived in India. Until now. Now she cried, she howled locked up in that room. She talked to herself sometimes. The landlady once thought she heard the girl say, "what is real?" between sobs, but she couldn't be sure. What kind of a person talks like that anyway, it made no sense.

The girl had first started asking that question 5 years ago. "What is real?" she had asked her mother, but her mother had not understood the question. "Amma, tell me what is real?" They were in America then, the girl had been a success - American degrees, an American job, a green card on the way. An American accent, an American attitude, American dollars in the American bank. But lately, it had all started seeming unreal. The popcorn at the theater had started tasting chalky, her mascara had stopped helping her once sparkly eyes pop. She'd started realising that every hot, young, new Hollywood starlet had fake lips and fake breasts. She'd tried so many things, but before long they'd run out. They weren't real. The female role models on TV weren't real, all the makeup she had bought wasn't real, her beautiful apartment that no one visited wasn't real. One day she realised that soon she was going to stop being real too.

What is real, what is real."

Life 2012

Title: Compartmentalised

Looking For Black Role Models

"An impressionable young black man in search of roles and images in the movies and media, however, would have found a sorry set of models. In the forties, the dominant representation of the African American was the comic minstrel, typified by the national radio show Amos 'n' Andy. (Ironically, of course, the original actors in the series were white, mimicking black dialect.) In films, blacks were generally presented as clowns or mental incompetents. Gone With the Wind, Hollywood's 1939 extravaganza celebrating the prewar slave South, offered up the servant Mammy, docile yet loyal, obese and hardworking. One of the few Hollywood movies of the period that departed slightly from crude stereotypes was Warner Brothers' Bullets or Ballots, featuring black actress Louise Beavers as the notorious Nellie LaFleur, the numbers queen. It is likely that Malcolm saw this film as well as dozens of others that addressed racial themes; decades later he would recall Hollywood's distortions of black people as part of his general indictment of white racism. Even the title of the Warner Brothers' film may have been recycled in Malcolm's 1964 address "The Ballot of the Bullet.""

- Manning Marable, 'Malcolm X'

I Saw a Mirage in the Classroom

I always sat on the left side of the classroom for Intro to Sociology. It was the summer of 2000, and I was turning 19 that June.

A curious thing happens in America in the summers: people take most of their clothes off. At least on college campuses. It looks like someone has swapped the university students for beachgoing young people. Girls wear short-shorts - denim or otherwise - and tiny cotton shirts - with straps or otherwise. It was my first summer in America as a university student, and I had recently heard the word 'spaghetti straps' for the first time. That summer, it was fashionable for young ladies to cover their hair with a bandana, as if one were just about to step out to pick corn on a farm somewhere or put on a huge helmet before setting off on the road with one's other Harley-riding friends. The boys' fashion does not seem to have changed much over the years since then; that summer they wore t-shirts and long cargo-style shorts. Khakhis, I discovered they were called. Hey, that's an Urdu word! Hello, my name is Khadija, I'm from India but was raised in the Middle East.

I was very attached to my pair of blue jeans that I would often pair with a bright shirt and a blue denim fisherman's hat that had colourful flowers and butterflies (or was it dragonflies?) embroidered on it. In turqouise, blue, red, and yellow. Chunky dark brown unisex sandals were all the rage, and every young person the nation over had a pair that year. I remember I'd bought mine from Payless. They must've made a killing that year like they do every time a new fashion comes out in footwear.

