Monthly Archives: May 2020

The Venus Flytrap: Rising Divorce Rates Are A Good Thing

As a child, I once got my hands on some kind of corporate diary, and flipped through its strange front matter curiously. It contained various facts and trivia – time zones, international calling codes, capital cities, and what I think of now as a slightly pedantic list of statistics. Including, strangely, divorce rates. India’s was 0%. I didn’t live in India then, and assumed that that actually meant that no one there ever got divorced. Now I know, of course, that it just meant that so very few did that they were anomalies. And that in less abstract terms, divorce was often brushed under the carpet even when it did happen – so that, quite possibly, even people who lived in India would have liked to think that 0% meant exactly that. No divorces, just happily ever after. Each and every time.

Not much has changed in over two decades, not in terms of the numbers. In 2017, the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development, an international forum established in 1961 that works in public policy) reported that India’s divorce rate stood at 1%, or 13 in 1,000 marriages. This statistic has just been reconfirmed, and come to public attention again, thanks to an infographic released by an Australian legal agency called Unified Lawyers which has been making the rounds. According to them, India has the lowest rate of divorce in the world.

This is very unfortunate. Just as a very high divorce rate (such as Luxembourg’s 87%) could be construed as unhealthy, an almost non-existent one shows that something is wrong. Are the vast majority of Indian marriages even mostly fulfilling ones? Let’s not lie to ourselves.

The truth is that an increased divorce rate would be meaningful evidence of the effect of social justice movements on ordinary households. It would mean, among other things: women staying in or returning to jobs, which let them live on a single income; people getting second chances at life when the horoscopes are perfectly matched but the couple themselves are incompatible; survivors being able to leave abusive situations with support and without stigma; and respect for individual freedoms. Especially where women’s empowerment issues are concerned, more divorces would actually imply success. Not failure.

For those of us who are surprised by the statistic, given how many divorced people we ourselves know, this is a moment to reflect on our privilege. We think divorce is not so terribly taboo anymore, but if so, why aren’t there more of them? We must be careful to not generalise based on what is true for our circles, or to presume to understand individual experience even then.

I don’t know anyone who found getting a divorce easy, or who wasn’t punished for it in some way after. So it’s also a moment to reflect on just how much it takes to terminate a marriage. Staying married in a system that’s designed to make you stay is no evidence of the strength of a marriage. But being willing to to leave the institution, see the divorce through, and go on – that’s strength. May it become easier for anyone who needs to make that decision.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on February 7th 2019. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: The Scent of Hibiscus

Hibiscadelphus wilderianus grew on the slopes of Maui up until a century ago, before it was declared extinct. Now, a biotechnology company, Ginkgo Bioworks, claims to have resurrected the flower’s scent through genetic reconstruction. They recently debuted a perfume, which they described as piney and earthy.

But in truth, most hibiscus flowers have no fragrance. If at all, it’s just a wisp of one, possibly partly imagined, and we know it more from clear reddish teas and blended into herbs and chemicals in haircare than from the plant itself. That redolence, light as it is, is not in the blossom. The blood-bright ones placed at Kali’s feet are silent in the realm of scent.

So what is the fragrance that these biotechnologists have developed? How much of it is the power of suggestion, what the words “Hawaiian mountain hibiscus” conjure? When they tell us their new perfume line will return to us something lost, do we believe them?

I was on a video call with a faraway friend the other night as she dressed for a date, and when she sprayed perfume on herself, I was sure I could smell it. “Is it citrusy?” I asked. It was. It was not a signature scent; I cannot explain how the fragrance burst around me at the sound of the spritz. One night more than a decade ago, I was weeping in bed missing my recently deceased grandmother when the scent of paan filled the room. She had loved chewing areca nuts and betel leaf, and the smell of this was something I associated with her. Someone will tell me I was hallucinating, someone else will tell me my heart imploded into aroma. You can guess who among those someones I would call kindred.

