Chameleon

Old black woman
Sitting next to me
On a plane
This plane
By the window
Grown woman
Maybe mother
Maybe grand
Maybe
Dear woman
In this tube
Of air
From Venus
From Mercury
Poison air
(We're dying)
Old lady
Quiet woman
Minding her
Business
But you feel
Only three
Maybe four
Maybe five
Small
In a dress
In baby shoes
Shining eyes
Ribbons
Just want to play
With me
Just to play
And giggle
Squeal
So nice
This little girl
This old woman
Little girl
Old
Woman
Who says nothing to me
Woman girl
Girl woman
She sat next to me
Quietly
Her memory is free

My Struggles with Nice

People have always told me that I'm a nice person.

What a nasty word that is. It always felt like an insult. Maybe because I am originally from India where being nice is universally considered a handicap. Nice there means stupid. Nice is a doormat that the world will wipe its feet on - and stamp its sins and muck on for good measure - on its way to take the things that you were too weak to take for yourself. What a loser.

Being described as nice has always pricked me like a secret thorn somewhere inside my ears where it's dark and secret.

In school, when my friends and I were matching ourselves to the Spice Girls, I thought I matched Ginger Spice with all her crazy. My friends promptly determined that I was in fact Baby Spice.

Baby.

Babies are nice.

When we were matching ourselves to Take That, I was matched with the baby-faced member of the group. But I really identified with the cheeky one.

Too late.

My family always feared my fate as a nice person. "How will you survive in this world?" they would moan, but of course in Urdu. It made me afraid.

Somewhere inside, even today when I have clearly survived to some degree in this world (with the kind of scars no eyes can see), I dread the next person telling me that I'm (still) nice. It feels like a secret shame that I desperately try to hide under...I don't know what.

I try very, very hard to not be known to be nice. Because it's easy for me. It takes no effort at all for me to be nice. It's my default mode. I absolutely loathe things that are the opposite of nice, the kind of person that wins praises in places like India, the kind of person that is called clever, smart, and someone who will succeed in the world.

But I want to succeed. At everything I do. I want to be the absolute best I can be. And if being nice, something that I have no control over, is going to hold me back, it will break my heart. I've had my heart broken many times by many things, by many people, but breaking one's own heart is worse than someone else doing it for you. I mean, one can't just walk out on one's own self. One has to live with oneself forever. How can I bear to live with my own failings? It is my secret fear, and it is always there, forever lurking just below my consciousness in the dark where ghosts live.

The past couple of years have been particularly challenging. I live in the United States these days where a lot of people who are the opposite of nice have sprung out of the woodwork. It's not just in the news; it's people around me whom I interact with to varying degrees. Seeing them at the very least be tolerant of ugliness (and at the very worst embrace it as if out of relief) has really sent me off-kilter because, if there's one thing I dislike more than being called nice, it's seeing others being awful. It's a time of the opening of great wounds, the whipping up of great gashes in the body of us, and we cannot escape. We are both the wounded and the one doing the wounding, and come to think of it, we are also the ones who have to watch, who are being forced to watch.

So imagine my surprise seeing my instincts for being nice snarling louder the more horrible people get around me. I had always visualized my niceness as something that was limp, soggy, and cold - basically pathetic - but these days it feels like a terrifying divine serpent, hissing and swaying maniacally at the flurries that have emerged from an eruption of nightmares. I never knew that nice could be strong. I never knew it could fight. I never knew that it could be awesome in its fury.

Nice in all its forms - silly, pathetic, outraged, helpless - is the reason humans exist. And that is its place. Being horrible can't be the right way - if everyone were horrible, we wouldn't exist. Each one of us exists because someone did something nice for us at some point. Nice is the fountain of all things. It is made of iron, it is made of petals. And it is my default mode. I am proud, I am here, I am ready.

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.

How To Bloom

My dear potted plant,

I love you. I bought you for cheap at WalMart a few weeks ago, but I loved you before then. I loved you when I was transplanting you into your new pot and packing fresh new soil around your naked roots in your new home, the patio of my apartment. I didn't hurt you when I did that, did I? When I had yanked you by your stems out of the broken little plastic cup you had come in, your roots looked so frightened, like a shivering little kitten that had got wet in the rain. You had looked so settled in the cup you had come in, decrepit as it was, but I knew you needed more space to grow. It must've startled you, having no soil to hold on to for a while. It must've taken your roots time to grasp your new soil and get used to the new watering schedule. Could you feel my love when I patted you down with rich, new soil in your new pot? I love you. All I want is for you to grow, for you to be happy. What else is there?

I know what it feels like to be uprooted. I know what it's like to have to transplant yourself time and time again. Maybe you were like me, a young sapling that had never known the soil its parent tree had come from. Maybe you were always the exotic plant whose foreign name no one could pronounce, the plant that no one knew what to do with. Maybe you won't take to your native soil again the way those who were never uprooted do. But that's okay. One can only be where one is, one place at a time. The best you can really do is give yourself some time to get used to your new home. I can promise you that one day your roots will grip your new soil and that your stems will rise crisp and fresh again. There is no shame in adapting to your new environment, and you will flourish if you let yourself just be where you are. It doesn't matter if people can't pronounce your name - they will come to you themselves when they see how comfortable you are in your own pot.

