Delhi Stole My Divinity

From my diary, dated November 30, 2011:

"I'm in some kind of funk. I keep myself very occupied with work, and I try not to think more than 24 hours into the future. I try not to think about dreams, goals, ambitions...

...I don't know what to believe in anymore. I was driven, self-assured, because I believed in God. But that got sufficiently rattled in India. I feel like a steam engine whose engine has gone cold. I feel like I could go 100 mph but I just feel so heavy and hollow. I am trying to figure out what I believe in now, but I can't come up with anything. I feel slow and panicky. Then I remember not to let myself think and feel too much. I remember to let myself be selfish and territorial. I am a house of cards these days. I want to call on God, but I suddenly feel like there could be no such thing. My steam engine's coal room has no fuel anymore.

What a crisis I am in. And you wouldn't know it from my face. I look so calm and speak so softly, like I am sleepwalking. I want to go home, I want to put a distance between myself and my memories of Delhi this past year. Everything hurts too much, and it's been 4 months already."

Dilli ka Disease

From my diary, dated December 20, 2011:

"I was so belligerent my last 24 hours in Delhi. The bank (SBI) was giving me shit, the PG aunty gave me shit about the deposit, the airline people gave me shit, and I threw a fucking fit. I spent 2 hours at customs waiting for them to clear my stuff, it was yuck. Thank God the shipping guy was reliable. He was very, very dependable. I was like a raging lunatic by the time I boarded my plane. I went to the sleep the minute I sat in my seat."

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.

A Conversation with the Man at the Museum

"I'm taking a panorama photo, it's not a video!"

But the museum employee would not listen to me. "I don't know anything about that," he said, "but you have to pay 2000 rupees to take videos."

I showed him the 200 rupee permit that I'd bought to take photographs in the museum with my DSLR camera, but he insisted that I had been taking a video. I tried to show him the panorama photo I had taken with my smaller camera, but he didn't want to see it. "I don't know these things," he kept saying.

The more I tried to show him the photo, the more agitated he got, the louder and more shrill his voice got, and he then went off to report the 'video' to the authorities. He returned a few minutes later by himself - looking sheepish, I thought - and then suddenly straightened up and said that I was using two cameras but had paid to use only one.

I just kept looking at him because the whole encounter was ridiculous, and he soon ran off, but not before telling me to delete the 'video' I had taken because I would be 'checked' upon leaving the museum. Of course, nothing ended up happening.

Museum Directions

There was something very creepy about the Parsi-looking man from the Jehangir Art Gallery. I had asked him to tell me where the Prince of Wales museum was, and even though it was down the street, he'd almost leapt to take me there himself.

What a creepy man. He was probably in his mid-30s, light-skinned, stout, clean-shaven, and with no expression at all. He mumbled and stared directly into my eyes the whole time, and about 2 minutes into our awkward walk to the museum where I could feel him looking me up and down and rubbing his hands with silent slimey glee I told him I could get there myself and I very happily left him behind.

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.

A Death in Bombay

A crowd of men with handkerchiefs wrapped on their heads carried a large coffin through a drizzly sticky muddy busy inner Bombay street.

The coffin was covered with bright green fabric that had Arabic calligraphy on it and strings and strings of red roses and white jasmines.

People stopped to watch as the men quickly moved the coffin into the back of a waiting ambulance.

Some of the bystanders touched their hearts with their fingers and then kissed them.

A small crowd of the nearest passerbys - Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Parsi - started to gather because Death will someday touch everyone.

It is the great equaliser, the unifier.

And I remembered a dream I had in high school half a lifetime ago where I was wandering in some dirty Indian city, and I saw both Hindu and Muslim funeral processions passing by in front of me.

In my dream, I had heard a disembodied voice telling me not to stare because that's how riots get started.

Today I saw my first Muslim funeral procession, and I chose not to stare because I didn't want to make a circus out of it.

As I quickly averted my eyes and started to move on, I passed an Indian man who could've been any Indian man mumbling to himself, to no one, to everyone.

The only words that made it to my ears as I passed him by were, "it's not polite to stare at these things..."

Bombay Photo

Maybe I felt peace in Bombay because with the
rains and the mud and the humidity that keeps your hair
damp and wet all day long and the mass of people that keeps
coming and coming and coming and the young people
and the old people and the babies and the
animals and the couples kissing under umbrellas by the sea and the people
dying on the street and the old British
buildings and the old Parsi symbols and the bacteria in my
food you can see the big picture and feel
part of the forever moving human story like a link that
believes the chain exists because it can see the other
links like an arrow in the diagram of an ecosystem that
has finally been neatly put into a box.

What a relief to feel part of something what a relief to have found a
picture to paint myself into even if the scenery around me
is
falling
apart.

Title: a scene from the life of Khadija.

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