Our olfactory sense is as emotional as our tactile sense. We think it’s the one we can live without, the one we’d give up if we had to choose one, but we’d lose more than just reactions of pleasure or disgust. We’d also lose one of the keys to our inner selves, influencing both our ability to reach into our memories and to express the way they make us feel. Sometimes the past circles back to us unseen.

The Hawaiian mountain hibiscus was known to botanists based on a single sample, dated to 1910, with it being presumed extinct only a couple of years later. Perhaps those early botanists used the word “discovery” in some description of their encounter and study of it, but if so, it would only have been in the way the Americas or certain spices were “discovered”. It it was endemic to Maui long before this. Centuries of people held its petals in their palms. Millennia of creature paws scampered by its bushes, or dipped proboscises into the nectar at its heart. The flower had other names, possibly held a place in ritual or courtship or adornment. Those who claim to have revived its scent have still not told us what its colour was. What its secrets were. They aren’t poets, after all. Yet they speak its songlike name, and look how we respond – how we rise, or implode.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on January 31st 2019. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: KonMari In Kinship

My friend handed me an adorable mug, pink with owls, and before I could comment on how pretty it was, she said: “You gave me this.” I had forgotten. Years had passed, during which I’d never imagined that I would be standing in her kitchen again. I was surprised that she still had it. “Yeah, I didn’t Marie Kondo the mug,” she joked.

But the words tripped out of my mouth. “Well, but I Marie Kondo-ed you, because I thought you’d Marie Kondo-ed me.” We both blinked at the prickliness of that moment. “What I meant,” I scrabbled. “Is that I wouldn’t have kept it…”

Objects which are mnemonics of pain, consciously or unconsciously, are a whole category of attachment (again, often unconsciously – hoarders don’t necessarily feel the attachment until asked to part with something). And many people who have transformed their spaces, inspired by Kondo’s techniques, known as KonMari, have done so through confronting the feelings evoked by, if not energetically contained in, those objects. “Does this spark joy?” has another question on its flipside.

Now, having organised and decluttered their surroundings, some KonMari enthusiasts have begun talking about taking the technique further. Top of the list seems to be toxic friends, another category of painful attachments. I’m all for good boundaries, freeing oneself from bad influences, refusing to be manipulated, laying ground rules for healthy relationships and the very effective liberation of headspace through social media unfollowing. But using a single question to evaluate an entire relationship? Not so much.

The idea of pruning connections purely for the purpose of having fewer of them to manage is itself suspect. And if it’s truly toxicity that’s the concern, it gets complex. A one-size-fits-all approach will not work; unlike what people are saying, digitally unfriending a classmate you don’t remember on social media is simply not on the same scale as ending a friendship with someone who is violent to their partner. While a catalytic event, the final straw, is often how we break out of abusive relationships, the exit is usually a long time coming. It takes circuitous routes, just as the healing is non-linear. The most toxic of our relationships are often also the most precious to us. Which means that by KonMari-ing our intimate circles indiscriminately, we’re only isolating ourselves further from sources of support who could help us clean up where we really need to. And sometimes, that cleanse is within – the friend is just a scapegoat.

It’s dangerous to label something “toxic” just because it currently contains friction, boredom or heavier demands on time and energy (for example: a friend going through a divorce is not toxic just because their pain is radiating from them all the time). A friendship, or any significant relationship, will not always reliably spark joy. There will be rough patches, misunderstandings, irritations and imperfect circumstances.

This was more obvious to me than ever in that kitchen, holding a simple object that my friend had divested of power by keeping, but which had suddenly become a mnemonic of our time apart. For a bond to last, you work at it. Love is complicated, but not clutter.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on January 24th 2019. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: Huddled In A Bubble

Of course the cotton seeds that have sprouted on the moon weren’t buried under its surface, the way they are on Earth. Instead, they’re in a sealed container still on board the docked mission. As the BBC put it, “The crops will try to form a mini biosphere – an artificial, self-sustaining environment.” Only the cotton seeds have sprouted; potato, rapeseed and other produce haven’t. Of all the forms of life – cotton, which only last year became genetically engineered to possibly be edible (or at least, not toxic). I wonder why China chose to shoot it into space.

