Raw Mango Words

New Delhi, India. 2019

I didn’t know what to do, so I asked Nithila. She said it was too much for a voice note, that I should wait instead for her next email. “Why do you write?” I expected her to ask, checking my pockets to make sure I had my Gaiman and Didion quotes ready. But no, she knows me too well to simply ask what I want her to. “Why do you share what you write?” reads her email. Eugh. I can feel my nose crawling up my face. What a galeej question.

I want to say that I share because I’ve always shared. What else do you do with your writing? It’s like playing hot potato. You create something, it burns, you fumble around with it for a while, tossing it from hand to hand and then you just chuck it at someone else. Eugh, here take this piece of me and begone! Not my problem anymore, the words have left my body and I never want to see them again. Nithila would be amused with this one, hmm. But the word ‘always’ in that sentence doesn’t quite sit right.

It’s 5:42 a.m and as light from the balcony begins to slide through my mesh door, I notice my patchy red notebook on the floor. We call them notebooks now, or journals. Diaries are for 13 year olds. I’ve never had to lock it or hide it away but the one time Archita’s unnecessarily discerning owl eyes noticed and picked it off my windowsill, I felt my body freeze in panic. The notebook, the crumpled sheets of my writing from Dharamshala all stuffed away between clothes somewhere, that one Google doc file of endless scrolling that I’d rather take to the grave with me than ever have Amma see. Writing to find out what I feel about things but not sharing because those feelings scare me. The sentences written in a heady rush that come as a shock even to myself later on, forceful in their violent extremity. Words that need to be cushioned among other, more gentle words, before they can be let loose.

Ever since July when this city swallowed me whole, I’ve been trying to write. Back in Bangalore for a week and around every corner lurks the So Shalom, How Has Delhi Been Treating You? And I find myself struggling with the rapidly growing vastness of that question. Aiyo, which Delhi do you mean, with whom, during which part of my stay here? Are you asking about that first week of long quiet hours in the balcony doorway, of unsmiling shopkeepers and lots of noodles from Shagun, or my last one of late night walks for ice-cream? Should I begin with the comfort of the pink line ladies “dibba” on the way back from a disorienting workers protest at Mayapuri, the freshly painted but lifeless wide lanes of Vasant Kunj, the pretty lights and floating voices of singing cancer patients at Rajiv Chowk or should I… begin with the sky? The way it opens out so freely above Humayun’s Tomb, like a bedsheet given the flick of a strong wrist, throwing little drops of sunlight through the fine lattice work?

Do I write for you about sitting in class, Riti and Devika, Shubhojeet and Snigdha all asking questions around me the way I once incessantly did in undergrad, and feeling like a domesticated cow because all I think of now is the Outram Lines plumber and not the Mughal Era peasant? Or do I write for you about the heady freedom of running down the roads in JNU at midnight screaming Robert Frost Lal Salaam, and the warm satisfaction of a successfully home-cooked lunch with Aditi on a floor we just scrubbed clean?

I return to this series of questions and find that at the very end, I’ve scratched out a few more lines. About how living in Delhi feels like living without a plan and about how for once, I like that. I seek refuge in that because thinking of a long term in this world that’s burning everywhere you look makes me want to whack my head against the wall and never wake up again.

My words feel raw here somehow.
Like they expose too much, too soon.

Sitting with Shubhojeet in the evening, we talk about how I never returned to the Queer Collective meetings on campus, having given away too much of myself all at once on that very first day. Three years of undergrad and even the classmates I love to pieces have never seen me cry, never seen me truly angry, never seen me as anything other than that peppy, political, pixie cut thing that I was, riding madly from meeting to protest to panel discussion. Something tells me that here in this city of happy women in home shorts at the store down the street where they say Khula instead of Change, I will break a lot sooner. In Bangalore’s buses I had an expression I could wear like a mask everyday but here in the metro, my moonji is an open book, flickering from the restless impatience of tears to the idiotic grin of text messages and emails that makes my insides plunge through cold water. Everything is gajabujja. I want to tell my flatmates, I wasn’t always this much of a mess but it feels unnecessary because hey they seem to say, so what even if I was?