Your mother in all seasons.

My Husband and My Son

Sonal and I were walking arm-in-arm outside his parents' home in Delhi. We were still boyfriend and girlfriend in those days. It had been a difficult relationship - he was training to be a neurologist in America, and I had just finished my year-long internship with New Delhi Television. We talked everyday over the phone, but sometimes that wasn't enough. I was so happy that he was visiting Delhi. At the time, he was the only happy thing in my life. I had started noticing then what I know now, that in his presence my mind would quieten and I wouldn't feel anxious anymore. I wouldn't feel like running, running the way I had felt my whole adult life. By then we'd only spent a few weeks in each other's presence. Our long-distance relationship would last for two years.

The sun was setting, it was getting cold. Diwali was only a few days away. Sonal and I were walking around his colony. He was telling me stories about his friends from school, from med school, about his favourite movies, his all-time best jokes. He was making me laugh. I had my arm around his and was smiling at him as he laughed at old memories that he wanted to give to me. I felt so pretty and delicate.

I suddenly felt like time had sped forward. I was still here, a happy bent old woman with white hair and an impish twinkle in her eye. This handsome young man full of promise and potential and goodness and kindness looked a lot like Sonal but was my son. I felt so proud of him. He looked exactly like his father had when we had walked arm-in-arm outside his parents' house in Delhi. We had been young then, the way my lovely son was now.

Stepping Out of Old Shadows

Last night I dreamt that I had gone back to school to join my old classmates, except that I was 31 and the rest of them were still teenagers. These dreams usually are panic-ridden for me because I feel like I have missed a lot of classes because I was out living my real life for over 10 years and will now fail my school exams.

 

It was different this time. I felt very confident and sure of myself. I knew that I could make up the missed lessons by myself. I knew that I did not have a year's worth of notes and that I would have to borrow someone else's and plough through them for my exams. I remember looking at other people's notebooks and wondering how much it would cost to photocopy all of it. Making up in a short period of time would be very difficult, but for the first time I knew that I could do it. No question about it.

 

I remember a slick young History teacher talking about Italy and showing off to my young and inexperienced classmates, and I wanted to tell him that I had written history books. He did not impress me.

 

A guy in my class tried to hit on me in a disrespectful way, and I turned back and put him in his place. I would've never known how to do that before.

 

I remember some parasitic female friends from back then, they were trying to put me down again in my dream, but I didn't feel like I needed them this time. I ignored them. They were children to me and not important at all.

 

In my dream I had just come from living in Delhi, working with NDTV, and visiting Bombay, and I felt so wise and confident. I had already lived in America and Canada. I had dealt with very difficult situations and had spent most of my 20s alone and in foreign countries.

 

I decided to leave the classroom early. I carried a huge camper's bag on my back, but it did not feel heavy at all. I was able to carry it very easily, which surprised me because I am quite short. My old parasitic friends tried to follow me but they couldn't. They were even treating me nicely because they realised that I had changed.

 

But I didn't need them anymore. I was not the same. I would never need to return to this classroom again.

 

I was smiling because I was free.

Girl

From my diary, dated February 7, 2012:

"If I look in the mirror, I can see that I look like a grown-up mature woman now. I like her. She's pretty, beautiful almost in how open and refreshing her face is. She has so much intelligence in her face. She's gentle and caring and nurturing. She's a wonderful, wonderful woman. I really like her. She's also brave and protective. She's such an incredible woman. I can honestly say that I don't feel like a girl anymore. I feel like a woman, a wonderful, wonderful woman. The girl transformed into an amazing, graceful woman. I am loving, protective, just, intelligent, pretty, and very, very strong. I also don't stand for disrespect. I really like how I turned out. It happened in January and this past week. I am not a girl anymore. I am a woman. I love what I see in the mirror. I love what I see when I look back on my life. I have lived and loved bravely, with so much heart. What a woman, what a woman."

Mad Desperate Scribbles That Were Breaking My Heart

A year ago, a year after living in squalor in Delhi and seeing some things too closely, I picked the corner table in the dark Ruby Tuesday in Nehru Place. It had been one of my favourite restaurants in the US. I remember how I used to go there with a boy who was my friend and whom I secretly liked and always ordered salmon there with him. I remember one young waitress - a white girl - who wore a Celtic cross. I like Celtic culture, I'd told her. She had been very happy.

 

She was not there at the Ruby Tuesday's in Nehru Place. The boy I used to like wasn't there. That had been a few years ago, they were a thing of the past. I was in Delhi now. I had been in India for a year looking for something, and I had bottomed out because my time there had taken from me instead.

