"I open at the close"

A situation that one faces increasingly as one grows older is being expected to, or having to, deal with grief. Quick flashback, we have mythological characters going absolutely out of control and cursing the world out of grief, we have kings and queens declaring war or burning down cities from grief, some of our best poetry, best literature, a myriad of themes and motifs, accompanied by alcoholism/substance abuse, and a hauntingly wrecked life, all resulting from grief. Heroes have been made, heroes have perished, epics have been penned on the wreckage of life beyond loss and grief. 

But do you and I know how to adequately process grief? Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Pop culture has burnt Kubler-Ross's thesis on anticipatory grief into our brains, but have you wondered how many of us truly get past each of these stages? Time heals all wounds. Does it, really? 

Insomnia driven binge scrolling on instagram has made me privy to a variety of heartbreaking music playing over some of the most sorrowful thoughts I've seen written. The fact that it wasn't written for fictional appeasement or as character development or as a plot twist, the raw sentiment behind it, got me thinking. How much do we really get past denial, how many of us progress from denial to depression and then just exist there? 

Some of us hustle harder, some of us get creative, some of us drink in binge, sleep through it, we make impractical decisions, reach illogical conclusions, pass on our pain to all and sundry, but how do we heal? 

What do we do about that playlist that we've to ignore for a year, and even after be able to deal with only because we've grown numb? Those roads, those movies, scents, idiosyncracies, routines, habits? 

Post three decades, I do not have an adequate response to death. My eyes well up when I think about Achilles asking to be buried with Patroclus, but I did not know what the right expression on my face should have been when each of my grandmothers passed away.

 I turn away when my cat gets a shot at the vets',  I cannot get through any Toni Morrison book without my stomach being painfully knotted, I can't read Fine Balance without ensuring there is a tub of emotional support ice cream in the freezer, I cannot watch Life is Beautiful without closing my eyes and ears right before the father gets shot, I cried for two days after watching Marley and Me, I avoid posts that talk about Fred Weasley's death. But I do not know the appropriate response to existing in a world where someone we knew doesn't exist anymore.

Therapy tells me how to deal with the losses I've incurred where all concerned subjects are alive, and stalking them, blocking them, ignoring their existence, and faking it till you make it are definitely not on the list of coping mechanisms! 

I am but a collection of pieces touched, caressed, fondled, cared for, healed, protected, and loved by all those who've walked with me on some day (s). 

I suppose I'll either discover spontaneous combustion or a wise sage will impart to me the elusive prowess to heal. 

Nervous Musings

There's a certain unmatched warmth that comes from unexpected conversations with people from your past. I love revisiting, and temporarily reliving, the me they knew. I enjoy the almost out-of-body experience it is to replay both the hallmark and inconsequential memories I shared with people I am no longer around. 

This nervous attempt at penning down actual sentiment may be triggered by newly prescribed hormone medication, or by a recent barrage of love that I was fortunate to receive. 

Telephonic (Whatsapp-video-call-ic) recollections of a neighbor aunty from 20 years ago, of a geeky, over active, over achieving, clumsy, loud, mischievous 9 year old, turned into a circus tale of feeding her two kids and me everyday after school, the hell we raised, and never really knowing peace. Lovely, kind, and caring as always, along with all the progress she had made as a parent who truly let her kids follow their dreams, she asked me, "Janu paapa...is there someone who calls you kanmani?". It took a moment before I comprehended what the question meant. 

Twenty years ago, on one of her flights of fantasy, this lady who loved me so, told me, paapa your name means kanmani. One day, there will be a nice Malayali/Tamil boy who will call you kanmani, and you'll know. I hope you'll remember me then. Why the linguistic specification? Her favorite thing about herself is that she comes from both. She claims to have lived in malayalam and loved in Tamil, I think her senthamizh speaking husband would agree! 

I asked her if it was enough that I called myself kanmani. It is true what they say about mothers tearing up. I believe we haven't been genetically coded to withstand that. 

After a brief hiatus from being able to recognize a stimulus or having an appropos response to it, I have been attempting to shock my system with an artificially induced overload of emotions. All behind the safety of a locked door, ofcourse. In other words I've been attempting to 'Chicken Soup for the Soul' myself. After one too many accounts of torrential emotional experiences (of strangers), I am at a loss. For words, emotions, facial expressions, what have you.

 Though very scarcely, I did feel a pang of longing, or a pang from not truly belonging. 

Would it indubitably ruin everything I've been saying till now if I said that's when I realized the power of the content we consume? Is it nihilism or a lack of faith in humanity or heartless if I re-realized for the umpteenth time that I definitely miss the casual intimacy, I may miss the stability, I may miss the carefree companionship, of being in a committed relationship, but not much else? My memories did make an attempt to paint only the rosy pictures from the past, but I'm not that easily fooled, atleast not for long.

