The Ladies Finger

Don't know how I first came across it, but I love this blogzine--irreverent, honest, charming, and pathbreaking. It seems to be written and produced in India, but it's a great read for anyone with transnational feminist sensibilities.

Trans-Local

Dad's big birthday today

We're just too far away.

But we get

an archana and a pattu

veshti for Ganesha.

And for ourselves,

lunch (with Mimosas).

Now we''re celebrating

(Even though

the birthday boy is teetotal.)

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After I flew back from India…

All of NuNu's butterflies 

were ready to fly away…

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Midday/Half a World Away

These names are written under my skin

Their faces are painted on every mirror.

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Unexpectedly...

 The family portrait my mom so desired

turns out a bit Jindalesque?

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A Third Coast

On the brine of memory
the ink of veins marks spots

It is a storm of forgetting;
at each sob, she jettisons

Parents as they were, embraces
in sorrow how they now are

sweeps it all into feeling
grabbing and flailing even so

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Nostalgia and Kindness

It's true that every time I hear this song, it brings a lump to my throat.


Nu says, "That's like you, Mama. You left your mom and Dad too."

At silently thumps me on my shoulder. (Somewhat smirkily, the way he seems to do everything these days, but still kindly.)

Broods: Mother and Father

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This is a morning

Painted with the colors of my childhood
a door swings, calls my childhood name
the stairs lift me as did mother and father
the breeze, their blessing calling me home

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Schooled

I was just browsing Shakespeare's Sister on a break and literally had my life interpreted for me.

In an article about high-heels, Melissa McEwan explains that for fat women, heels (which have been criticized by some feminists as a form of self harm) may seem a necessary defense:

Fat women have all kinds of narratives about sloppiness, laziness, dirtiness to overcome. Sometimes heels are a crucial part of looking "put together" in a way that sufficiently convinces people that we care about ourselves, that manages to counteract pervasive cultural narratives that fat people don't care about ourselves… I get treated completely differently at a $20 hair salon if I'm dressed up or dressed down. Two totally different experiences. I get treated differently at the doctor's office, and at the emergency room. I can't go to the ER in sweatpants, because I'll get shittier treatment. In an emergency, I have to worry if I am dressed up enough to prove that I deserve respect and care.

All round horrible. Points I completely empathize with without having experienced them myself. (Or so I think.)

And then the part that changes the way I count my life. Melissa McEwan continues:
I am speaking to my own experience here, but many women with other marginalized bodies have the same experience. Women of color, trans* women, women with disabilities, and other marginalized classes of women may strongly relate to the idea of having to be "put together" in order to be treated as human beings.
That would totally explain why after years of dressing in jeans and homespun tunics and putting a lot of thought into looking like I didn't care how I looked in India, I've become--after years of living in the West--consumed by fashion. Because looking like a vagabond* is cute only if people know that you're playing and know you're not really one.

*(as the nuns at my private school may have said)

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Weekend with Grandparents Portrait (2)

With Maama-Thatha

Horseshoe Park, Cleveland

Déjà vu / Rétrospective

I remember sitting in an undergraduate poetry class, not really paying attention, wondering if my acceptance and scholarship letters would come that day, watching the treetops rearing and bucking into the wind and thinking my happiness would be as elemental as theirs.

Of course, there's this:

Coloniality continues, in fact, whenever bright young men and women from all over the world decide to cap off their educations by going on pilgrimage to pinnacles of Western civilization; when they dedicate themselves to the Western canon and walk in the shadows of gothic cathedrals and imperial facades, and learn that this is the good life. 

It continues whenever anyone anywhere in the world walks down a street and sees a billboard on the modern cathedral that is a shopping mall, and sees in that conjunction of power, wealth, and beauty an image of desire. In other words, it happens these days not by the strength of arms or the power of states, but by the captivation of the eyes, the training of the taste, by unwritten rules of thumb – that we all learn everywhere, without even knowing it. Coloniality is far from over: it is all over. It is perhaps the most powerful set of forces in the modern world.

-- 

For Amma

Mother, my diameter
I am yours, your radius.

Gambling into leaf too early
the crocuses are betrayed
frayed on drifts of winter,
sleet, and no daisies
at our feet

All weekend long,

Toronto's lonely songs

their Omni and just me

the same Hindi movies

this time I see alone

Bound to you. Only you.
But found by everyone.

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Power

Squirmy Nu and her dad jockeying for position on the couch:



A: Stay still. You have to listen to me, don't you know I'm the boss?

Nu: YOU stay still. Don't you know that I'm the princess?

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The Book Kids of Mumbai

This made me nostalgic although it is about Mumbai and not Chennai, and although it is about pirated books and not books on resale, and although it is about children on the street rather than quite literate adults. It reminded me of my friends and fellow English grad students Kamal and Christine with whom I spent many hours competitively buying second-hand books from the pavement book sellers of Pycroft Street. And I'm thinking also of the many street sellers (I wonder if the guy at Luz corner still sells) who would take a pescribed book list and rattle off all the titles they did or didn't have.