I try my hand at fiction for Toto and Nithila says she can’t give me feedback on my writing because that feels somehow like giving me feedback on myself. We talk about Adichie and Ifemelu and she says “but your blog is personal, and the person reading it should know you and your context a little bit to appreciate what you are saying”. I think of Anisha Ajith and the letter of golden stars on her blog and what Nithila says begins to fall into place. I think of Mythili and Archita and how reading their writing is for me so much about keeping in touch with where they’re going. About watching to see how they figure something out.

And yet I never knew Ila before I read her blog. I never would have guessed from the way she can sit in English Department chairs that the way she writes about her mother would always make me want to cling to mine.

It’s only with emails and her writing that I’m getting to know Sharon. Amma’s old student Ajinkya became more than just a name from her stories with his Facebook posts. Paswan comes alive with his wild storytelling, and it’s like we’re sitting on the canteen steps again, him speaking his rapid Hindi and me my fully vada-sambar English.

I have never been one who understood poetry or felt much empathy for the quivering voices of slam poets on a stage full of fairy lights but that day, sitting in Akshay’s bedroom with Ardra next to me, reading that little book of Deeksha Verender’s poems? That day, sitting in the bus stand scrolling through Daniel Sukumar’s instagram? I felt a strange marble blend of both respect and instinctive protectiveness spread over me for people I had hardly ever spoken more than two sentences to. Respect, protectiveness and a weird gratitude.

Perhaps the raw words ought to be shared too. Writing, which for me is confession, cannot be so unless someone reads it and yes, there is fear that those who know me will read and begin to worry in ways that I do not want them to. But raw words can be kind words too, words that I haven’t shared because writing them made me shy. Words of a feelings new to me that makes me all kalaachi-fied and full of chinna aasais. Words of a world where your breath turns to mist and every touch feels like freshly cut grass beneath your feet on a cold but sunny day.

So here goes a sharing. A work in progress, a “notes from a big city”, a journal, a diary, a privilege of space to speak freely while lost within the folds of the internet. Violent or kind, if I am writing, I am okay and if you are reading, I hope that you may soon be okay too.

10th July, 2019.
Dharamshala.

What is it about the stillness of non-city spaces that makes me sad? As though the sadness has been waiting, collecting inside me like wisps of cotton candy that bubble over only now… in the space left by silence. Why do I think in rhetorical questions? Like Isabel from Alexander McAll Smith’s stories does, each incident, each observation, branching into threads of uncontrollable speculation.

At night we find a reggae club and dance on the effect of alcohol that has been made stronger by the price we paid for it. Why do I not find it creepy when random young stranger boy in leather jacket dances and touches right to next me? Why only the middle aged man who belongs not here but on an office sponsored trip to Goa? Is creepiness also shaped by our own attraction? Would traveling here be scary or exciting, how bold would I have been in this ganjedi land of flirts aplenty?

Why do monasteries make me want to cry? The missing people posters, the injustice, the silence punctured by a cricket match on a punjabi kid’s iPhone. The eyes of the Green Tara statue gazing past Real Fruit Juice and Dabur Honey offerings. Is it only possible to find religion in sadness and desolation, in vast empty spaces filled with rows of pillars and high roofs, in holding on to nothing but ourselves?

The rain will not stop. My wrists tingle and yet I write with urgency of a madman. Madwoman as VJ would say. VJ whose writing fills me as I wonder what she thinks of my every retweet. In the bar where the women were more attractive than the men, I find myself missing Senalda’s excitement and drunken freedom. Nithila and her big person hugs.

Kailas asks about wanting children and I am surprised by the anger in my own voice. The quiver of a word when I express an opinion I never knew I felt so strongly about. The weight of the unsaid lingers like the tightness of my ribcage just before asthalin kicks in. What is the point of obituaries if the person they are meant for is gone?

Something is wrong with the plural in that sentence.

Does it rain in Delhi?
I could write for hours like this, just free flow.
Limbo makes my legs feel like jelly.
I miss the presence of people I know.