The classroom that I took my sociology class in that summer was a small one. The floor at the back of the room was raised high and tilted down the closer it got to the front. The way an amphitheater's seats are arranged, I mean vertically and not horizontally, of course. The seats were arranged on either side of a narrow walkway that ran down the center of the room to where the instructor's area was. I don't remember the name of the professor who took that class, but he was a white American man in his late 50s or 60s. His hair was very white and the same colour as his skin. He was stout, not very tall, he was built like a kindly block. I can't remember if he wore glasses, but he did wear a hearing aid. He couldn't hear very well, which posed a problem for me a number of times and bumped me down from a sure A to a B. The professor, in his desire to instruct according to the Socratic method, had made class participation a large part of the grade. He'd unfortunately not be able to hear me if he was positioned at a certain angle from me when I'd raise my hand and call out to him with a question, insight, suggestion, or answer. Once he'd stood right in front of me with his back turned towards me, saying, "anyone? anyone?", looking for student participation. I'd raised my hand and called out his name a number of times, but he hadn't heard me and had gone on with the rest of his lecture. How embarassing! But it's not like anyone would have noticed in that class anyway. There were around 15 students in that class, most of them white Americans, all of them young and bored of the Socratic method and theories about social deviance and conformity. I remember them from where I used to sit on the left side of the classroom. I remember this one particular handsome young fellow. He was tall, white, a little pale, and with short dark brown hair. He had the bony build of so many young white American boys, and he wore dark brown sandals similar to mine.

Then there was this girl. White American too with a short straight blonde bob that behaved itself under the bandana she wore over it. She used to sit one row behind the tall brunette boy. I would often get distracted by her during the lectures of the kindly but hard-of-hearing professor. She usually wore a thin cotton shirt with spaghetti straps, and she seemed to favour light summery prints, the kind that have small flowers on light backgrounds. She was small and thin. Her back would often be exposed, and I'd be able to see her shoulder blades, small and razor-sharp like chicken bones, looking like they were about to tear out of her skin everytime they moved. She was a skeleton dipped in skin, a machine of metal and pins tightly covered with an empty balloon. She had small, very thin lips that she'd keep pursed very tightly. Her nose was small and very sharp. The skin on her face looked like it would tear any minute; you could see the malaised light blue veins lying lazily across her cheeks. Her arms were long bones and frightening. You could see her bare legs because of the short shorts she often wore. They were as thin as her arms and slightly curved. The dark brown sandals on her feet used to make me feel uncomfortable - what if their weight snapped her ankles?? She used to snack on dry Cheerios. She'd take them out of her backpack without moving too much - she never moved too much. I never saw her talking to anyone or participating in class. She'd sit in her chair, place her textbook and notebook out on her pulled-down flapdesk and sit very still and very properly for the duration of the class. Except when she'd snack on her Cheerios. She'd reach out for her backpack and slowly pull out a transparent Ziploc bag with the Cheerios in it. She'd then count out a certain number of Cheerios and arrange them on her desk. She'd then eat them very slowly one by one. One. By. One.

I would often find myself staring at this girl. It was hard not to. The young man who'd usually sit directly behind her in the topmost row would be looking at her chicken back as well. She was frightening to look at, like the pictures we've all grown up seeing of starving Somali children.

I've been thinking a lot about her these past few days, particularly since I recently started learning Photoshop. I've always known about Photoshop and the things it can do, but I didn't really understand the almost reality-molding extent of it until I actually saw it happening before my eyes or even by my own hands. It feels like everything I had ever been told about beauty and the way I was supposed to look has been undone. Like Ctrl+Z. Bam. I have suddenly stopped minding my flat hair days, skin outbreaks, new grey hairs, sometimes visible double chin, short legs, imperfect figure, back fat, cankles, muffin top, man hands, eyebrow regrowth, facial hair, body hair, fat, flab, one huge ugly walking-talking collection of flaws. A monstrosity. Flaws that they've now invented names for even. I don't care, you know? I don't see any of it now when I see myself in the mirror. I'm just having such a good time, I feel like I'm a kindergartener again. I don't know what all these grown-ups keep talking about - figures and diets and calories. I'm just having such a jolly good time rolling along in life. I just comb my hair and pin it back and dive right into the world with a new colour of nailpolish and fun costume jewellery. I am pretty again just like that, so now I don't have to worry about that anymore.

God, what about all those other young women? And those other young men? Generations of them who keep rejecting each other and even themselves because they don't know what real looks like? Cosmetic surgeries and compulsive exercising and not eating? To become like other people who don't even look like that themselves? I'd seen it in America, but now I saw it in India too. Is the whole world chasing mirages now? You can't ever catch a mirage because it isn't really there, but what happens to you while you're chasing it? Do you become a mirage too?