 

I ordered a dish I can't remember and took out a piece of paper from the raggedy bag I had carried as a reporting intern at NDTV. I had so much to say but no one to say it to. No one who would understand the things I had seen and the things I had understood and the things that were racing in my mind and not letting me rest. I had taken to scribbling on pieces of paper because my thoughts felt like scribbles in my mind, like bits of torn paper that even when put together were not adding up, and I continued to scribble at the Ruby Tuesday's in Nehru Place:

 

"I was raised in comfort. I always had enough to eat, my stomach was always full, I barely ever sweated. Then what am I doing here? This country, this nation is filthy. Have you ever looked into the eyes of the average citizen here? Their eyes are hollow, and they look back at you, asking you - why are you here, aa hee gaye tum [in Hindi and Urdu]? And why did I return? To mourn a time of my life that is never coming back. And what now? My tears have been shed, I can go back to my life, where I came from, the world where I'm never hungry or too hot or too cold. So why can't I leave? What is it about this nation of shattered dreams, shit, and piss and bacteria that is not letting me go? I can't be one of them. I never was. I am part of nowhere. But they think I'm a part of them. What do I tell them, that this isn't my life, that I have to go? Where do I go to now that no other place can ever feel like home? What now, what now, why won't you let me go? You don't know me, I'm not one of you. I never lived here before this year."

 

Method Writer

Newspaper cutting from Muscat about an opera set in ancient Egypt

 

I'm writing a book on ancient Egypt, and while I am not allowed to say much more about it, I want to share that this project is different because it treads a fine line between fiction and non-fiction. It's difficult making a setting come alive when no one's really seen it, and I have found from experience that whenever I have to write about an era gone by, it helps to immerse myself in as much everyday detail about life back when. Seems like I write best when I can shut myself in a room and feel like I'm walking amongst the people I am making up and eating the food they are eating and feeling the fabric they are wearing. When I was a little girl and used to live mostly in my head, I had become a little obssessed with ancient Egypt and had wanted to live there. This was in the time long before the Internet or easy access to books, but I still remember a children's book about ancient Egypt that I had borrowed from the British Council library in Muscat, Oman. I can still see the book open before me to a page where the artist had drawn the picture of an Egyptian home. The artist had also drawn people walking about the mud house - through the door, on the stairs, in the kitchen. I felt like they were my friends, that if I went outside I would run into them. Of course I knew them. These little people made of ink, they had names and hobbies.

I later went and rebuilt the house using a shoebox and used my miniature animal toys to play in it. My favourite was the cat that was of the colour of the chicken curry my mother would make. The cat was always the heroine of all my games, and often another animal would be in love with her, but she would be too alone in her great thoughts and adventures to notice.

These days I feel like I'm living in ancient Egypt again. I've come across similar drawings of houses in all the research I've been doing about that time, and I think I've lived in all of them. Everytime I research this way and after my project has been finished, I carry with me a feeling of fondness for that time, that country, those people lost in the dust. I think of them often like I would of an old lover I once sparkled my eyes at because he smiled at me. It almost makes me cry sometimes.

No Pet of Mine

I hate keeping birds in cages. The whole time I was growing up in Oman my mother and I would clash over the sort of pet our family could have. I wanted a hamster, but my mother wouldn't let me have one. I then wanted a cat (I'd called many places that had cats up for adoption but my parents never helped me get beyond that point) but my mother wouldn't allow an animal indoors. So I took to making friends with the neighbourhood alley cats. Over time they figured out where I lived, and one started regularly giving birth in our ground floor balcony. Every 6 months for a few years. I'd bring those kittens inside to play with when they got older. Those were my happiest moments. Kitties playing with me, lounging about in my lap because they trusted me. Because they wanted to play with me. Because we were different animals but we understood each other through our eyes and body language. I miss them. My lap has been empty for so long.

My mother thought the safest pets to get were birds. Over the years we bought single budgerigar pairs - I always got to pick the colour - because we'd heard that they'd lay eggs and have families. We knew other families whose budgies bred like rabbits. And smelled like them too. Now that I think of it, I don't know why it was so important that we have birds that breed and have families and generations. In cages. What was the point? So that it would amuse us? Oh, look, they're like us too!

I never felt attached to our birds. We would bring them home from smelly bird shops in a shoebox that had holes stabbed into them with a knife or scissors. I remember sitting in the back seat of our car with the shoebox in my lap and feeling the birds scraping across the cardboard as they blindly slid around in the dark. Then we'd move them into their cages. Were they supposed to be pleased about that, their brand new cage? I hated seeing them sitting all day long in there. There was no room in there for them to properly fly even; how suffocating would that be, how maddening. I'd wonder how I'd feel if I was made to sit in a cage my whole life, even if I got all the food and water I needed.

I never took ownership of our birds, I left them for my mother to tend to. I'm not the one who put you in that cage, I think I was trying to say, your imprisonment is not on my head. I'd stop by to say hello to them every once in a while though. I liked my cats because they were free, because they didn't make me feel guilty, because they could do what they wanted and come back to me when they needed me.