Is it a symptom or some kind of urban sadness, that I yearn for the fiery, impossibly fused relationships from the myths that I read, but also cannot realistically fathom having that with an actual mortal? Maybe I'm not one person's kanmani, but many, across this speck in time that's a human lifespan? Maybe if we pieced together all the love we dispensed, it would make for a mythical tale. 

For now, it is enough for me that I am my kanmani. 

Here's counting down days till the hormone meds are done!

Tara 

Hope for #29.

I have subconsciously planned to give inconsistent a new meaning by being consistent about posting here only once in a few years. 

Hi anonymous readers! 

I believe we are at what is the best-case scenario regarding getting to the other side of the pandemic. Is that scary? I have always measured a 9 on a scale of Sartre to Nietsche, so I'm not particularly phased. 

In two weeks, I would've commenced the final revolution before I take on a new decade. It is a journey that albeit sporadically, included this blog and the assumption of readers. 

As a race, we went through an extraordinary set of circumstances in the past decade, not limited to the pandemic or self-driving vehicles or billionaires touring the space or the terror-inducing ascension of the right (alt-right) all over the world, or global warming, or cryptocurrency, or a litany of other events/phenomenon that would've been previously unthinkable. 

On a hopefully non-self-aggrandizing note, I went through what I'm made to believe are meant to be the most defining years of my life, that would dictate my final outcome in this rat race that is life. 

Though it is going to be a few years or decades before I find out exactly how delineating the years were, there are a few adjectives that I'd like to use to define 2013 - 2022. Educating, emancipating, exhausting, confusing, tiring, heartbreaking, sorrowful, joyous, momentous, successful, defeating, tearful, fearful, excruciating, exciting, overwhelming, intoxicating, strenuous, inculcating, and more? And more. That is my statement, I stand by it. Not even psychedelic mind-altering substances can do to you what your 20s can do to you! A laundry list of gratitudes, platitudes, and a strong acknowledgment of my privileged existence doesn't in the least do any justice to just how much we've been pushed and fooled by the world. There is this gnawing feeling in the pit of my stomach that wakes me up reminding me that my good times are done, I should've crossed all the big steps by now, oh what glamorous years these are going to be! Such blasphemy! Show of hands of anybody who didn't spend the first half of their 20s looking like abandoned waifs! 

I have recently been attracted to a certain genre of academics being tormented ruthlessly by literature. The tempests of torture, the impossible proclamations of love, the borderline-obsessive desire and lust, the fixation with fictional characters, the cogent analysis of impossible scenarios, the destructive energy of negative character developments, the painfully chafed need to simultaneously be set on fire and just lie down on the cool wet ground. And I have never related to anything more, ever. 

There have always been two planes of existence, for me. Reality, and the wondrous one in my head, complete with nuanced plotlines and character arcs and well-researched mythology worked through it. You know this. The one where the narrator takes breaks from sapphic fiction to facepalm at my lousier-than-fiction life.  The not-so-slow journey we are all taking towards what I believe is kingdom come has escalated this mildly unsettling phenomenon.

A distinct detachment from everything that is happening around you, me, us. I do not feel the rage or an outcry at the injustice, or sorrow. Just numbness. Death, destruction, injustice, school shootings, rapes, violence against all communities, police killings, refugee crisis, a horrifying employment and housing crisis - numbness. We've come so far, someone told me recently, give it time. Time? At what human cost? 

I have been informed many a time that I expect too much, that basic progress doesn't satiate me, that I'd scare people away. Not because I go around wielding a scimitar, but because I have bare minimum expectations of justice. I feel my soul/spirit/essence wander out of my body (new existence, who dis?), when I maintain silence at these comments. Academia does seep us in the false notion that these vital conversations are taking place with just as much vigor and nuanced dissections and intersections in the real world. It is not. My mental fatigue stops me from quoting stats to you, but we have barely scraped the bottom of the barrel. Revolutions crossed the seas and the mountains, and then at some point, we lost the momentum. A dangerously hypnotizing mixture of capitalism, materialism, orthodox beliefs, xenophobia and tribe mentality hit back at the global village. 

My 20s, like they are meant to be, have been ten new things everyday, where I go from euphoria to curled up in a ball crying, in a matter of a few hours. Right now, everyday feels that way. Everyday, I am more inclined to be convinced that the world where we attempt to change and heal, is in my head. Somewhere down the line, the pandemic-induced inertia turned my mind palace into a dystopian ghost town, and beat out my will to scream and roar and remember and do and be. 