Is this the real life?
Is this just fantasy?
Caught in a landslide,
No escape from reality.

Julia Turns 30 in Hollywood

"In 1978, in January, I stopped drinking. I had never thought drinking made me a writer, but now I suddenly thought not drinking might make me stop. In my mind, drinking and writing went together like, well, scotch and soda. For me, the trick was always getting past the fear and onto the page. I was playing beat the clock - trying to write before the booze closed in like fog and my window of creativity was blocked again.

By the time I was thirty and abruptly sober, I had an office on the Paramount lot and had made a whole career out of that kind of creativity. Creative in spasms. Creative as an act of will and ego. Creative on behalf of others. Creative, yes, but in spurts, like blood from a severed carotid artery. A deade of writing and all I knew was how to make these headlone dashes and hurl myself, against all odds, at the wall of whatever I was writing. If creativity was spiritual in any sense, it was only in its resemblance to a crucifixion. I fell upon the thorns of prose. I bled.

If I could have continued writing the old, painful way, I would certainly still be doing it. The week I got sober, I had two national magazine pieces out, a newly minted feature script, and an alcohol problem I could not handle any longer.

I told myself that if sobriety meant no creativity I did not want to be sober. Yet I recognised that drinkig would kill me and the creativity. I needed to learn to write sober - or else give up writing entirely. Necessity, not virtue, was the beginning of my spirituality. I was forced to find a new creative path. And that is where my lessons began."

- Julia Cameron, 'The Artist's Way'

On Tortured Artists

"The idea that creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time. The four twentieth-century writers whose work is most responsible for it are probably Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, and the poet Dylan Thomas. They are the writers who largely formed our vision of an existential English-speaking wasteland where people have been cut off from one another and live in an atmosphere of emotional strangulation and despair. These concepts are very familiar to most alcoholics; the common reaction to them is amusement. Substance-abusing writers are just substance abusers - common garden-variety drunks and druggies, in other words. Any claims that the drugs and alcohol are necessary to dull a finer sensibility are just the usual self-serving bullshit. I've heard alcoholic snowplow drivers make the same claim, that they drink to still the demons. It doesn't matter if you're James Jones, John Cheever, or a stewbum snoozing in Penn Station; for an addict, the right to the drink or drug or choice must be preserved at all costs. Hemingway and Fitzgerald didn't drink because they were creative, alienated, or morally weak. They drank because it's what alkies are wired up to do. Creative people probably do run a greater risk of alcoholism and addiction than those in some other jobs, but so what? We all look pretty much the same when we're puking in the gutter."

- Stephen King, 'On Writing'

Stephen King's Babysitter

"Eula-Beulah was prone to farts - the kind that are both loud and smelly. Sometimes when she was so afflicted, she would throw me on the couch, drop her wool-skirted butt on my face, and let loose. "Pow!" she'd cry in high glee. It was like being buried in marshgas fireworks. I remember the dark, the sense that I was suffocating, and I remember laughing. Because, while what was happening was sort of horrible, it was also sort of funny. In many ways, Eula-Beulah prepared me for literary criticism. After having a two-hundred-pound babysitter fart on your face and yell Pow!, The Village Voice holds few terrors."

- Stephen King, 'On Writing'

Authority Figures

An excerpt from Stephen King's 'On Writing', where he talks about his school principal's reaction to a story he had adapted from a horror movie and sold stapled copies of the 'book' to his schoolmates when he was in the 8th grade...

""What I don't understand, Stevie," she said, "is why you'd write junk like this in the first place. You're talented. Why do you want to waste your abilities?" She had rolled up a copy of VIB#1 and was brandishing it at me the way a person might brandish a rolled-up newspaper at a dog that has piddled on the rug. She waited for me to answer - to her credit, the question was not entirely rhetorical - but I had no answer to give. I was ashamed. I have spent a good many years since - too many, I think - being ashamed about what I write. I think I was forty before I realised that almost every writer of fiction and poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent. If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that's all. I'm not editorialising, just trying to give you the facts as I see them.