An artificial, self-sustaining environment. The two words should cancel each other out, because the effort it takes to truly self-sustain cannot be simulated. Yet, in a strange way, we understand. That bubble in which we must sometimes live, because there’s no other way in which to survive. As 2018 ended, I was shocked by my naïveté in a post, shown on the “Memories” FB feature, from one year before that. I’d written that 2017 had been kind to me and that I’d remember it fondly – a statement which had rapidly proved untrue. I’d been in a bubble of forced gratitude, afraid to accept the truth of my misery. I could only do so in hindsight.

How much depends on the framing. One flip of the coin: in six months of that year I’d gone to Batticaloa twice, my ancestral town, and found a key I had looked for my whole life. Another flip of the coin: in those same six months I had been so sick from fatigue and anxiety that I declined a free trip to Bhutan, to mountains I had seen in dreams. One more frame: I ponder travel only because I did so little of it last year, when I thought I would do so much.

An astrologer friend opened my chart up. I told her how when she’d last done so, I hadn’t believed when she’d said I’d have to wait a year for what I’d thought was just around the corner. The lease on that prediction is up for renewal now. I remembered how when we’d last met she’d touched her heart with a sympathetic look and said, “Here – you had a terrible disillusionment, with the planets exact on that point about three months ago”. And how, dazed by the possibility of new love, I’d said No. I’d forgotten that something had indeed happened then, a culminating disappointment to a heartache that had dragged on for ages like roadkill on a bloodied wheel. One turn of the solar wheel later, she referenced that painful transit again and I saw it anew. How everything has a miasma. I hadn’t escaped with one terrible disillusionment in a December past; there was another that came later, even more harrowing, of another kind of love entirely, that I hadn’t framed that way before.

Sometimes life offers nothing but harsh conditions. We huddle within our bubbles – our artificial, desperate, self-sustaining environments – and tell ourselves what we need to. We cannot tell it straight until we’ve seen through the miasma, into clarity – or at least the next bubble.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on January 17th 2019. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: Not Loose

Could there possibly be anyone who doesn’t have a crush on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez? If her progressive worldview and personal journey weren’t impressive enough, the newly-elected American politician won even more hearts after conservatives released an edited video of her from college, happily dancing, intending this to smear her reputation. (She responded with another video of her happily dancing, in her lofty new office). There’ve been similar, malicious smear attempts, like a photo misattributed as a selfie of hers which made the rounds, in which a woman’s feet are seen in a bathtub, with a hand holding a vape pen, and a suggestive reflection in the faucet.

Dancing, relaxing, having fun, being and feeling attractive – all activities deemed inappropriate for a woman because the overall impression is that she is… What exactly? The answer is spelled out many times over in the heterosexual dating app Bumble’s new commercial for the Indian market. Bumble’s premise is to let women decide whether to make contact or not. The ad stars Priyanka Chopra, one of its investors, and shows her in various scenarios being described with a positive adjective, followed by “not loose”. The inference is that loose women use Tinder or other apps, while not-loose women use Bumble. Newsflash: it’s the same dudes on all platforms. And it’s the same pitting-women-against-each-other strategy that’s run the world for millennia.

But why not “loose”? The slut-shaming is shocking, given Bumble’s purportedly woman-friendly ethos. How can a dating app that claims to be based on women’s empowerment denigrate women in this manner? Bumble’s Twitter replies to the surprisingly few people who have protested were patronising, claiming that “loose” is a misogynistic term (it is, which is why Bumble’s use of it is especially misogynistic, positioning women who enjoy their sexuality as less admirable than those who don’t) and making vague statements on “on the ground” work in response to clear objections.

And what on earth is “loose”, anyway? Back in 1994, before we could take for granted sex-positivity (i.e. the acceptance on a socio-political level that sexuality is natural, to be celebrated, and not at odds with the fight for social justice) as a cornerstone of sound feminist principles, the poet Sandra Cisneros released an entire collection called “Loose Woman”. The titular poem unfurls like an anthem. Among its many thrumming lines are these: “I built my little house of ill repute. / Brick by brick. Labored, / loved and masoned it. / I live like so. / Heart as sail, ballast, rudder, bow.”