At least the birds weren't alone. We always bought single pairs, so at least they had each other to talk to. Sometimes they'd chirp so much and for so long that my family would want them to stop, to let us take our afternoon nap in peace. Sometimes they'd chirp all night long, so we'd have to drape a cloth over their cage to put them to sleep. But at least they had each other. I liked it when they talked to each other, I wondered what they were talking about. I always wanted them to have something to talk about. I always wanted them to nibble each other's beaks, it made me happy to see them have each other. They were technically not my pets, but I still felt bad for not setting them free. What would my parents say if I just shook them out of their cages and let them go? We must've had at least 20 birds over the years, and I kept an emotional distance from every one of them.

And they'd always die. They never seemed to lay eggs in our house. It was always the same story. The chirping bird couple would chitter-chatter for a few months, then one day when I would go to say goodmorning or howareyou then I'd find one lying dead on its side at the bottom of the cage. The other bird - the husband/wife, I could never tell - would be sitting quietly in the corner farthest from the dead bird. And it would never sing again. I would feel bad for it and spend more time talking to it, but it never really noticed me. It would just sit there by itself and not move much. Definitely not say much. I'd bring my cats over to meet it; at first the bird would feel frightened and move away into a corner, but over time it learned to not fear my cats even if they were lying sprawled out over its cage.

But it was always a matter of weeks before I found the bird dead too, lying on its side with its eyes shut. Have you ever seen a dead bird? Have you ever held it? It feels light, like it's made of wood chippings and sawdust. I was always surprised everytime I held a dead bird because it felt like it ought to have been heavier. The closed eyelid of a dead bird always looks like it belongs to an old man, a tired old man who is tired of life and tired of blinking and wants to sleep. It's wrinkly, it's thick and thin at the same time. The claws are always curled into a loose tired fist. It looks asleep. It looks too still. Too still.

I hate keeping birds in cages. I hate it. I want them out there, living out their lives, flying wherever they are supposed to go. I don't want them dying on my watch, not on my watch, not on my conscience.

C/O Anybody

Find me in the bottom-right corner.

 

I was standing outside the NDTV corporate office in New Delhi, chewing some gum. It's an old habit of mine that my family has always strongled condemned as American. When I was in high school in Oman I was a fan of bubblegum. I liked grape-flavoured Bib Babol, and in college in America I discovered a strange new watermelon flavour. I used to enjoy blowing bubbles but I have now settled for the less effort of chewing gum. Even if you give me bubblegum now I'll probably just chew it and not put in the effort of bubbling it.

 

I carried this gum habit of mine to India in 2010 when I joined NDTV's year-long broadcast training programme. On that one particular day I was standing outside the building, probably on a break, with a few friends from the programme. They were talking about something, and I was chewing some gum I had bought from the dhaaba that smelled of excrement just down the very short, busted inner street the NDTV office was on. As my friends kept talking, I absent-mindedly flipped the gum pack over and glanced at the address at the back. That's another habit I've had since I was little. I always look at the address that's printed at the back of gum packs everywhere. The address is always of somewhere else, a big city far away - usually in America - that I've only ever seen on television, or a small city somewhere else in the world that had made a pack of gum for me that passed through goodness knows how many unknown hands across the world into mine. I always wondered what the building at that address looked like. Was it a skyscraper or a factory in the country? What if I wrote a letter just to say hi and mailed it out to that address? Who would receive that letter? Who would open the envelope and touch the paper I had touched? Would it be a woman called Susan or a man called Colin? Would they have straight hair or curly hair? Would they be happy? Would my letter make some difference in their lives? Would my life mean something suddenly just because they knew I existed? I would wonder. So much. In a casual glance that had become an automatic reflex by now. I don't even think about it now everytime I flip over my packs of gum. I don't look at the whole address, just the city, state, and country. I feel attached to all the people whose lives are linked to all those addresses in all those faraway cities that are on streets that have their own stories. It feels like looking at a photograph made of words. Like the pack of gum is a phantom letter that was sent to me. It's almost a lonely feeling.

 

 My friends kept talking. And I noticed that the address on the pack of gum I was chewing from was of New Delhi. Oh. How funny. I was in New Delhi.

 

I looked over the rest of the address, curious about if I had been to those areas in Delhi yet. It said 'Okhla Industrial Estate Phase III'. That's where I was at that very moment. I felt a little bit excited and a little bit sick, but I don't think anyone noticed. The floor of my stomach tightened a little bit as I moved my eyes to the building number in the address.

 

206.

 

Wait a second.

 

The NDTV office, the one I was standing outside of, the one I was spending around 10 hours in everyday, was 207.

 

I suddenly felt weird. Frightened even. I almost felt panicky.

 

My friends were still talking. I lifted my head away from the pack of gum in my hands and looked at the two buildings that were on either side of the NDTV building. I saw 206.

 

Oh my God.