As the lights turn red at the Haji Ali traffic intersection in Mumbai, the boy slouching against the railings quickly straightens up. Yakub Sheikh is just 12 years old, but he knows he has only 45 seconds to make some money. Holding aloft his wares, he dashes toward a black BMW and in his cracking preteen voice addresses the woman inside: “ ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’?”.... (Don’t tell E. L. James, but the woman in the BMW bought the entire “Fifty Shades” trilogy for the equivalent of $10.) 


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Amanat

The anonymous young woman was nicknamed Amanat (Treasure) by the press; her savage gang-rape  set off unprecedented protest marches and riots around India. She died today.

The story--all of it I can't even--is at the link. A few of the heart-wrenching, scream-inducing prompts are below:

On December 16, the student watched The Life of Pi at a South Delhi mall with a male friend who offered to escort her home. They boarded a private bus - the sort used so often by commuters in a city where public transport is inadequate and unreliable.

The six drunk men on board began harassing the student. They beat her friend with an iron rod. When she tried to stop them, they turned on her, hitting her with the rod before taking turns to rape her. The bus kept circling a 31-kilometre stretch in South Delhi, for hours as it rolled unstopped through a series of police checkpoints.

In messages that she scribbled for her family while on life support systems, Amanat reportedly asked if the six men who had damaged her so badly that her intestines had to be removed had been caught and punished.

The 23-year-old had persuaded her parents to sell their small piece of land in Uttar Pradesh so she could move to Delhi to study medicine. Since then, they said recently, their meals are very often rotis with namak (bread with salt).

There are so many tragedies here. One of the most frustrating may be that there are so many enlightened people in this story--the young woman living her life, her caring male friend, her parents who went through financial hardship and sacrifice to give her an education. It hurts that some completely unrelated goons can insert themselves into this narrative--precisely at the point successful change--and turn it into one of unimaginable suffering and tragedy.

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Andal

(After Andal)


The small, breeze-colored day

the design and dance of water

thoughts are jasmine 

and mint

In the pounce of moonlight

what to think 

Yearning summons 

from a distance of days 

The ways of the evening

settle and fly like birds

Krishna, Krishna

Where are you?

I miss... I wish 

to hear your words again 

to feel the kiss of the flute

warmed by your breath


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Old Things (1)

Today I found the song you played me on repeat from across the aisle while trying to make eye contact. You may have played it a hundred times? Played it louder than necessary. Played it back to back with another song I don’t remember at all. Something with Salman Khan in it? Some other song extolling the virtues of romantic love and taking a chance.

Anyway, I found “Mannil” on an old CD copied for me by a dear friend who’d billed it as “SPB Marina Beach Song” because even seven years ago I’d forgotten how the song was sung, but only remembered only that it was filmed on the beach. But although I’d forgotten the song itself, something about the frisson of seeming desirable to you must have stayed with me.

And today, listening to that song from another lifetime, I enjoyed it as I never have before. Remember you, footnote, person whose name I never knew. I’d look you up on facebook if I knew your name.

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Amma

Called Amma to find out that she'd been sick and feverish for two days.

Sick since she got home from Benares; since she bathed in the Ganges with its famed sin-eliminating waters and decomposing corpses downstream.

She said she only meant to take a token dip but ended up doing nine. She said she swallowed some of the water.

In the last month two childhood friends have told me that their mothers died--one six years ago and C did not make it back to the funeral, the other one month ago on account of which S wasn't celebrating her birthday this month. I loved these "Aunties"--I loved their food, their style, their staunch support of their daughters. I yearn for a chance to tell them this.

I wonder when I'll see my own Amma again.

The kids called Amma this morning to yell "Get well soon, Ammama."

It's only been two months since I was in India.


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Where to start?

From Sonia Faleiro's article in the NYT For India's Children, Philanthropy Isn't Enough:

What’s most galling about this corrupt behavior is the fact that the current government is making an unprecedented effort to confront poverty. In 2011, according to a World Bank report, India spent over 2 percent of its gross domestic product on poverty alleviation. Over the past 11 years, India’s government has sought to provide free midday school meals, a guarantee of 100 days of employment annually to the rural poor and free primary education. But endemic corruption, from the very top down to the ground level, prevents them from being implemented effectively. A lack of transparency and a leakage of subsidies to the nonpoor means that poverty isn’t falling nearly as fast as it should be.

The free hot meal is the reason Meena goes to school. But her teachers routinely skip school, three days a week. When teachers don’t come, the school stays shut, and there’s no meal. A well-funded, well-intentioned program created to educate and feed poor children fails on both counts: Meena not only learns nothing, she also goes hungry.

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Once, twice

Your place is inside someone.
the closing of their heart
a landscape scaled to story

what if you knew everything
About why my sister looks like
my sister, the slap of silence;

the beating that is the phone ringing
The lament of memory in all
the half-remembered childhoods

what if those habits are only errands
dead from scorn; like butter asking
to be left out, sleepy in the sunlight

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