I want back in. I want the tumultuous uproar and the myriad of vigorous sentiments to descend from my head and flow through my veins. I want to be able to hope unbridledly, and love fiercely. I want to be, intensely.

That is my need, wish, want for 29. 

As always, see you on the other side!

Tara

Epiphanies

Facebook memories is getting immense attention from me right now, because what else do I have to keep me occupied anyway. I open the notification in the hopes of being transported into those days of innocence and joyful abandon. Instead, I am constantly horrified and kinda resort to reading my posts through my hands covering my face. I was a terribly non-woke (asleep?) teen who said all cringey things possible. It got me thinking about things I've learned should never be said, perspectives that required to be changed and challenged, and things or people or activities I had to give up, because I realized that somewhere inside me there does lie some sort of a decent human being? So from 2010 to 2020, here are 10 things I learned, unlearned, stopped/started saying/doing/indulging in:

1) Learnt that calling something or someone gay is not a freaking insult! This should've been instinctive, but wasn't, and leads to me staring in horror at things I've said. 

2) Calling someone a retard is (a) not an insult, (b) not to be substituted for asking them politely why they couldn't comprehend something. Again, you'd think it was instinctive, but it wasn't. 

3) Slut, prostitute are not insults. One is a character judgment based on hypocrisy, and the other one is honest manual labour. Neither are terms that I should use to debase someone. Well nip the thought process in the bud if I consider insulting them via their choice of sexual partners or line of work, anyway. 

4) All of the above are terms that were frequent residents of my vocabulary due to years of conditioning, and the pop culture that I consumed. Here's the dilemma though - by 2010 I was already reading Rushdie, I thought saying sexy out loud was a crime, but didn't hesitate to call someone gay for taking something too seriously. I'm not about to breakdown the mess that would've been the thought process behind that. I'd rather chalk it up to being an idiot teenager. 

5) My knight in shining armour should not be stalking me, forcing me to respond to their affections, or getting into self-made tight spots that he later rescues me from. STOCKHOLM SYNDROME! That should be the freaking genre of all of our cutesy cheesy romantic Hindi, Tamil, and Malayalam movies that I grew up on. If someone successfully argued in an actual court of law that he should not be found guilty of stalking because this is a part of his culture,  you know its time to restructure this bish. Also my knight can and should be a female (Dame), if that's what I'd like. 

6) Madonna and the whore trope. Your bitchy villainous female characters are all the ones that wear non-sanskaari clothes, will likely speak in good English, will sport characteristics that make them independent, and then also up and do the weirdest vilest things possible. A mark of a girl having softened is also the change in her sartorial choices, and when she becomes more adept at her native tongue. Dude c'mon! (Kuch Kuch Hota Hai is a cult classic, and I will forever love the movie no matter how much it sucks, don't fight me on this!)

7) The concept of family. A part of having a predominantly Asian upbringing is that we assume the presence of a father and a mother. We were never used to our friends talking about step-parents or step-siblings or having single parents (by choice or because a parent had passed away). I still put my foot in my mouth every now and then, when I absent-mindedly assume the presence of two alive and connected parents and make situations very very awkward for everyone involved. As someone who will definitely give out details of my dog when someone asks me about my kid, I should be better at handling this!

8) Crying in public is for kids/ Don't cause scenes! Most of us keep our emotions in check, depending on our surroundings. This is a necessary skill, true. This doesn't mean that the darkness of your room is the only place to express your emotions! Crying doesn't make you weak, crying doesn't make you hysterical, crying doesn't make your stand any less worthy, crying also doesn't absolve you of anything. It took a lot of unlearning and relearning to grasp this concept. To know that it is okay to cry, and to not cry. 

9) Not every argument needs to be fought. As a debater, and as someone with very loud opinions that I insisted be statistically and factually backed, I had, and still have, a hard time stopping myself from seeing every argument to the end. The emotional toll an argument has on someone goes unnoticed in my effort to get the facts right. I now know that my academic or general interest should not negate their lived experience or the trauma someone was dealt. Sometimes, I just have to be human. And be there. I'm working on it. 

10) Drumroll? Grey area. Not the BDSM kind, shutup!! Is it just me, or did you also grow up assuming that someone couldn't have attributes that are widely considered opposites of each other? For example, I wouldn't expect a soft spoken debater, a weight lifting chess champion, a shy drummer (don't ask!), very naive notions, in hindsight, yes. I have realized that everybody is a smorgasbord of 'opposites'. There's good and bad and loud and quiet and strong and weak and soft and brave and smart and stupid and dainty and clumsy and bored and enthusiastic and wordy and speechless and nerdy and street smart inside us. We are all a curious bundle that gets curiouser and curiouser, and I am learning to appreciate my journey down the rabbit hole with all of the ones I call my own. 