Miss Hisler told me I would have to give everyone's money back. I did so with no argument, even to those kids (and there were quite a few, I'm happy to say) who insisted on keeping their copies of VIB#1. I ended up losing money on the deal after all, but when summer vacation came I printed four dozen copies of a new story, an original called The Invasion of the Star-Creatures, and sold all but four or five. I guess that means I won in the end, at least in a financial sense. But in my heart I stayed ashamed. I kept hearing Miss Hisler asking why I wanted to waste my talent, why I wanted to waste my time, why I wanted to write junk."

Backwards/forwards

Oh, what can I tell you about why I'm in India? That answer has so many parts, I'm tired of listing it out for everyone who asks me why I came back here. Most of all, I'm tired of going over it for my own self when I need reminding. They've told me that most people move forward but that I've chosen to move backwards. I've been here so long, away from the world that I came from. I am beginning to forget...

* * *

I've started volunteering as a Film Editor for the Youth Parliament Foundation. This past week they'd been hosting the 'Know Your Body, Know Your Rights' national consultation in New Delhi. A bunch of young folks from various states - Gujarat, Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh, Nagaland, Manipur, Tamil Nadu, Bihar, Uttarakhand, and others - landed up in the capital to talk about sexual health awareness for 4 days. I had been asked to help shoot the event for a video we'd need to edit and send to the sponsors, the MacArthur Foundation and UNESCO. I was grateful for the opportunity to hide behind the lens. As a videographer, one's goal is to capture an event without interfering with the subject or affecting the environment. It was only my second week with the organisation, and I was still getting used to its social dynamics. I didn't have any work friends as yet, I wasn't in on the inside jokes, and I couldn't imagine surviving on smalltalk and shooting out clever one-liners on the field all week. Thank God for the job description - shoot, be invisible, go home.

We were packing up by the end of the 4th and final day of the consultation. I had played the part of the mute camerawoman perfectly - I hadn't bonded with any of the attendees and had sat down for meals with the organisation staff without contributing much to the conversation. I hadn't had the energy for anything more than work anyway. Cameras get heavy hanging from one's neck after 8-10 hours. They give one achy shoulders, cramped thighs, and burning shoulder joints. That and keeping an eagle-eye out for good shots hour after hour after hour consumes any leftover desire to cross over and reach out to the subject. I don't mind though. The world often seems a lot more beautiful through a camera. I don't mind spending as much time there as possible. I don't mind not being noticed.

"Didi." Sister.

I turned to face a young rural boy, not more than 18. Like most people from the rural parts, this one was skinny with not an ounce of fat on him anywhere. Not even on his face. His skin stuck to his smiling skull like a thick layer of paint. Oil kept his side-parted hair in place. He wore a generic button-down shirt and generic pair of trousers. A generic Indian rural person holding out a generic Indian notebook to me. Made of recycled paper.

He was smiling at me, shyly, possibly even admiringly.

"Didi, autograph."

Four days of silence behind a camera, and I'd forgotten how to speak. My voice came out with a crack, as if I'd been asleep. "Me?" My autograph? What had I ever done for him? I'd never even spoken to anyone during the consultation. What reason would he have to smile at me?

But he kept smiling anyway. "Accha, theek hai," I said - right, okay - and I slowly took his notebook and pen and smiled, still in a haze after being woken from my cameraperson stupor. Life behind the camera dulls one's social instincts sometimes.

"Main kya likhhoon?" I asked him gently. What do I write?

"Naam, email address, aap kahaan ki hain, aur aap kya kaam karti hain." Your name, email address, where you're from, and what you do.

Oh, boy.

I started writing my name in English. K-H-A-D-I-J-A. In uppercase because it's easier to read. He looked at what I was writing and told me that he couldn't read English. So I wrote my name and email address in English, and then began to write in Hindi.

I wrote my name.

I skipped the email address. I didn't know how to translate it into Hindi.

Of the remaining two questions, I tackled the easier one first. What did I do for a living? I was a trained IT professional. I had recently trained at NDTV in broadcast journalism. I was a published book author. At that moment, I was a film editor. Media, I wrote.