 

I suddenly blurted out to my friends that we were standing next to the building whose address was on my pack of gum. They smiled and thought it was cool, and then went back to their conversation. But I felt so strange, excited, frightened. I felt like I had arrived, that I had made a connection, that in all my travels to find the truth, to find life, that I had finally arrived. At an actual address. I had finally shown up at the right place. Those people at those addresses that I'd always wanted to give my life meaning, one of them ended up being me. 'Somewhere else' was finally 'here'. I could rest now.

  

 

The Bombay Girl from Elsewhere

"Where are you originally from?" I asked the young Times Now graphics producer who had been raised in Kolkata and gone to college in Delhi. She wore seeing glasses, a dark blue summer dress, black Roman-style sandals, and her long dark brown hair was loose about her shoulders and back.

"Oh, you will have never heard of it," she had said, "it's a place called Saharanpur in UP."

She was ready to move on to the next subject, but I didn't let her. "Saharanpur, of course! I've stopped there before while travelling between Lucknow and Delhi; they're known for their pottery!"

The girl perked up, and we chatted for the next half hour about our experiences as women in the anachronistic Avadh Dust Bowl. I will now always think of her everytime I see the mug I bought from a roadside street shop in the middle of nowhere in Saharanpur in 1997.

The Song on the Radio

"Saajan!" I shouted in the crowded NDTV shuttle, but the song on the radio meant nothing to my friends. How could it, I realised, they were all mostly born in the late 80s. The movie had probably come out before they started kindergarten. Everyone in the minivan - other NDTV employees whom I didn't know - looked at me; none of them remembered Saajan.

"You know, Saajan!" I continued, returning their startled gazes. "The Madhuri Dixit/Salman Khan/Sanjay Dutt love triangle! Sanjay Dutt was a poet whose pseudonym was Saagar?"

Everyone was looking at me funny. Who was this crazy woman having a happy meltdown to an old Hindi movie song on the oldies radio channel? Was I the only one who remembered how Saajan had turned India and even Pakistan upside down with its solid starcast and Pankaj Udhas songs? When did Saajan become an oldie?

"Haanji, the songs were very nice," said the usually silent driver quite suddenly, "jiyein toh jiyein kaise bin aapke."

I was happy.

Fiona and the Universe

Dedicated to Fiona Poojara

In Bombay by the sea
By the Arabian Sea
On a humid afternoon
Fiona sat in a cab that was yellow and black
And looked out the window and saw
On the grey tarmac
A black and grey crow with a long black beak
Picking out jiggly thin pink stringy bits from the corpse of a rat
Quite casually

Fiona looked away
These things she said make her upset
She don't want to see

My dear Fiona
Little girl
Raised on birthday parties
With clowns and movie star Miss India guests
And an Anglican school for girls
Long skirts and ladylike shoes
For the girls of Saint Mary the Virgin
Saint Mary the Virgin

It's just life in the foodchain
One death for every birth
One death or more
Somebody to eat somebody else
It's everyone's turn sometime
Nothing personal it's okay
Just life in the foodchain
Don't look away Saint Mary
Look upon your God's glory
One death for every birth
One death or more
Don't look away Saint Mary

A Good Idea Turns 16

Like 2012, 1996 was an Olympic year. That was the year I turned 15. That was also the year my high school in Muscat, Oman, was turning out an Olympics-themed issue of our school magazine.

My English teacher was in-charge of putting this issue together, and I had very excitedly gone up to him with an idea I had had. I had told him that I had the lyrics of the Gloria Estefan song 'Reach' and that it would be a great idea to include those lyrics at the very end of the magazine. The song had been released as part of the Olympics, and its lyrics were very inspiring. These were the days before the Internet; song lyrics were either published in expensive or hard-to-find (especially in Muscat) book collections or on a flimsy sheet of printed paper inside the pastel-coloured plastic cases that some audio cassettes came with. I had an ear for song lyrics and usually wrote down those of my favourite songs and shared them with my friends who desperately wanted to be able to sing those songs correctly. I had found the lyrics of 'Reach' in a youth magazine and had torn the page off and saved it. I still have it with me somewhere.

But my teacher ignored my idea. He never even shot it down, he just plain ignored it. He almost made me feel like I wasn't there standing in front of him. I even think he looked over my head and continued about his business. I didn't know why then. He was an unpleasant sort of person, and I now can recognise him as the sort of person you don't want to hire or work with. I've met people like him over the years; these are the people who recognise a good idea when they see someone else come up with one, and some dark bitterness in them makes them want to kill it immediately. They do this by using humiliation, shame, discouragment, mockery, or repeated silent dismissals. My teacher used the last technique on me on this particular occassion. He used the others on me and other people the rest of the time. For everything. These kind of people ought never to be allowed near children who can't recognise or know how to interpret this brand of toxicity. These are the kind of people who can never be happy for someone else, who flinch at the sight of a smile, who feel relieved only if they can say or do something to dampen another's success somehow and get them to just.stop.smiling. These are the kind of people who feel big by making others feel small. My teacher had once told me that I thought too much of my poetry and that I was arrogant. I hadn't understood what he had meant, I was chirpy, chatty, and quite sensitive about feelings that belonged to me and also to other people .