After procrastinating for over a week, I've managed to get to the end of this list of epiphanies which should've just been good sense! 

Here's sending you strength and virtual booze and air kisses to get you through! 

See you on the other side of 2020! 

insomnia induced rant (part 2/n)!

I really did want at least one post to not be marveling at the horrors that 2020 is unleashing on us. A friend texted me after a while the other day (not sure about measures of time anymore since I can't even be trusted to know which day of the week it is), and I suddenly remembered that he was stricken by an additional calamity, and honestly excused myself saying I can't keep track of what fresh horror is hitting whom anymore, its a miracle that we haven't exploded into dust, thanks to 2020. 

Well, you could chalk this post to yet another response to a brand new variation of a time-honored tradition. Once I took a break from playing ludo/scrolling through memes/crying and laughing at the same time about how my work shoes miss me, I was privy to a few unsavory memes about including a mongoose alongside someone's daughter's dowry and attempted to find out what that was all about. Well, I sure wish I hadn't. A guy killed his wife by exposing her to snake bites twice. This because she refused to give in to the demands of more dowry, I am led to believe. I am going to refrain from commenting because my heart and head will explode from the effort. I hope her parents find a way to come to terms with life. 

Discovering this event led to me reading a lot of comments that frankly made me want to throw up, but also brought back a million conversations I've had with imposing uncles and aunties, and the spectacular double standards with which some of us are treated. This might also have been triggered by the 'kulasthree' videos originating from the abomination called 'annie's kitchen'. 

Marriage is a sacred custom, a sacred space, a sacred tradition, a bond, a promise, a lifelong commitment, a companion, and everything. Agreed. In my very honest opinion, though, we as a society, put too much faith in the goodness of human beings, for marriages to truly be what it is expected to be. Like democracy, and communism. All the most wonderful concepts, but places too much faith in human beings. 

I am not about to get into just how much we know personally people mess up, when it comes to remaining faithful. Just how blurry the lines get, with circumstances and time, how 'forgiveness' becomes a very important concept, or how people remain tied up due to societal pressure, or for their kids, or because its an expensive affair, or because they've spent a good part of their lives with them, or because the love is still there or because staying in the marriage is easier, or because we do really need a companion to get through life, or just because.

I am not here to question anybody's decision to get married or stay in a marriage. I'm here to ask a few questions of those who make interesting assumptions about me when I refuse to get married. 

I have values and traditions that I hold closer than life, and will never break. The lack of faith I have in myself, makes me stray away from situations that might make me abandon these values, I hold them so close, I don't want to test my resolve. 

Lying in a relationship, cheating in a relationship, holding onto a person when the emotion runs out, making sacrifices and compromises I will later return to blame the person for, misandry, toxic anything, and pretending about a million things that stop me from being who I am, and from them being who they are - all things I won't accept. Don't @ me with when in love or you've to learn to adjust. I adjust, and I understand love. Hell I am still trying to convince my friend that in the Cartesian plane of emotions, love falls on the upper right quadrant. I also know that when the honeymoon phase is done,  I'll get bitch slapped by life. Before you run at me with you won't know unless you experience it, or there's nothing like having a companion, think about what I am saying. I wouldn't stick my neck out for marriage, because I don't want to be the one hurting the other person, I don't want to take something lovely, and slowly watch it turn ugly or run-of-the-mill. I don't want to lie or cheat or hide or not take a job in a far-off continent and watch them deal with the debris of our relationship. 

Now, for all those of you who have very colorful thoughts about my relationships, and, shall we say dalliances?, once you understand where I come from, even if you don't agree with me, I hope you'll understand that this means that I hold all those values you incorporate into marriage closer than you think I do. That I respect the people in the institution, their attempt at going through life, their success at it, and everything about it, more than most people. Not wanting to get married, doesn't take away a particular category of morality away from me. It doesn't mean that I don't respect families, or that family doesn't mean squat to me. I don't think this union should be a rite of passage. I won't do it because I'm expected to. And then stay in it because I'm expected to. I won't let you subject me to peer pressure from our ancestors. My values are what makes me hesitate, not my lack of them. Here's an easier way out - don't judge/hate/assume before you attempt to understand.

Capisce? 

Sedate in the knowledge that my parents and other near and dear ones are going to read this post, and, um, have things to say about it, here's me gearing up to respond to at least 20 concerned people saying, "ofcourse not! just trying to find a suitable guy! I was bored, so I turned to my blog, that's all!"