If that’s what it means to be a loose woman – hardworking, passionate and proud of herself – then who knows why it’s deemed unappealing. And worse, incongruent with being ambitious, curious, busy, free or equal – the ad’s buzzwords.

It’s clear Bumble’s India strategy is just the latest version of that old Ladies’ Night bar tactic. It appears to be for women, but all it offers women is something watered-down, while it’s the men who are the true target market. And when it comes to the political playing field, it pays for anyone who isn’t a man to remember this too. It’s their world. We’ve got to usurp it.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on January 10th 2019. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: The Songless Female Of The Species

It was the length of the tail feathers that caught my eye, and then the statesqueness of the pose, and only lastly those eyes like beads of ruby. I didn’t know what it was, this bird that had sought out a branch of the neem tree that I see more of every day than any other living creature. Only a crow that surely has come to know me as well or as little as I know it roosts there, and sometimes it takes a companion; they bite each others’ beaks (I wonder if they are voyeurs into my life, too). Intrigued, I looked up the plumage colours of this strange new bird and was surprised to learn that this creature so striking that I could not think of it as anything but totemic was in fact something quite ubiquitous. So ubiquitous, in poetry and public imagination, that I couldn’t believed I hadn’t even known that this is what it looked like. It was a female kuyil who had come by, who briefly lingered within the lush enclosure of the branches of the neem tree that is my neighbour, whose leafy heart I look into directly.

The female of the species, I read, is rarely seen. (This made me feel better about my ignorance of her beauty). It is not her song we hear, but her mate’s. He doesn’t look like her; indeed, he looks a little closer to the crow in whose nest she stealthily lays her eggs, uninterested in the process of incubation. The female of the species appears when she chooses to heed that call. When the love spell of his beautiful voice has worked, has convinced her.

Between the neem tree and I was one more neighbour: a spider whose home was made of silk spun from her own body. That delicate web often caught the light, and I refused to remove it. But someone who thought it inauspicious jettisoned it with a sweep of their fingers before my eyes. Minutes before I wrote this, and just a little after I had contemplated that little habitat again, admiring the arachnid for its autonomy, its dexterity and its architectural aesthetic. The spider and its home were gone before I could even gasp.

Now I look into that tree’s branches without the filter of a spider web on the window grill. And I wonder if she will come back, that allured and alluring kuyil, with her stippled wings and her receptivity to seduction. I am summoning her, too. I know if she returns, it will only be for the crow’s nest (but there is no nest that I can see, unless the tree has more secrets). Who really summoned her here – a mate or I? Perhaps beyond all other symbolisms – self-contained spider, intelligent crow, bitter and benevolent neem tree, auspiciously fertile female kuyil – it is he who is my true totem for this moment. This male kuyil whose song I have heard but who has not been sighted so far: who opens his heart and unfurls his voice, and unafraid to ask for his deepest desire, calls and calls for his lover to come.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on January 3rd 2019. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: Sex Workers In Ayodhya

Morari Bapu, a spiritual leader noted for his Ram Katha sermons held around the world, came under fire over the weekend for inviting 200 sex workers from Kamathipura, Mumbai, to attend an event which he conducted in the city of Ayodhya. This drew outrage from a number of other religious figures, who predictably spoke of sin and shame. Ayodhya is regarded as the birthplace of Ram, in whose praise Morari Bapu recites the Ramcharitmanas, Tulsidas’ 16th century Ramayana with the distinct religious tones which have since been popularly associated with the epic.

As one important criticism of arts-based activism more familiar to us goes: it is not enough to bring the kutcheri to the kuppam, when the kuppam is still (figuratively) kept out of the kutcheri. This makes Morari Bapu’s initiative admirable: he did not choose to just deliver his discourses in the red-light district, but brought the people of that district onto holy (and hotly-contested) ground. Sex workers who spoke to the media of their experiences at the Ram Katha did so in glowing terms.