The lyrics never made it to the school magazine. I still think including them would've been a great idea. So here is the song. It's songs like these that make me want to direct and edit a music video someday. It's people like my bitter high school English teacher that keep people from reaching. Thank goodness we eventually learn to recognise them and don't let them get in our way.

Some dreams live on in time forever

Those dreams, you want with all your heart

And I'll do whatever it takes

Follow through with the promise I made

Put it all on the line

What I hoped for at last would be mine

If I could reach, higher

Just for one moment touch the sky

From that one moment in my life

I'm gonna be stronger

Know that I've tried my very best

I'd put my spirit to the test

If I could reach

Some days are meant to be remembered

Those days we rise above the stars

So I'll go the distance this time

Seeing more the higher I climb

That the more I believe

All the more that this dream will be mine

If I could reach, higher

Just for one moment touch the sky

From that one moment in my life

I'm gonna be stronger

Know that I've tried my very best

I'd put my spirit to the test

If I could reach

If I could reach, higher

Just for one moment touch the sky

I'm gonna be stronger

From that one moment in my life

I'm gonna be so much stronger yes I am

I've tried my very best

I'd put my spirit to the test

If I could reach

If I could, If I could

If I could reach

Reach, I'd reach, I'd reach

I'd reach' I'd reach so much higher

Be stronger

A Letter I Just Wrote in 1991

Dear grown-up Khadija,

I am writing to you because you've been trying to find me. I saw you trying really hard over the past few years, and you've come really close, but I think it's my turn to reach out now. I need to cover these last few steps and close the distance between us.

I am you, 10 years old, and from where I am, the year is 1991. Do you remember 1991? It was in the early 90s that you started doing some really cool things. You pestered Abbu into showing you how to work his Yashica SLR camera. You just kept asking and asking and asking until he had to show it to you. You'd go on to win a Middle Eastern photo competition with it. You also started spending hours at the DOS PC at home, the one that only displayed text, that too in green. That's where you learned how to type so fast without needing to look at the keyboard. You spent hours writing all sorts of things on that computer. You wrote two mystery novels based on a character similar to Nancy Drew. You even made pretend book covers for those novels. One was about sabotage at a farm and the other was about the sabotage of a high school music department. You'd even started writing a Nancy Drew novel based in India. You also wrote a collection of short horror stories. There was the one about the guests who died on their way to a party but still showed up. Then then one about the young male student at an English boarding house who was ragged to death and stayed behind to mourn his fate for all eternity. You wrote a commentary on each an every one of your classmates. You wrote an essay on your thoughts about how being educated and being knowledgable seemed to be two different things. You'd go on to use that concept on your TOEFL essay after high school when you had to write down your thoughts about if you preferred education over experience. The staff at the testing center would be really impressed with your scores, they will have never had someone score so highly before. Back at that old DOS PC, you would spend so much time staring at those green letters as you typed all your stories that when you were done, everything white around you would look light pink for a while afterwards. And one day the computer crashed and you lost everything. Everything. All those stories and characters have remained in your life though, like miscarried children.

You would then go on to writing a story on paper and stapling the pages together into a book with a front and back cover. Do you remember the story, it was about 4 children - brothers and sisters - who got lost in a forest and found their way out by following the movement of the sun across the sky. You had even made an ever-growing short story collection by adding pages of short stories (with illustrations!) between two pieces of cardboard covers tied up with ribbon. Do you remember the first story? It was about a girl who lived in the forest on a hill and saw her first human from where she hid in the trees - a boy from the town in the valley. You wrote about how she fell in love with him from a distance and waited for him and then followed him to the valley, only to discover that he loved someone else there. Her heart broke and she returned to the forest on the hill without ever facing the boy she loved.

Around the same time you discovered the magic of recording your own voice on audio tape, and you started spending hours every afternoon, when the grownups would be asleep, at the music system, at first simply recording yourself reading from books like the British women who read stories on Oman radio. Then you graduated to reading from the newspaper the way they also did on the radio. Then you started pretending to be the news anchor and the correspondent and would record your voice as you spoke through the phone intercom to capture the effect of a real phono. Then you started recording music request shows and mixed your own tapes from your own music collection. After a while you'd pester Abbu to show you how to use the giant video camera. You couldn't do much with it, the whole thing was made up of separate pieces of a large camera, a large VCR, and a very heavy light that would get hot very fast. You couldn't even move around too much because the whole thing had to be plugged into a power source. You didn't have many subjects, so you'd record your kittens instead. Do you remember that time you were waiting to capture your two kittens rolling across the living room floor? All your video and audio tapes are still lying around that house you live in in 2012 where you're 31 years old.

