Where Are You From?

It depends.

Sometimes, the answer is an “excuse me?” Sometimes, it’s a stiff spine and stiffer upper lip and responding to that narrow question in the narrowest possible way--so the answer might be “Summit,” or “out of town.” If the questioner continues to talk, you may have to coldly suffer through their declarations of love for “Yogh-er” or Beef Vindaloo or the brown-ness of your skin.

Other times, the answer is a widened beam, excitedly bobbing your head, and furnishing an answer that is, technically speaking, accurate only in the nostalgic past. Then you learn about how their best friends in Fiji or Malawi or Yugoslavia or Jamaica or Russia were Indian and how they used to get home-made rotis with butter and sugar or mango chutney and--just you wait--how they’ll surely beat us at the next Cricket match. You get compared to sisters, cousins, nieces, you get tips on places to visit, you get the phone numbers of their aunts and mothers scribbled on scraps of hastily recycled paper.

The answer to “Where are You From?“ is never hyphenated. Unless it’s written. Of course. All bets are off then.


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INDULGENCE

It’s always summer in my forest.

Trees stretch their arms awake
breath warm and loamy like earth.

Ideas hang like languorous monkeys
suspended lazily by a single limb--

Arm, leg--even tail--so alike
I can’t be bothered telling the difference.

Maddened by the chatter of falling water
I look at you and you and you

and I and I and I close my eyes
preparing to listen for a smile.



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But Isn’t that Incest (Part Two)

I’m walking Li’l A and my favorite nieces into the museum when the man directly in our way hails me with an “Ay Mami…" It's too late to do a Girl from Ipanema, but i still try.

Li’l A tries his best too--to make sense of it.

He looks up, thoroughly puzzled, and checks with me: "You're his Mommy too?”



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The Best Part of the Q & A

At yesterday’s lecture at NYU, Fawzia Afzal Khan’s presentation was a reminder of how much I used to enjoy progressive theater--passionate debate, poseur-ish fakery, self-sacrificial integrity, relevant use of Talvin Singh’s “Traveler” and all.

And there wasn’t much by way of Q&A, the point of the presentation was quite Brechtian so that by the end, the audience had already been thoroughly meta-manipulated for a good cause.

Except that later--Khan, my new friend L, and I Q&A-ed about life, South Asian-ness, academia, dogma, and costume jewelry in the women’s room--as we took turns using the loo, washing our hands, and checking if the condom dispenser worked.


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But Isn’t that Incest (Part One)

So… I grinned and flashed my finger at a bunch of guys trying to chat me up.

That would be my Cartier be-ringed ring finger, obviously.

And I was prepared for the fake groans and laughter, but totally unprepared for the cutest of them all to look at me mournfully and plead, “At least adopt me.”


P.S. And by "cutest" i mean--funniest. Not the other thing, obviously. (Mmkay, Big A?)



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SHE SENDS HIM A MESSAGE: IT'S A FULL MOON TONIGHT

In her mind, so entranced by air,
It is the most passionate of messages
And requires, in response, suitable fanfare:
A tipsy feast tented by the night sky,
Soft, playful hands in bejeweled fruit;
Or a luminous viewing where they are
Suitably wrapped to disarm the chill
In each other’s arms and staged silks;
Or even an unfastening of casements
So the dull, satellite sheen invited in
May be softly laid between
Their warmly-scented skin.

In times past,
She would have
Sent him her message:
Through her cheeky parrot
(or perhaps another more
docile and amorous bird);
Or in a hand-penned note
Poised between the pages
of a brocade-tasseled book;
Or heard by a giggly confidant
Who would give him the words
With a lingering, meaningful look.

It is. A full. Moon.
To…night.
Alas--she sent it to him
Through the tangled vines
Of the everyday internet,
Where its almanac-like
Efficiency traps him
Into unaware apathy,
And he then descends
Into Sunday’s sudden,
Last-minute,
late-night industry.


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Haggard, Foley, and Effing Foucault

So... Haggard is “guilty.”

I bet Big A that he wasn’t.

I’m mad because now, I’m out of $10. I’m mad because I was so completely fooled by what I read as sincerity in Haggard’s preliminary denial, which came prefaced with, “I never claimed I was perfect…”

I guess that it could translate into good news for anti-Repubs this close to the elections. But I’m mostly just tired of the Haggards and the Foleys. Tired of the messy deceptions, the pious hypocrisy, and sad about the turmoil they must put so many families, including their own, through.

I’m tired of people lashing themselves to the posts of untenable deprivation only to inevitably stumble into self-defined depravity. If Haggard wasn’t so preachy about homosexuality being evil, his crime would be the simpler one of drug abuse; not sex with a male prostitute, adultery, hypocrisy, deception, and drug abuse.

I wish society would re-discover moderation. Discover that it is possible to indulge desire safely, honorably. In moderation.

I’m sad when people have to depend on a posse of Weight Watchers to tell them that one slice of pizza = cool, five slices = not such a good idea. I’m sad when they flinch from human touch, from yoga, a piece of chocolate--because they’ve been conditioned to think of them as alien and/or evil.

I wish we could be truthful with ourselves, be in touch with our desires, keep a warm, open, welcoming mind.

I wish we could remember that we tend to obsessively desire exactly whatever it is we punitively deny ourselves.

I want to yell, “Read some fucking Foucault, you dimwits.”



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