But, here’s a pinch of salt: given the incendiary context in which we live, can we really read even generous acts as apolitical? How can they be, when religion is the expressed basis of compassion as well as the implicit basis of hatred? So what are Morari Bapu’s politics? I confess my ignorance: being non-proficient in Hindi means I lack access to much material and commentary. I wish I could offer the unequivocal hope that he is that unbelievably rare figure – a progressive spiritual leader – and that his welcome to sex workers is a feminist act. His dedication of a 2016 Ram Katha to transgender people, during which he was quoted as having expressed the wish that a person from the community should one day lead a similar event with his support, would be one such heartwarming example.

But I’m wary. So what I’ll pay attention to instead is a contradiction: earlier this year, Morari Bapu criticised politicians who use the performative gesture of eating in Dalit households as a pawn to attract voters, going a step further by saying that marrying people from the same households would actually be meaningful. He is correct: inter-caste marriage is radical, truly risky (as murders by family members have shown in too many cases) and potentially revolutionary. However, more recently, he also criticised a CM’s comment that Hanuman was a Dalit, calling it a divisive statement while others like himself were working for unity.

This contradiction – of focusing on transcendence rather than reality – is where good intentions go to die. If we insist that our acceptance of others lies in our commonalities, we also insist on certain erasures. We can assume that the 200 sex workers who visited Ayodhya from Kamathipura were pious – but is that why they should be respected? Will the atheist or non-Hindu sex worker be offered the same? Will she be offered respect as a routine part of life, upon her return to her workplace – where, night and day, men whose actions are never questioned as they enter temples come to commit the sins of objectification and abuse?

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on December 27th 2018. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: Lipstick On The Ladder

A personal essay I wrote a few years ago, called “Karaikal Ammaiyar And Her Closet Of Adornments”, took me everywhere from literary events in Brisbane to Lakmé Fashion Week in Bombay, went viral when it was republished online, and still brings me messages from women who see something of themselves reflected therein. It was about self-expression and self-concealment: specifically, how women camouflage ourselves so as to not be perceived as desirable and thereby attract undesired attention, much like the bhakti poet Karaikal Ammaiyar who prayed to be transformed into an unsexy wraith so she’d be able to wander undisturbed. But it’s time for me to come clean. At some point, that camouflage ceased to be armour. It became avatar. I began to overidentify, and my self-esteem sank partly from this. In my ongoing journey to reclaiming my voice, I faced an uncomfortable truth: gradually, being dowdy stopped being a choice and became the default. The weapon I uncap to fight back? A pen, of course – but alongside, lipstick.

Megan Falley’s poem “Ode To Red Lipstick” has many quotable lines, referencing history: from concentration camp survivors “thin as smoke, naked / everywhere / except for their mouth”, to Cleopatra. But one unusual detail stands out: “In post-war New York, butches could get locked up / if they weren’t wearing three pieces of traditional / women’s clothes.” A slash of lipstick was often the remedy, for queer women in pantsuits, to avoid arrest. The poem doesn’t say how many of them loved, or how many of them loathed, this. But what’s certain is that it was the preferred circumvention. No simple ribbon, brooch or barrette was chosen over a blazing mouth.

The dynamic young American politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who caused a particular shade to sell out when she wore it to a debate, said: “I derive power from my femininity. Any attempt to make femininity trivial or unimportant is an attempt to take away my power. So I’m going to wear the red lipstick. Other people’s attempt to say, ‘Oh, talking about lipstick is unimportant,’ [they are] talking about feminine expression being unimportant. That expressing yourself as a woman is unimportant. Don’t ever believe that…. [Wear] whatever makes you feel authentically yourself and like a badass. The only way that we’re going to move forward is by running as our authentic selves.”

For me, why it begins with lipstick is because colour on my lips behaves like a woman who refuses to climb up a ladder without taking along others like her. The alluring, vivid burgundy or scarlet on my mouth demands that my eyes too be painted, that my hair be opened, that my skin be softened and made rosy – and because of all this, how could I do anything less than drape myself in clothing befitting that effort, that beauty?