I wondered what to write about where I was from. I was born in Lucknow, but I had never lived there. I never felt Lucknawi, more so after my latest trip early this year. That had snapped any emotional ties I had to that place. I just did not recognise it anymore. Most of the people I knew there who had remembered me from my childhood had died, their name plates still on their ancient wooden doors, their houses abandoned by their children who'd moved out to the newer parts of Lucknow, to other parts of India, to other parts of the world. Greener pastures. They hadn't even bothered to take down the old nameplates. Like Scrooge who had been too miserly to remove his dead partner's name from their office signboard, 'Scrooge & Marley'. Old Lucknow was a ghost ghetto, a grinning skeleton. Like this rural boy here, wanting to know where I was from.

Maybe I was from Delhi? It was the only place in India where I had actually lived, for over a year, working, not on a holiday. I could recognise landmarks and the 'India Today' office in the latest movie 'Rockstar'. And the 'India Today' signboard had been extremely blurry and in the background. You couldn't even see any text, just red and white squares. But I had recognised it. I had even shouted the block out at the theater - F-14/15 Connaught Place! I get excited whenever I can recognise landmarks in any city I'm in. It makes me feel that maybe, just maybe, this is what home feels like. There once was a time in my life when I had started recognising landmarks at airports. The restaurant where the chicken nuggets and fries were good at Zurich. The worship room in Amsterdam. I like the food court at Terminal 3 at the Indira Gandhi International Airport in Delhi. The smell of cinnamon and the sound of jazz at Chicago's O'Hare. The casino posters near the baggage claim area in Tulsa. I remember the woman's face. She was a white brunette in her late 30s and was ecstatically clapping about winning something.

But my Facebook account says that my hometown is Muscat, Oman. I spent 18 years straight there after all. That's the most amount of time I have lived anywhere. A close second is America with my 10 years. Canada was only for 4 months in total, but I am a resident there. I did feel a sense of belonging there for a while because of my immigration status. It made the immigration officer smile at me and say "welcome home". I've even got used to Tim Horton's and the Rogers monopoly. I even know some intersections and Go Train stops in Toronto. I know Dundas Square. I had attended a music fest there for Michael Jackson when he had died. It hadn't felt like he had died then.

The rural boy with the long eyelashes was still looking at his notebook, waiting to see what I wrote, wondering about the long pause before I wrote the name of my hometown. I wrote them all. Lucknow/Delhi/Oman/America/Canada.

"Yeh kya hai?" he asked. What is this?

I told him that I was from all those places. I read out the names even though he could read Hindi. His eyes widened, and he looked at me with new respect. This was probably the first time he'd left his town somewhere in Jharkhand, Uttrakhand, wherever he was from. India's soul is in its villages, Gandhi had said. This was probably the first time he'd visited Delhi. Reaching Delhi had been a miracle for him. Like a trip to Rome for the ancients. Babylon, Cairo, Persepolis. It was what Hollywood had been for me. Staying in Beverly Hills, coming on TV on Jay Leno from Burbank. Having my picture taken on the bridge of the Enterprise-D at the Star Trek museum at the Las Vegas Hilton.

We had both come a long way. Such a long journey it has been.

Stay hungry, stay foolish

"In return, I want to offer you a few pieces of advice: try to keep it real. Stay true to what’s best in yourself and to the best of what you’ve experienced here at Vassar. Continue to expose yourself to new ideas. Trust your instincts and think for yourself. Make art, or at least value it. Look for the core of what makes each person human, appreciate the details that make them unique.

Find something that moves you or pisses you off, and do something about it. Put your self out there. Be brave. Be bold. Take action. You have a voice. Speak up, especially when something tries to keep you silent. Take a stand for what’s right. Raise a ruckus and make a change. You may not always be popular, but you’ll be part of something larger and bigger and greater that yourself. Besides, making history is extremely cool.

Hold our elected officials accountable. They work for you. Ask them anything you want. If you don’t, you’re giving up on democracy. Inez Milholland – Vassar class of 1909 – didn’t let people silence her and she didn’t let anyone stop her. She became one of the pivotal leaders of the suffragette movement. If you forget everything else I’ve said here today or if you choose to ignore it, remember Inez and remember to vote. It’s a radical act that’s still legal, and we need to keep it that way.