6th August, 2019
New Gupta Colony, North Campus

Went to DSE to meet Mounica, realised I got the date wrong, tried to stroll casually into library without membership, had embarrassing encounter with librarian uncle, fled. Walked back home, got lost, bought a fruit bun from a grumpy shop aunty, came home, waited outside for Yogita to finish a bath, sit on the bed without lunch and find myself lying that evening during a game of Never Have I Ever after three years of never having ever had to lie.

Miyasaki to the rescue, followed by green tea and midnight walks to the funny open air gym with Vidya.

It disturbs me that people here use the word Bhaiya for men not just a little but much much older than them. Men who should not have to strain this way, pulling a cycle across a drenched city. Vidya bets that they make a lot of money everyday and I try my hand at explaining the math of 30 rupees a ride but give up too soon. Vinay describes me to Elizabeth as a child who cares much about the world but lacks the will to do anything about it. I think of him and the number of knots within myself that he has helped me unravel. My writing is reduced to angst. No one has ever described me as lacking in will before.

Bath in a bathroom finally cleaned, smelling like her shampoo.
Rain on a morning filled with sheepish giggles in the metro.
Music and white curtains, the sixth chai of today.
I like it when my feet do not gather dust from marble floors.

27th August, 2019
Vishwavidyalaya metro station

It is paralysing. I try my hand at fiction for the deadline of a fast approaching short story competition and find every character collapsing in hysteric outbursts against the world. I am like Amruta Patil’s Kari. Long threads of email discussion, WhatsApp forwards, student groups going wild over each other in a never ending cycle of No, Why Can’t You Understand? And it feels futile. I write of sulaimani chai, scooter rides beneath raintrees and people I never got to know better. I hear Iflah laugh at all my worry and I see her write words in a language of revolution I am yet to understand.

It’s been 21 days since the shutdown in Kashmir, 21.

5th September, 2019
Jawaharlal Nehru University

Yesterday I surrounded myself with SFI people who have adopted me on campus and went for the presidential debate. The in-fighting, the heckling, the signalling from one comrade to another saying “hey no do not clap for what they said even though you might agree with it, they are overcome by identity politics, they are not with us”. The Malayalam, the beards, the kurtas and I feel anger. When I sit with Amartya later on, at the steps of a dhaba selling banta well past midnight, I hear voices in my head that make me wary of men selling ideology and still somehow feel that temptation that comes over me when Varkey speaks of Marx. Temptation to throw my entire body and soul into fighting, to not hold back anymore, to give in to blind conviction.

Yet every time I sit to write, every time I draft a social media rant or begin to engage in heated discussion, I find myself feeling the need to read more instead. My revelations get repetitive. Two months of a new life and more than a month of no word from Iflah. I write as though she is always on my mind but the truth is that it is not her but my unwashed clothes that I am thinking of. The everyday of my life sweeps the things that scare me into hidden corners of the room.

Like the thought of a phone call from home. The thought of a what if something happens. I find myself thinking of what it would feel like to place an open palm on the tavi inside the canteen where they fry parathas, to grip a knife within a fist, to eat chilli after chilli and I wonder if the pain would consume me so entirely that it would leave my mind free.

10th September 2019,
The Ridge

Where is all this energy coming from? he asks, peering down at me, looking genuinely like he expects a very clear and precise answer. Um, from right here I think, yep, this exact point between the lower bones of my ribcage. Or wait, maybe it’s coming from that cup of chai we had earlier in the afternoon, the one that made me feel complete again. Aiy, how to pinpoint the source of this joy?

This feeling that engulfs me every time I see open spaces? The free rolling lawns of Lodhi Gardens that seem to sprint like marathon runners from one into the other, the flat stone of Jama’s open square where every tile feels entirely soaked in sun. The wideness of roads in Delhi makes me want to throw my arms out to the sides in full titanic style. My calves burn with the urge to run. To run and run and keep on running, to cycle furiously until all my breath is out there in the world, to play a wild and vigorous game of badminton until even my toenails feel drained from all the happy exhaustion. Where is this energy coming from? This inability to stay still amidst all that is beautiful and not gold but marble? Smooth, cold marble that rises to meet the arches of my bare feet, marble with little swirls of colour and opaque inlay. The blue is a heavy, solid one, the orange sparkles and glitters, but the green… I could eat the green. Alive and whole.