This is who you are. You draw, you write, you design, you film, you edit. You are not the robot people forced you to become as an adult, someone who talks about machines with people who themselves are machines. I know people made fun of you, called you weird, abnormal, and even laughed at you in groups. I know that's when you stopped listening to me and started doing things to make people stop laughing at you. But they never stopped. You stopped drawing and writing and creating things, though. Because I went away, because while you paid so much attention to the people outside - people who weren't very smart in the first place - I felt bad that you felt ashamed of me and had to hide me, even apologise for me. You never stood up for me. You thought the others were right. So I went away. Like that girl from the forest on the hill. And you weren't able to create things anymore.

But you came back to find me. I saw you standing up for me. I had been so hurt, but you put yourself through your biggest fears to find me again. You left everybody and everything to find me. You'd almost become me again, but I realised that I needed to return your gesture. If the boy from the valley came back to the forest on the hill and looked everywhere for the girl, she would need to hear his calls and go to him. Otherwise they would never be able to meet. So here I am. Ten years old. I like eating plain cornflakes with dollops of ketchup on it. I doodle faces of women all over the phonebook while talking to my friends over the telephone. I don't know what a landline is because in 1991 we only have regular phones at home. Many of us still have rotary phones, and Abbu recently ordered a wireless telephone from Dubai because they aren't available in Oman yet. That's the phone through whose telecom you recorded your voice as a pretend radio correspondent. Amma hasn't started insisting I start wearing grown-up shalwar suits and cover my legs yet. I don't know about menstruation, I don't seem to notice my hair or my face yet, I like to play with my cat and her kittens. She gives birth every 6 months. I don't watch too much TV because cable hasn't come yet. I have a group of friends at school that I huddle up with every recess to take turns and narrate ghost stories to. And I write stories and draw and record in audio and video. And I'm very good at it. I don't know what the other kids do, but the things I do don't seem like work because it's like breathing. It just happens. Doesn't it to everybody? It seems like it should. But it doesn't. But I don't know that yet. I know you do in 2012.

You're remembering these things again, aren't you? You've been trying to get back to being the way I am right now, so imaginative and productive. But you've been having a hard time becoming productive again. You've got everything back except the effortlessness. You're forcing yourself to be creative and complex. You're trying to be yourself by imitation, by paint-by-numbers. You're trying to become like me as if you and I are different people. You don't have to do that. You don't have to become like me, you just have to let yourself be.

Do you know the one thing that's standing in the way of your recovery? It's that you're so self-conscious. You think too much before creating something. Before you've even started you start wondering about style and structure and metaphor and marketability. You start worrying about what you will do with what you create. Stop it. You don't have to do anything. Why don't you just be the way I am right now, oblivious to the world outside? I don't think about what anyone will think about my work. It's not even work for me, it's just...me. Do you remember how your roughbook in school would fill up with art work and stories and illustrations? Do you remember how one day in 6th grade you wrote a story, almost in passing, about two characters - Ketchup and Hot Sauce - who almost fell into a bowl of water and dissolved away? Their father, a tomato, was furious at their carelessness. You wrote about how he yelled at his children about how they were made of him and his wife, their mother, a container of salt. You'd even drawn a picture of the whole thing. You hadn't planned it. You just saw some pictures in your head of two characters, and you made the rest up as you went along. You didn't think about anything else except how much fun you were having. Why don't you do that now?

You're so much older than I am. You know so much more about the world. I am 10 years old, and I go to school. That's it. You've lived in 4 countries - 3 of them by yourself - and experienced things I don't understand yet or even know exist. Maybe you've grown up too much. You've certainly cried too much. What, you thought I wasn't watching? But I'm here now, and we are one. Come back to simpler things, to cornflakes with ketchup, to simple stories. Forget about the world, come back to 1991, before the Internet, before cable TV, before cell phones, before judgments, before perversion. I don't even know the word 'pervert' until a few years later when a girl in my class tries to explain it to me and I still don't understand. You can sit with me and tell me about all the things that are going to happen in the new century. You can tell me everything. We'll write it all down as simple stories. The world will be tomato fathers and condiment children, nothing more complicated than that. We don't have to save the world or win an Oscar, we don't have anything to prove to anybody. We don't have to be famous, we don't have to win prizes, we don't have to be afraid of what the world will say. You're my hero, and you don't have to be afraid anymore.

From,

Me

PS - does '20th Century Fox' change it's name to '21st Century Fox' in the future?

PPS - am I beautiful as a grown-up? Has anyone fallen in love with me yet?

PPPS - how tall do I end up being?

Everybody's Favourite Aunt

Aunt Alice's advice to my teenage self in a November 1996 issue of Young Times. Remember her? Good times, good times.

My Friend the Astronaut

It's 2012, and Sunita Williams is making headlines in India. She is an astronaut with NASA and is going to be heading back out to space. She is also of Indian origin from her father's side.

I heard about her on TV a few hours ago here in Muscat, Oman. All the Indian news channels are talking about her.

And I suddenly miss Kalpana Chawla. Do you remember her?

