un-koothu

Despite an increasingly adversarial situation in one of my classes that's psychically depleting me, I managed to send off my proposal for a chapter on Mangai this evening. Yay, me.

Mangai expertly uses traditional, low culture forms like koothu to interrogate feminist issues including female infanticide and feticide. Or so I say, and because I was writing about it, I guess my mind had been working hard to process these cruelties and make sense/contain them. And so...

***

Last night, I dreamt that I led my three-year-old daughter  on to a public bus in Tamizh Nadu crowded with standing grownups and gave her instructions on where to sit (in the middle--it's the safest) and where to get off the bus (after two stops).

She said, "ok mama," but bumbled around like the three-year-old she is. The sort of happy, carefree bumbling around that--especially in the mornings when our deadlines are tight as a noose--can make me want to cry and/or laugh helplessly.

The bus conductor was very helpful, promising to help, but as I walked away from the bus, I realized that he was following me around chatting away. And then I realized I'd left my baby on a bus where she didn't know anybody.

Nothing happened. But the possibility of disaster, the sense of menace was huge. I couldn't fall back asleep even after I'd checked that both kids were in their beds. And not on buses.

_

Quiet complaint

We went to see Li'l A's school production of "The Bollywood Jungle Book" today. I really wasn't going to say anything about "Bollywood" or "Jungle Book." Hey, elementary school. The kids just want to have fun. Li'l A didn't get color cast as Mowgli, so that was good and he was the most bored Bollywood dancer I've ever seen :). Then for a grand finale, they decided to dance to "Jai Ho" (from Slumdog Millionaire). Yes.

I like both those stories, I like both those movies, I sing those songs to my kids all the time. But really? A group of educators didn't see anything problematic about sandwiching the pablum of their essentialist Indian experience between the bookends of Kipling and Boyle? There really is no fucking post in postcolonial.

I leaned the back of my head into Big A and muttered a restrained "Eff you" to the ceiling.

******
The rest of the day--as Li'l A likes to say-- was awesome sauce. First was birthday brunch with family and friends (and so many flowers!) where I ended up on the floor with the kids climbing all over and around me, and then my awesome MIL threw a dinner party and baked me the bestest birthday cake :).

_

Post

And after the excesses of my birthday, I was awoken this morning by our itinerant rooster crowing. I ate another cupcake and went back to bed.

Birth! Day!

So far,

I've snuggled with my family (sleepy kids had to be persuaded),

had a Bossa Nova-fueled workout untrammeled by school dropoffs (the university is--so conveniently--on a midterm break), 

had my hair washed by Big A, 

napped,  

had a midday cocktail, 

helped Big A bake my birthday cupcakes (I dropped the paper cups into the cupcake pans),

decided to abandon the Joyce Carol Oates after 20 pages in (NOT birthday reading!),

picked out a color to paint the hallways (which may be revised post cocktail buzz), 

danced,

had a discussion about Mos Def,

can't wait to pick up the kids, 

and get sushi (and maybe sake?).

I haven't even opened presents yet :). The thing is... on any day--and even today--just one of the things on that list would make me as happy as I can get. (Joyce Carol Oates and Mos Def respectfully excepted.)

_

She was there

Today started off fairly normally and then I ended up at dinner with Jennifer Finney Boylan.

Back up: I should say that meeting her wasn't entirely unexpected--I have after all planned to take my class along to hear her talk for, lo, all of two months. Jenny is amazing. She is the author of She's not There Anymore and the forthcoming Stuck in the Middle With You (her schtick--she says, self-deprecatingly ignoring her writing skills and her jaw-dropping experiences --is naming her books after bad pop music).

Trans experience is something that students frequently don't understand; a concept that becomes, and stays, intellectual--and so something that you just get or just can't wrap your head around. My admiration for Boylan has been mostly on a gut level--mostly for her courage and her sense of comedic timing, so I was so happy to see these translated into a great *show*. Jenny worked the audience: making them laugh with her, at her, making jokes about them, getting them to care about her, getting them to extend that interest and affection to all trans people, to all people. It was breathtakingly, heart-achingly beautiful.

She is so articulate about growing up as male and female also, parenting as father--and now--mother, that my question had to be about the way her parenting would differ if she were parenting daughters instead of sons. She knelt beside me in the audience as I put my question out (smirking, "this is just between us") and gave my question way more attention and honesty than it deserved.

So, when I was invited as a last-minute addition to the dinner table, I couldn't wait to accept. My students were all starry-eyed at the end of the talk; I can't wait to debrief with them on Tuesday.

Ananya

Princess NuNu,

thank you for finding every dragon in my bedroom

and telling them all

they couldn't stay.

Thank you for talking to all the snakes

and letting just the nice ones stay.

(But only after you made them promise to behave.)

(But actually, I don't want any of them.)

Thanks for agreeing with me

that you are an amazing, awesome NuNu.

("Yes!" You say, as if, "of course!"--

throwing your arms out to embrace this too.)

And thanks for tucking me in around 6 p.m.

It's cozy in bed.

_

No point

Rushed into shameful big-box store to buy a couple six-packs of Ensure. (Yes, Li'l A is back on the Ensure after I discovered looking for a lost form in his backpack that he hadn't actually been eating the lunches we'd packed for him. I couldn't even be that mad at him, because that's what I used to do, and the reason he does this is probably because my mother used to lament that I'd never understand how much i hurt her until I had a kid who refused to eat. Who knew my mom's curses would work! I drank Complan, my child drinks Ensure.)

But this story isn't about family. Not right away. While ringing up my Ensure, Anne, the cashier asks me my name and tells me that I look old enough to be her granddaughter. The granddaughter is 21. That's when I begin loving Anne ;). Then she asks me if I'm from India, and tells me she knows Hindi and rattles off several words in a flawless accent. I love her more now.

She tells me she's tired of English, and casually throws out--"I already have a couple of degrees in English so I want to learn a different language now." A couple of degrees. Wants to learn another language. Really love.

And that's when--rather symmetrically in our ephemeral relationship--she began to remind me of my Gadadoss grandmother also. The grandmother who didn't have a single college degree.

The grandmother who was tutored at home after menarche, was married at 16, had my mother at 17.

The grandmother who would be reading pulp fiction in English when I dropped in on her after classes at Stella. The grandmother who would then carefully put a bookmark in her book and put away the dictionary she'd been using to help her read. And the notebook that she'd used to log the words she'd looked up in the dictionary.

It feels strange to think that I won't be able to visit her on an India-trip anymore. I don't really even believe it.

_