Is happiness in Delhi going to always feel as extreme as the sadness does?

Happiness: at the sight of so many people going to work all at once, the determination in their collective footsteps slowly seeping into mine. Satisfaction: of a secret that tickles the expression I struggle to keep still on my face when I see a footpath barbershop where the man being shaved has fallen fast fast asleep.
Pleasure: at the light in a woman’s eyes at the college CR area as she reads something silly and lifts her face just once from her book to be lost in a kind of warm memory.

Today, I feel filled.

31st October, 2019
Meena Bazaar

I can feel the spiral begin.
I know what is coming. I know I shouldn’t go there. I can see myself sitting in class, not hearing a word of what’s being said, eyes glazing over and feet unable to stop jittering. I start listing. I know I shouldn’t start listing. I know I should just snap out of it, cut it out, STOP, it’s all in your head, put an end to this futile drama, STOP thinking STOP.

But no.
It begins at random with the forgetting of a hard copy of my assignment submission. It moves to the number Iflah gave me of her aunt. To Kavaunty. To the key I still haven’t couriered to a friend. The overdue book I need to return to the library. The emails unanswered. I see my professor gesturing as he speaks but cannot hear him. It is not the long term that paralyses me this time, it is the immediate future, the this very afternoon. What to do to snap out of this panicky mood and be productive again? I imagine returning home and pulling down all my shelves, yanking the clothes out and sweeping things off the top of them in frustration the way they do in American movies and yet I can’t help but think; what if the little bottles of paint break, what will I paint with then? What if the nailpolish spills on my clothes, how do I get it off then? I imagine that phone call from home.

Spiral, spiral, spiralling.
It is Devika who stops it.

Grinning from across the canteen, dabbing to say hi. The thoughts blank out and disappear entirely. For a while I feel quietened. Grateful. The cheese maggi tastes good. Her conversation distracts me. We sit on the lawns then and I find myself spacing out. The thoughts are gone but there are none to replace them. I catch the middle of a sentence and lose track of the end. I begin a story and forget what I was trying to say. They laugh, hai hai how lost are you? Is your memory always this bad, how do you forget your own words?

I don’t know how.
It happens. And the world feels slower. Covered in haze. I scare the shit out of myself with this inability to get going. And then he takes me to Meena bazaar.

Lights, glitter, brocade, shoes, watches, oranges sliced into circles like pineapples usually are, disco lights that remind me of Ajayuncle’s house. Rows and rows of dark, faded stone steps, silver toe rings, burqas by the dozen, a chai shop. A proper, familiar chai shop with proper, familiar salt biscuits and proper, familiar muslim men and women huddled around the veneer topped tables. Glass glasses and milk poured by the metre. A shop full of clocks and framed quotes from the Quran. Jama appears from within the smog and as though a bucket of cold water has been poured over my head, I am awake again.

13th November, 2019
Emails from EJP

I woke this morning to an email. Emails from EJP set my mind in motion like a clockwork toy that’s finally found its key. I stare at the ceiling and zoom out from my own life and I see us all scattered across the map. Nithila sipping coffee on the sloped lawns of NCBS as her mind tinkers away at her future plans, Rosh in uncharacteristic silence by a spectacular lake in a city that has no street dogs, Crystal sitting like a porukki on American sidewalks as she catches a break from kindergarten children, Archita marching along the beach to ominous music that tells me more about her life than her words do.

Anisha writes about the flowers in Bangalore and I wonder if it is not the cities themselves but the point in our lives at which we discover them that makes us fall in love. She writes of the smell of roses, sandalwood and jasmine and how their upper caste temple-ness comes in the way of her pleasure and I remember again that the best thing about Development Journalism with Vinaya ma’am was how honest we could be with each other. How easy she made it for us to reveal the parts of ourselves that we were most uncomfortable with.

Mythili writes and I see her standing at a highway side drive-through, hands stuffed deep into the pockets of her large hoodie jacket, “smelling the air of the person she’s become”. On days when I find myself having to eat alone, a concept completely alien to my meal-time-loving family back home, I think of her confident solo trips to movie theatres and feel stronger. “Love means being comfortable enough to say kai kodu to your partner” she observes from those around her and I love how I am not alone in taking note of the little things that slip through crowds in public spaces.