I find myself going to my own words from that Karaikal Ammaiyar essay, which come back to me now like a note from a wiser, younger self: “If a red lipstick is wonderful anywhere in the world, it is most wonderful of all on the mouth of a woman who has claimed her own voice.”

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on December 20th 2018. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: Voice In The Shape Of A Blood Clot

A blood clot in the shape of a bronchial tree, a tree in the shape the air takes as we draw it into ourselves. Two trees, actually – one for each lung, upside down like branches reflected in water. (We are bodies of water too, mostly). A dying man in California, bringing up small clots of his own blood in a hospital suddenly, violently, coughed out a perfectly-formed, arboresque one. A cardiothoracic surgeon who attended to him called it “beautiful anatomy”. It is beautiful –  and horrific – the way his blood filled the shape of his breath. I know we should not keep staring at this blood clot like it’s something between an art object and a talisman, without thought for the person who coughed it up in his final days, after his heart had failed but he was still alive. But as this strange year dwindles to a close, it feels like a perfectly-formed clot of blood is as worthy of meditation as any other symbol.

“A woman in the shape of a monster / a monster in the shape of a woman”, begins the Adrienne Rich poem for the astronomer Caroline Herschel and other unremembered women in the field. The delicate, brutal branches of that blood-sculpture evoke it. What shape would your truth take if it was expelled, whole, into the light of day? Would it be so monstrous, would it be so beautiful? (The two do not cancel each other out). The poem ends: “I am an instrument in the shape / of a woman trying to translate pulsations / into images for the relief of the body / and the reconstruction of the mind.”

For myself, I am perhaps hoping to do the reverse – to translate, relieve and reconstruct in ways so that image and thought become pulsations once more. I have been cerebral so long, and this being cerebral has compensated for what is in truth a loss of voice. I told an old friend: I lost my voice when my heart broke in the year I claimed my life back, and that helplessness manifested itself as thyroid disease. She didn’t know what I meant. She counted the evidence against my claim. And I said to her: I have not yet expressed what is truly within me, I have only brought forth echoes.

Echoes lack embodiment. I ground myself by considering the malfunction of the butterfly-shaped gland at the bottom of my throat. I place my fingers there and feel my pulse, the pace at which my blood fills me. I draw the infinity symbol in that place with frankincense oil. My friend went to the Pyramid of the Sun and the Moon in Teotihuacan, and she said that endangered monarch butterflies – those “daughters of the sun”, spirits of the beloved dead – throng and thrive there now. Our voice notes, disembodied, erase the distance between continents as if through flight. And one of these days, my voice will fill me again in the shape my breath takes when I speak, the shape of my secret passages. Arboresque like forking lightning, like the fractals of desert rivers. Fill them like liquid, like light.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on December 13th 2018. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: Ambitious Women Are Often Unpartnered

There’s much about Priyanka Chopra’s brand of feminism that’s been dubious in the past, but the victories of feminism are for everyone to enjoy – not only those who practice it. Which is why the standout moment of her Vogue interview on her new spouse, Nick Jonas, brings such cheer. In it, Chopra describes how their courtship moved to a deeper level when Jonas said to her: “I love the way you look at the world. I love the drive you have.” She explains: “As a girl, I’ve never had a guy tell me, ‘I like your ambition’. It’s always been the opposite.”

At 36, Chopra has spent half her life so far in the spotlight, with a thriving career in beauty pageants, Bollywood films and Hollywood television. You don’t get to, and stay at, such a pinnacle without ambition. And like many ambitious women, Chopra declined or deferred marriage – or even any publicly acknowledged partnership – for a long time. Ambitious women often make this choice, but it’s a choice largely made based on a lack of viable options. The alternatives include forfeiting one’s career, downplaying one’s achievements so as to seem interesting but not threatening, or sublimating that drive into channels like tyrannical parenting and undermining other people’s dreams.