See you guys on the other side of 2020!

Soliloquy

For the longest time, I've attempted to write fiction, only to fail miserably. This has resulted in a number of terrible jokes in the life-is-stranger-than-fiction genre.

Let me try and break this down - 

I could imagine a storyline, characters in it, a narrative, a geographical or sociopolitical setting, a theme, and more. 

I begin writing, somewhere down the line, I am engulfed by the feeling that I am not doing complete justice to all the characters. Their reactions are not fleshed out, they are merely responding. People don't just respond, all their reactions are the end result of a myriad of factors. I can't get over the fact that I'm now attempting to speak for people I don't fully know. 

When you are done rolling your eyes at me, I haven't missed the irony. I created them, but then they got too real for me too quickly. 

I drop their story like a hot potato. 

This is the general timeline of me having a go at fiction. 

Not to use the term 'phobia' lightly, but commitment hasn't always been my strongest suit when it comes to people. I am shoddy at keeping in touch, I run out of people's personal matters the moment I spot an exit, I tend to not divulge too many details about myself, and I hit backspace about four times right now because I wasn't comfortable putting these details down on my blog. 

I am beginning to comprehend that this tendency may be what hinders me from being able to write fiction. 

Postgrad in English Studies, worked/works in the media, writes content and edits magazines for a living, have published in online and print magazines, you get the idea, writing is my line of work. 

Yet, my fear of getting too involved with human beings is so monumental, that I'm willing to give up on a necessary skill. Maybe I should attempt writing about dogs or cyborgs? 

Intimate terrorism

As the world allover we romanticize spending more time with our families, getting to truly know and understand each other, bonding through activities, etc., a massive section of society who do not have the luxury to count their homes as safe spaces are being placed under duress by the necessary and continuing lockdown. Globally, all helpline numbers, child protective services, women protective services, and all legal and social help centers have had the biggest surge in calls and cases in the recent past. 

Domestic abuse and child abuse are at an all-time high, defiantly eviscerating our collective tendency to idealize the concepts of family and home. 

In an almost dystopian situation where mankind is attempting to fight an unseen enemy by being made to stay indoors and away from fellow beings, there is a litany of frustrations that are crippling our psyche and our ability to function 'correctly' or 'normally'. 

There is a massive amount of burden on homemakers and working mothers to be high-functioning, because everybody at home constantly means constant attention, and duties to fulfill. Since domestic help is a risky route to take, traditional gender roles are putting a lot of stress on women to over-perform, while they themselves are undergoing the frustrations of a lockdown.

Redressal methods are hard to carry out since at this point the victim is pretty much stuck with their abuser 24/7 and fear extreme repercussions to reporting an already extreme situation. Stereotypical ideologies resurfacing along with bruised egos owing to the current work environment have resulted in a lot of men taking out their frustrations on their children and the women of the household. 

In a community where women are workhorses, sources of pleasure, and an outlet of all anguish rolled into one, these helpless women are stuck inside the four walls that were already the source of their nightmare, or have become so, right now. They are weighed down by the centuries-old expectation to be the one that placates that nurses that heals, and society's indoctrination that they are second in position to their husbands, and a lot of the times sheer physical inability to strike back. 

Before we began featuring in the latest version of apocalypse now, most cries for social and moral equality were direly overlooked or shutdown as overreactions because we as a community have become good at paying lip service to be liberal. I have always personally believed that our milieu plays a big role in defining who we are, as a person. When forcefully shut inside four walls, when everything is a big question mark, when I don't know what will happen to my savings, if I'll be employed when this is done, I need to understand that raising my hand against another person, or raising my voice against them because I have been granted the authority to do so, is not an option. It is not something I should merely refrain from doing, it is something I shouldn't factor in as even a dimly possible option. 

'Intimate terrorism' is a term I came across post lockdown, and the accounts of women and children and men are truly horrifying. With the concerned law and order having to deal with a worldwide pandemic, humanity is taking menacing steps backward in the progress we made at rote-learning that every human being deserves dignity of existence. 

While we joke about parents who pulled fire alarms in their buildings simply to get a glimpse of someone who is not their perceivably exhausting toddler, we must also be aware of the fact that a lot of others are taking that frustration out on the helpless. 

I peruse lockdown memes because it is some version of 'misery loves company', but I do that in the confines of the four walls that will always be my safe haven. I wish these reports of domestic and child abuse cases wouldn't be a part of our arguments whenever we next argue policy, but they will be, because in so many households, in strata of society, in communities, in mentalities, physical and mental abuse is still a part of life.