Like in Connaught Place where couples collapse into each others arms so easily. Where the musical fountains leap and dance, where Tik Tok videos are made without any trace of the slight sheepishness that overcomes us when we take selfies outside the privacy of home.

16th November, 2019
#1673, second floor

It’s been one whole week. A complete one, self-satisfied and filled like a perfect circle that has concluded its successful arch outwards by finally curling into its own tail again. I feel like me. Like Bangalore me. Free of sadness and frustration and confusion of having lost and being lost. Aditi and I cook chicken and fry fish and set the room ablaze with fairy lights that make the shadows of our money plant leaves dance on the creamy coloured walls. The empty corridors now carry conversations, turning names — Anjali, Lalit, Lham, Sakhpui, Amartya — into people.

25th November, 2019
Exam season

A junior from Bangalore shares a story on Instagram, attributing the significance of exams and our paranoia with being productive to the great evil of Capitalism. All my life I grew up hearing stories against status quo, against the Indian education system, against the pattern of study, work, marry, reproduce, die. When our family of friends came home, they brought their stories with them and we listened… dropping out of college, running away from family, leaving a life in Germany to find another in Japan, leaving a farm in Kerala to find a film in Bombay, rebel love marriage, rebel shaving of head, rebel parties, rebel religion, rebel jobs. Forget taking the road less taken, leaving the road entirely.

And yet here I am; 10th grade, 12th grade, BA, MA, and next? Mphil, PhD, NET, job interview and next? It is as though we are all aware of how much we disagree with the system we are in and everything it stands for, and yet… we continue to perpetuate it. As if someone is physically forcing us.

Why, after so many years and so many coming of age movies, is it still such a radical, unacceptable, difficult thing to want to just stop studying and set out searching? Why does it still feel like such a privileged, white person, cranky child thing to say? What will you do, roam around in Gokarna making dreamcatchers until some genius uncle gives you life changing gyaan? Sit around in the Women’s Commission office trying to figure out what they really do all day? Travel along the eastern coast learning about changing trends in fishing patterns so you have something to tell Rohini Mohan if you ever meet her again? Lock yourself in a room of your own and read; Ambedkar, Marx, the actual text of Foucault, Freud, Woolf, Bhagat Singh and Narayana guru, anything but second hand summaries reduced to five lines on a Professor Prepared PPT. The Quran, the Bible, Idris Shah and the Gita, for real. Just to see what happens if you find something there.

Am I lost or am I lazy?

Is existentialism the easy way out of academic rigour? Of forcing yourself to just aargh, read the next 400 pages the way you read the previous 4 and press on, through lecture after lecture and hour after hour until maybe, who knows, perhaps, by chance, you will find yourself one day writing something that you actually think will mean more than just a grade.

The folds in my pink-orange batik shrug remind me of an installation in Pepper House, Fort Kochi. Columns of cloth and the quiet of tentative footsteps. Like the Moorish mosque in Kapurthala, where I could have stayed forever. 2019 has robbed me of things to believe in.

3rd December, 2019
Airport

I left for Hyderabad last weekend. A Friday following a week of exam season exhilaration. Poured my mind out at the paper, skipped home in happiness and packed within minutes. The nervousness and fear of last night had gone and I found myself thinking, yes, I can do this weekend. I can attend this 40th day ceremony for my uncle who so recently passed away and meet the people who feel the loss most strongly and cry if I need to but freely, with the kind of tears that flow like water and not the kind that burn.

Missed my flight.
Forgot the glasses I needed for the next day’s drive.
Left an unopened tiffin box full of food in the bedroom.
Forgot a toothbrush in Delhi and a second in Bangalore.
Didn’t bring a back-up kurti.

As I waited for the next flight at the airport, Amma calls and says she’s more worried than angry. What state of mind are you in, what kind of life have you been living in that far away city? Ma couldn’t sleep on Friday because of me. On Saturday because of Joe uncle and Kavaunty. On Sunday because of Ishaan. On Monday Amma slept and on Tuesday, I missed my flight again.