As Chopra said, men tend to dislike ambition in the women they date or marry. In a traditional context, men on the arranged marriage market quite frankly seek women with lower educational qualifications or salaries. In dating, the cues are subtler. As an ambitious woman only a little younger than Chopra, I don’t have to rely on anyone’s experience but my own for these nuggets. Envy: the poet who password-protected his documents before letting me use his computer (then forgot his password and lost his manuscript). Condescension: the older predator type who visited websites that had published my work to tell me the websites were interesting (silence about my work). Carefree dismissal: “I don’t read”. Or worse, pedestalization: when you’re their favourite so you’re out of their league. And that incredibly slimy – so far thankfully unsuccessful – undercutting method I’ve seen attempted many times: when they tell you your work is lousy, but gosh you’re cute and (here’s that word again) interesting and perhaps you can redeem yourself in some non-literary way?

Women with a strong sense of purpose who wish to partner with men have very slim pickings.

Which brings us to the purely circumstantial, a stark fact beyond personal choice: you don’t get chosen. They prefer someone who won’t distress their fragile egos. This has a funny effect on ambitious women, though. We just work harder. We put all of it – time, effort, love, attention, the need for validation and even libido – into becoming damn good at what we do. Then becoming even better. A woman rejected, openly or underhandedly, for wanting her career as much as or more than she wants you has no choice but to make the most of it.

So congratulations to Priyanka Chopra – not on getting married, but on finding someone who admires that she dreams big and is driven. And isn’t afraid she’ll out-dazzle him (and she surely will).

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on December 6th 2018. “The Venus Flytrap” appears in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: Smash Brahminical Patriarchy

What a beautiful coup it was to watch unfolding online: the head of a platform on which women and minorities face daily abuse, unwittingly holding a poster with a radical slogan. If only Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter, had held the words “Smash Brahminical Patriarchy” above his head, and truly understood and endorsed them. But at least he held the poster visibly enough, in a photo that was shared the day after a closed-doors meeting he had with feminists in India. When you consider the angry backlash that came afterwards, you appreciate just what a coup it was for Sanghapalli Aruna to give Dorsey this poster, and then for him to not just pose with, but post it! Yes, the slogan is radical. But why? It should not be. It should be natural and logical. It may not be intuitive, given the extent of conditioning that many people must consciously undo, but it can at least be learned. It should be as vital as the green recycling symbol, as ubiquitous as the new rupee sign, as catchy as “Horn Ok Please”. Unfortunately, we’re still at a stage where its very meaning needs to be explained.

As Thenmozhi Soundararajan, the artist behind the 2016 poster that Dorsey held, explained succinctly, during the ensuing controversy: “Brahminical patriarchy refers to the interlocking system of caste, gender norms and rituals under Brahminic tradition that enforce caste through women and their reproductive function.” The phrase is not some shiny new hashtag event, and has been in use for decades in the works of a number of intersectional activists and thinkers. The concept itself, with or without the exact phrase, is in the foundational ethics of many more. In even more simplified terms, and in terms that directly call for action, it’s this: the only meaningful kind of feminism in India is a feminism that jointly tackles the caste system.

Feminist discourse has evolved to a place of intersectionality, requiring that other inequalities are also a part of conversation, from acknowledgment through to action. Class, race, sexuality, the environment, post-coloniality, anti-capitalism – these are some of the intersections. We cannot deny that the Indian variant of patriarchy (and to be fair, just as there are different strains of feminism, there are different strains of patriarchy, but here we speak of the most powerful form) is deeply interlinked with caste. Caste cannot be maintained without the policing of reproduction. And therein is the fundamental reason for all the controls on women and female sexuality that we experience in myriad forms in Indian society.

I can take it in good faith that Dorsey and his staff, even his Indian-origin ones, were ignorant of all the above when they needlessly backtracked and apologised for the poster. But that, above all, reveals how important this work is. Indians everywhere have managed to keep India’s most shameful, and shamefully thriving, system under wraps for a long time – obfuscating it, philosophising it, claiming other victimhoods when convenient. But no longer. That’s the beauty of this coup. It turned that conspiracy of denial on itself, making the most of corporate desire to look progressive. With just three sweet words.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on November 29th 2018. “The Venus Flytrap” appears in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: A Closet Full Of Ocean

You’d imagine the indigo plant would contain a clue of what it’s capable of, but from root to leaf-tip, it gives little away. There are no blossoms like the vivid blue aparajita’s, for the indigofera tinctoria flowers in pinkish-purple. Its dye is made from its innocuous-looking leaves. When processed, they give forth a colour so potent that it tinges human skin, turns the hands and nails of those who prepare it blue-black like Kali or Krishna.