Speaking from my own experience, I also want to offer a warning: you will, undoubtedly, meet people who will try to shut you up or entice you to compromise your principles in any number of ways. They’ll try to seduce you and distract you with money, power, security and perhaps, most dangerously, a sense of belonging. Don’t let them; it’s just not worth it. One of the biggest threats to our world is the culture of silence and compromise—politicians who compromise their beliefs because they’re scared they’ll piss off their voters and won’t get re-elected, corporate executives who put profits above principles. You can have a conscience and still make money. You can have genuine values and still get elected. You can even make movies that do well at the box office without playing to the lowest common denominator.

And try not to let love silence you. And don’t let it kill you—always wear a condom, for god’s sake. Partner with someone who loves you and loves your voice, who loves the very core of who you are and believes in your dreams, not someone who is hell-bent on changing you."

- excerpt from Samuel L. Jackson's 2004 Vassar College commencement address

The family that grieves together

"Afterward, for many days, Kunta hardly ate or slept, and he would not go anywhere with his kafo mates. So grieved was he that Omoro, one evening, took him to his own hut, and there beside his bed, speaking to his son more softly and gently than he ever had before, told him something that helped to ease his grief.

He said that three groups of people lived in every village. First were those you could see - walking around, eating, sleeping, and working. Second were the ancestors, whom Grandma Yaisa had now joined.

"And the third people - who are they?" asked Kunta.

"The third people," said Omoro, "are those waiting to be born.""

- Alex Haley, "Roots"

Set to stun

"Charlie X", the first episode of Star Trek I ever saw:

Kirk: Charlie, there are a million things in this universe you can have and there are a million things you can't have. It's no fun facing that, but that's the way things are.
Charlie: What am I going to do?
Kirk: Hang on tight and survive. Everybody does.
Charlie: You don't!
Kirk: Everybody, Charlie. Me too.

Where are they now?

I've met many people in this life of mine that I've spent trotting around the globe, recently on my own. I wonder about the ones whom I shared moments with for a while or even just a few minutes and then went our separate ways, never to meet again. Some of them made me happy when I needed to be made happy, and they never even knew it. I wonder where they are now and if they remember me as I remember them:

Florence worked with security in the building across from the Empire State Building that housed the office of Guideposts magazine. She was a middle-aged black woman from Trinidad & Tobago whom I chatted with when I visited the staff at Guideposts on my magical 2007 New York trip. I never saw her again.

The black UPS mailman rode around the Oklahoma State University campus every day in his black truck and brown uniform. I met him as a desk clerk in my residence call where he would drop by everyday on his rounds delivering mail. It was one of my duties as a desk clerk to receive and distribute mail in the mailboxes of the buildings' residents. I can't remember the mailman's name - was it Robert? He was a gentleman and would great me with a compliment and a smile every time. Even after I stopped working at the residence hall, we'd wave and greet each other everytime his truck passed me by anywhere, on-campus or off. He made me feel like a pretty lady. I left OSU in 2005. I never saw him again.

A dusky and statuesque waitress was serving me that late night at the no-name Los Angeles diner. She wore a stereotypical turquoise waitress outfit that went down to her knees, complete with a white apron and white wrap cloth tiara on her crown. She looked Hispanic. Her hair was long, black, and thick, and her skin was the colour of hot chocolate. Her lipstick was a soft dark brown. She asked me where I was from. I said India. Her eyes lit up and she smiled. She was from Bangladesh, she said. She told me her name and I told her mine. We were both Muslims. I looked around the dimly lit diner with its plastic covered seats and plastic-covered menus. What was this beautiful woman doing here, so far away from home, in this town full of freaks and perverts? I never saw her again.

The old woman who looked like she was made of wet white paper was looking at me expectantly, her eyes shining. I told her I liked her gold pendant and that she looked pretty. She clasped her hands and her voice shook. "Oh, honey..." she said as she smiled, her eyes never away from my face. The other university kids who were part of my volunteer group in Stillwater stood a few feet away from us, nervous and uncomfortable in the old folk's home. They were all young, all under 20, and the smell of death, decay, and napthalene made them uneasy. Maybe it's because they were American, or maybe I was used to being around old people, but I felt more comfortable at the home than with them. We didn't stay at the home for more than 10 minutes. I met that old woman in 2000. I never saw her again.

