Return of the Novum
PART ONE: In Which Techie Meets Deshpande
The straps tensed. Shehnaz Tanaka dropped into a crouch. Her shoulder blades raised above her spine, lifting her thin jacket off her back and letting it’s tattered edges shimmer in the wind. One wrong step and the platform would come crashing down. Her eyes itched to flick sideways and check the straps. One little second was all she’d need. But it was also all he needed to make a move. Her fixed marble gaze was the only thing she had to hold him in place. Chin up and hand in one pocket he fingered the Szchwitsaki blade. Considering.
All around them the Sighters watched on in silence. Looking through their windows, down at the platform that hung in the narrow alley between clothes lines crackling across from one fire escape to another. One watered a plant. Another chewed on a stick of Awix. A third picked its nose. It suddenly occurred to Shehnaz that all the clothes hanging stiffly around them were pale pink. The Szchwitsaki blade lashed out, missing her sucked-in lungs by a wisp of frosted breath and tearing through the strap. The metal shrieked and she felt herself thrown back, off the edge of the platform as he grabbed for the belt around her waist. She saw his eyes for the first time, flung open as if in absolute horror.
And then the pale pink swallowed.
This was meant for a sci-fi short story. One in which a young muslim girl named Shehnaz works in an IT company and then becomes the office champion at playing a video game called Szhwitsaki Blade. In the story, Shehnaz was then going to be challenged by a new employee named Nandita (because I had just watched Kannathil Muthamittal) who beats her with ease. Full queerness, sci-fi, Bangalore techie making headlines type romance. Shehnaz was the only muslim name I could think of in 12th grade that didn’t already belong to someone in Bollywood. The only other names I knew were Asfiya (who happened to live across the street), Mariam (the only muslim family friend of ours) and Alira (a girl from school who was kind enough to let me sit next to her on the bus).
2019 was a year of broken writing, with every piece and every story left unfinished. I discovered that I was too much like Isabel from Fugard’s ‘My Children, My Africa’, that I didn’t know as Deshpande said, how to push the descriptions of my privilege beyond the unhelpful confines of guilt. On one hand, everything I tried to say about my own life tasted like boiled egg without salt. Sad, bland and like something I had already eaten too much off. On the other, every story I tried to write about other lives, felt like stolen shoes, stories that didn’t fit and weren’t mine to tell. All this while I had lived the Gaiman and Didion way, writing to figure out what I wanted and what I was afraid of, but now as guilt swallowed up all words, I found myself lost.
PART TWO: In Which The Wind Chimes
In June 2019 when I came across a call for science fiction essays on the Himal website, I thought I’d write about how a hundred years after pollution emptied people out of Delhi, trees grew in their place. More than half my imagination flowers from Miyasaki’s forests and I saw an abandoned city, still hazy in a bubble of thick, greenish yellow air, filled with massive trees that clambered over everything. Huge roots, with their ends as intricate as the patterned tile work, twisting in and out over Jama Masjid. The Parliament road paved with giant leaves of mushy colours and bright blue beetles ambling along empty hallways. The maze of metro tunnels underground, all filled up with pale, faintly glowing water. I thought I’d write about how one person decides to go back, and finds that there are still people living in that forest city of thick greenish yellow air. People left behind by others, to make their own way.
Ocean Vuong says that when dead friends come visiting, they pass through you like wind through a wind chime. North Delhi probably feels like a giant wind chime right now.
Skeletal shops, scattered belongings and the sound of souls passing through.
On the Wednesday that I got back from the riot relief centre, it rained all evening and all night and sitting in my bedroom with the door open just a little to let the sound of leaves flutter in, I felt all of the weight and violence from that one week come suddenly over me. Covid19 is nothing when there is so much hate around. It spreads quicker and kills faster too.
A few days ago, my friend Vishnu told me about two little birds who came and built a nest in his garden. He was explaining why he got delayed with some design work and described how he had to stand guard by the nest to keep the bigger chemboth birds away. Yesterday Akshay wrote to me about how most of his life now revolves around washing dishes and feeling the weightless float of liquid soap. Months ago Mythili wrote to me too, about love being as simple as getting to say kai kodu to someone without worrying about it. Everyone seems to be focusing on the small things these days. When the news gets overwhelming, take a furious walk to Betsy beach, fold some clothes, sit with the neighbour’s dog, talk to your brother for hours on the phone, learn to cook rasam that doesn’t taste like water with a bunch of spices dying in it. Do these things to keep yourself occupied so that you can get by, from one day to the next. When grief is too close a reality to write about, learn to live instead.
PART THREE: In Which Dusana Meets Yellow Butterflies
Walking into the shower room, trying to stand tall and step tentative at the same time so that her body curved unnaturally, Dusana noted that that was the cool thing about fiction. It didn’t have to be accurate. She scrunches up her nose peering into the shower rooms to check for bugs. The sound of the faucet scared them and they’d fly up into her face all frantic and panicky, making her dance awkwardly as she tried to get rid of them in silence while the other swimmers showered in blissful oblivion next door. It had happened before.
Kinda took the punch out of her name.
Dusana Wires.
Such a Gibson thing to be. Such a street fighting, rebellious hacker slash biker whizz thing. Well not biker exactly, because bikes would be outdated by then. More like a hybrid skateboard that also flies or a batmobile type twisting machine that rode on walls instead of roads.
When she gets home, Dusana puts her costume and towel out to dry, uses the loo, brushes her hair, microwaves a bowl of rice and leftover chicken curry, yawns and sits down in the middle of her room to eat. Roommate walks in, glancing briefly at her with narrowed eyes and then disappears through the balcony door. Within minutes Dusana can hear half of a conversation over the phone. Something about transferring money and next Saturday being a holiday. Parents surely. Not boyfriend. Sometimes Dusana wished Roommate had a boyfriend so that she could complain about them being lovey dovey all the time. But Roommate was too independent for one. She had her own life to live and would often stop suddenly mid-stride, hold Dusana by her shoulders, stare into her face and say “Boys Need Counsellors. Not Us.”
Dusana didn’t know if she agreed.
The boys she knew seemed all right, but that wasn’t saying much.
The name Dusana came to me one morning in Cubbon Park. I was sitting on a bench trying to get late for college but it was too cold to do anything productive. I looked up top 10 sci-fi names and realised that most of them were either Russian or Japanese. This Dusana story was going to be about a girl who imagined all kinds of cool things while living a very uncool life. Evidently too close to home for fiction. I grew up on Spiderman and Tarzan comics, on the trilogies of ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ and Christopher Nolan’s ‘Batman’. When I came home to Bangalore from Delhi last month, the first thing I did was binge on seasons of Arrow with Ishaan. I love the training scenes, from Karate Kid when he learns to do a split across the balcony railing, to Nanda Parbhat where they learn to go days without food or sleep, to the Forbidden Kingdom where dumb white boy learns Kung Fu beneath waterfall. They’re so awesome I go mad.
I am in love with vigilantes and cities being taken over by trees. I want that confidence of a person who has spent years dedicated to physical training, I want to be able to imagine a future that is not the world of today.
On the train home from Delhi this time, I started reading One Hundred Years of Solitude. It’s a story in which a fictional village of Macondo survives (among other things) generations of insomnia plague, the wrath of a Banana Company and four years, three months and two days of continuous rain. What is 2020 if not something out of a Marquez novel? When the real world begins to fill with unreal things, like “bones filling up with foam”, perhaps this fight must be handed over to fiction rather than fact. Enough of the dystopian sci-fi, we’re already living it. Make way now for utopian worlds instead, because I seem to have forgotten how to dream of one.