It was 16 years ago in 1996 when the world first heard of Kalpana Chawla. I was 15, and it was such a huge deal for me as a young Indian school kid in Oman to hear about a female Indian astronaut. There were no Indian news channels in those days, but I did rip out stories about her from a youth magazine I used to subscribe to. How amazing was she! In those days I almost used to live in an alternate universe where the Star Trek world was real, and here was an Indian girl like me who was going into space. The final frontier! From NASA! As far as I was concerned, NASA was the real world's Starfleet Academy, and I had a crazy amount of respect for that. I had another Trekkie friend in high school who had a thing for Mr. Spock (I was a Kirk girl myself), and all I ever heard her say was that she was going to grow up and work at NASA too. It felt nice to have one of our own - brown skin, black hair, black eyes, a name that didn't sound like Smith or Sarah - out there, someone who was actually going to see the final frontier my Trekkie friends and I were always obsessing about.

The next time I heard about Kalpana Chawla was many years later in 2003. I was 22 years old and emotional-light-years away as an undergraduate student in my final semester at the Oklahoma State University out there on the American Prairie. A tragedy had occurred, and the Space Shuttle Columbia had disintegrated - along with everyone on board - over several miles in Texas while re-entering the Earth's atmosphere. From what I remember, it was because of a faulty heat-resistant tile on the body of the shuttle. The shuttle had burned up and fallen apart out there in the next state in a region only 4 hours away from where I was. And Kalpana Chawla had been on board.

The American news channels had carried stories about the Columbia crew for days. One of them told a story about Kalpana, about how she had felt while looking at the Earth through a window from inside the Columbia while in space. She had seen her own reflection looking back at her, and she had been able to see the Earth in her eyes. And she had said that the Earth had looked so beautiful and so calm and quiet out there in space, and that if everyone could see what she had seen, that no one would fight each other anymore.

I miss her today. I've never had any real-life role models, never really looked up to anyone particularly while growing up, but she had felt like someone I had known. Her smiling pictures in her astronaut suit, the ones from NASA with the American flag watching over her from behind almost like it had her back, those pictures felt like she had been smiling at me. Like she knew me too. She had kind eyes. She looked like a nice, normal person. Kalpana my friend. I miss her today.

I Lived with a Pretty Girl

I don't remember that girl's name. She was tall, slim, and had very long dark hair that she liked to wear loose. It fell across her back and over her shoulders like so many twisty grapevines. At 16 she had the kind of face that people notice, that sets you apart in a crowd. Bright eyes, a button nose, doll-lips. It's easy to let a pretty face distract you from what's behind it. She was from Kanpur and was one of the 4 girls with whom I shared my (really shoddy) room at the all-girls' Abdullah Hall at the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) in India. I don't remember our room number (maybe 35?), but it was right at the end of the hall, in the same line as dreaded #43 where a group of baleful Kashmiri girls lived. I had only lived with this girl from Kanpur for a couple of weeks, but some things about her made me uncomfortable. Some strange madness behind her eyes which every once in a while turned to stone, something bad there going tick-tock, tick-tock.

We didn't know much about her. This was August 1997, and there was no Internet, no LinkedIn, no cell phones, no Blackberries, no Facebook. All we knew about this fierce (and frightening) beauty was that her parents had divorced (hush!) and that she lived with her mother. She had now joined AMU with us, a bunch of 11th grade science students, and lived locked up with the rest of us at the hostel.

I haven't seen her since 1997. I left AMU only 2 weeks after school started and went back to my old school in Muscat, Oman. I don't remember her name, but I expect that I'll remember it in a dream now after having thought about her so much today. She was a strange girl. Very reactionary and very sensitive. Too intense. She knew she was pretty, and I felt that took away from her beauty. One day we all heard in class about how the 12th graders would host a party for the 11th graders and would also have them walk in a fashion show. When we came back to our room, this girl immediately fished out a pair of worn-out closed shoes. They had low wide plastic heels, and I remember how she had confidently put them on and started strutting about the room in whatever little space we had. She was in her element, but something felt...scary. "I will be crowned the ramp queen," she had said, brightening up so suddenly. I can still see her, her dupatta slung across her body like a sash and tied at her waist, the loose ends swaying as she swung her hips in a confident catwalk, her arms swaying along with the rest of her. She had shown me the bottom of her shoes later. The soles were worn out at an angle. "These are my catwalk shoes," she had told me, "I have worn these out with so much catwalking that I can do it best in them." She was dead serious. I don't know, something about how much she banked on her physical appearance made me feel uncomfortable.

I remember how one day she'd been sitting on her bed, reading a letter she'd received from a friend in Kanpur. That's how we all kept in touch in those days. That sleepy afternoon we were all in our room and not really doing anything at all. All of a sudden she crumpled the letter very loudly in her hand and leapt off the bed. That's how she did things, too fast, too suddenly. We all watched as she ripped the letter to shreds and threw it onto the stone ground. Then she set it on fire and watched it burn. And she kept looking. And we kept looking at her. Her long lean body frozen, her eyes unblinking. Maybe she wanted to take in as much of the sight as she could. I wonder what was the matter with that beautiful girl.