My friend and I were buying movie tickets for the new Mr. Bean movie at the AMC near Times Square. I noticed that the counter had the new Master Card smart card reader installed. I got excited and began to hum the tune of the commercial, a funny little ad that had had the card reader beeping to the tune of Strauss's 'Blue Danube'. The young black fellow working at the counter sang with me. We all laughed. I never saw him again.

When I was in kindergarten in Muscat in the early 80s, our school had hired elderly Omani women to help the teachers take care of the little children. I spent many hours sitting in the lap of the old Omani woman in my class. She was short, strongly built, dark, and had a wide nose. Sh wore colourful cotton Omani clothes. I remember her in a dark green and black outfit. A long scarf covered her hair, and the only parts of her body that were visible were her chubby hands and feet and her face. She didn't speak much. She didn't know any English or much Hindi or Urdu, and the Indian children, most of them South Indian, didn't know any Arabic but only smatterings of English and mostly Hindi, Urdu, Malayalam, Telegu, Tamil, Kannada, etc. I never saw her again.

The tall strawberry-blonde young Irish fellow at the Navy Pier in Chicago was selling t-shirts and bags that changed colour in sunlight. I didn't want to buy anything, but he stopped my mother and I and laughed and joked as he kept talking about how he was a terrible salesperson and wasn't able to sell anything. He kept saying that he was just visiting his uncle from Ireland. He wouldn't stop talking and smiling, telling me that I probably wore t-shirts sized small. After 10 minutes, we had spent 40 dollars at that stall. The young Irishman gave me strawberry candy and thanked me for making him feel better about his selling skills, even though he was a terrible salesman. I kept that candy, wrapped in its strawberry designed wrapper, for many years after that. I never saw him again.

The middle-aged professor burst into the Microform Media Room where I worked at the university library in Stillwater and exclaimed at me, "Hello there, young person!!!" I leapt from my chair, all the sluggishness and frustration of my life instantly banished as an unknown optimism burst into existence in my chest. The clouds suddenly cleared and the sun shone on me as I realised I wanted to smile and didn't want to sit anymore. I asked the professor how I could help him. I never saw him again.

Aishwarya Bledel?

Aishwarya Rai and Alexis Bledel - the real Gilmore girls? They often looked related to me...!

Ryan Kapoor?

Double takes with Ranbir Kapoor and Ryan Gosling.

A Higher Altitude

"To be affronted by solitude without decadence or a single material thing to prostitute, it elevates you to a spiritual plane, where I felt the presence of God. Now, there is the God they taught me about at school. And there is the God that's hidden by what surrounds us in this civilisation. That's the God I met on the mountain."

- 'Alive'

Not Sonia Gandhi

For the last time, this is Reese Witherspoon. Even NDTV aired this picture thinking it was Sonia Gandhi...

The Dancing Cavalier

One of my favourite songs from the 1985 movie, Alice in Wonderland. The White Knight saves Alice from the Red Knight and then sings a beautiful song to her.



"We are dancing.

We didn't need a cue,
Yet with a girl like you,
It seems the thing to do,
Don't you agree?

I hear the strings,
My poor heart sings,
And we are dancing.

We share a smile,
And for a while,
We two are dancing.

If ever time should bring another year,
Another spring,
They'll be compared,
To what I've shared,
With you.

I hear the strings,
My poor heart sings,
And we are dancing.

We share a smile,
And for a while,
We two are dancing.

If ever time should bring another year,
Another spring,
They'll be compared,
To what I've shared,
With you."

Where have all the knights gone?

What a beautiful song, what a beautiful performance. This song bored me when I was really young but it brings me to tears now. It's sweet, in a sad way, how one thing can appear different to a person at different times in that person's life.

---

Watch the whole movie!

Alice in Wonderland



Through the Looking Glass