What do I do with these thoughts in my head? Of metro tracks and knives and fast cars that will not see me if I jump out onto the road all of a sudden. Do I take them seriously or dismiss them as drama? Do I get down from this flight, call Vinay or Shubhojeet, and yell at them for things that aren’t their fault because I know that they will never not listen?

How does one go so quickly from self-confidence to self-hatred? The nausea that started with a loss of conviction in TSO has now wormed its way into other parts of my life and I realise I am sick of being sick of myself this year. I am done with feeling so faltu.

I find myself going home to Aditi instead. To the inside lanes of North Campus that she knows so well, drowning in the study of Jenkins and Carr to keep my mind clear. Aditi knows the dogs on every street corner, calling them out from their pack with just a whistle and the crinkle of biscuit wrappers. When life throws difficult situations are her, she comes to my room, pours out all the ridiculous, extra type things she could do and then at the end of the day, laughs at herself and decides on the most sober, practical response of them all. When I tell her about my weekend, we laugh and I feel like I’m with Arundhati again, giggling with the comfort of retrospection at things that once felt like the end of all worlds.

23rd December, 2019
Alternative Law Forum

Shivajinagar again, right after a meeting at ALF. Lingarajapuram Tamil, Mosque Road Hindi and the kind of Kannada that makes everyone seem familiar with each other. Easy flowing sentences cushioned in accents that draw themselves like shawls around each word, protecting them from the cold of suspicion. Half an hour with people speaking their own languages, a “regional” song played over and over, a movie that is neither Bollywood nor Hollywood and there it goes… my mind thinking in languages I cannot speak. Thoughts flowing up and down in tune with the sounds around me. It’s only when I pause that the blanks in those sentences begin to rise to the surface. The fact that most of the sentence is made up of approximate sounds and English and little bits and pieces of languages I simply cannot say with confidence that I know.

Rosh writes about it well.
A protest filled week returns me to places where I once belonged.

2nd January, 2020
#002, Russet Apartments

When I was 10 years old, everything wrong in my life was somehow all Amma’s fault. It’s because of youuu, I would cry angrily, my life sux, leave me alone! And then Amma would say that sucks was a word I shouldn’t be using and that either way, it was not a word that had an x in it.

I was brought up without religion and I blamed this on Amma too. So one day when I whined that I wanted to pray but did not know how, Amma said that sometimes before going to sleep, she would lie awake in bed and just remember to be thankful. Doesn’t matter whom you’re thanking or what you’re thankful for, she said, just remember to do it and you’ll feel better. At the time I was so thrilled by this idea that I practised it very ardently every night, forcing Ishaan into it as well because he was 6 and I was Leader. Then at some point I turned teenager and became too awesome for things like God and all.

But what Amma said was true, it does make you feel better.

At New Year’s Eve Ishaan asked us what we felt about 2019 and I made a sound that I don’t know how to spell. It was about 75% the sound you make when you step into something squishy level disgusting and about 25% the sound you make when someone you’ve been wanting to hug for a long time suddenly takes things into their own hands and surprise hugs you instead. Gajabuja. Or as Amit would say, Oh My Allah Hey Bhagwan. My 2019 was saved by people. Who The People? These the people;

To Acha for sending me pictures of Chikki and Lupu when I most needed them.
To Amma for taking my word and trusting me enough to not worry.
To Aditi for the cooking experiments and cleaning routines that kept me grounded.
To Archita for making sounds that were relatable and for being a “fire person”.
To Anisha for gifting me beautiful Malayalam sentences.
To Mythili for gifting me beautiful Kannada sentences.
To Vinay for knowing how to get my mind to shutup.
To Ishaan for trying.
To Roshini for her dumb voicenotes and lengthy midnight conversations.
To Arun for her dumb Skype calls and for fracturing her nose because that’s the funniest shit I’ve heard of in a while.
To Ananya and Akshay for not giving up on everything.
To Zenisha, Ajinkya, Ila, Malathi, and others for having words and drawings that make me feel like things are still beautiful in this world.

To Shubhojeet.
To Nithila.

Thanks for existing, thanks for being there, god bless, may you have a hundred children, live long, prosper, all that jazz, okay bye, just don’t do dhoka now that I’ve said nice things.