I read somewhere that ancient Egyptians wrapped their mummies in indigo-dyed cloth, and flicking through the accordion of hangers in my closet I can imagine why. To be buried in indigo, upright like a warrior. To be burned in indigo, so as not to wake suffocating within a grave (in indigo). To die in indigo. To arrive in the afterlife in indigo. The thought is so comforting.

When I see denim or a solid purple-ultramarine, I do not think “indigo”. I am technically wrong, of course. Indigo is what makes blue jeans blue. It has its place on the colour wheel. But to me, only blue fabric interspersed with white (sometimes an adulterated white, if the dye has bled) counts. Stamped repeatedly with a dabu hand block pattern. Swirled, achieved with batik wax. Or synthetic versions of the same – synthetic versions of everything, from the print to the dye. My eyes are fooled. My mind is calmed. The sight of indigo – that combination of soft blue and white – soothes me.

This is what Marco Polo observed about the production of Indian indigo in the kingdom of Coilum (present-day Kerala): “They have also abundance of very fine indigo. This is made of a certain herb which is gathered, and [after the roots have been removed] is put into great vessels upon which they pour water and then leave it till the whole of the plant is decomposed. They then put this liquid in the sun, which is tremendously hot there, so that it boils and coagulates, and becomes such as we see it.” European leaders of the 1600s were so envious of India’s monopoly on the trade that France had the death penalty for the use of indigo over woad, a yellow-flowered plant that also produces a blue dye. Germany spread a rumour that it was “the devil’s colour”. I touch my beautiful clothes and think of how neither threat would have persuaded me to give them up.

Then I think of the hands who plucked the leaves, who stirred the vats, who pressed carved wooden blocks onto the fabric, who measured and cut and stitched it (even if it’s not true indigo, it’s not without exploitation). I think of the Indigo Revolt of 1858-1859, and of the environmental effects of processing or synthetic pigments. I think of everything we know about the labour that goes into possessions we see as “the small things” or self-care. Even the way this textile comforts me comes at some cost.

How disquieting to know it is impossible to be in this world without somehow being violent. Contemplating this, I reach into the calm of blue and white undulations, a closet full of ocean.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on November 22nd 2018. “The Venus Flytrap” appears in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: Not In Your Nightie

After several months of keeping this fashion policing under wraps, news leaked that the village of Thokalapalle in West Godavari district, Andhra Pradesh, had proudly and privately instated a dress code. According to this village sanghama-ordained decision, women are banned from wearing nighties during the daytime. Only the ill are exempt, and those who violate the ban face a Rs2000 penalty. Tattlers benefit, with a reward of Rs1000. Since the ban came into effect, village elders claim that women have indeed stopped wearing nighties outdoors between 6am and 7pm, as no ban violations have been reported. Sarees and dupattas have made a comeback on their streets.

Consider the average nightie – ankle-length, sleeved, with a modest collar. Often in less than attractive patterns, sometimes with frilled panels on the bustline that have an additional concealing effect. In fact, the nightie is the definition of dowdiness. It signals a woman who would prefer to be at rest, but is also simply too busy to get changed. To many, the nightie is also the definition of comfort. Wearing one is a subtle declaration of disinterest in dressing up, and of putting one’s ease first. It’s interesting how piqued Thokalapalle citizens reportedly said that the sight of women in nighties in public “inconvenienced” others or made them “uncomfortable”. The women’s convenience is the inconvenience, and their comfort causes discomfort.

It’s not difficult to imagine women going about their daily business wearing nighties. The clothing brand Pommy’s even developed an entire advertisement series around this motif. In it, the actor Devayani defused a variety of conflicts by appearing on the scene donning the utterly domestic nightie. But seeded within the hilarity of these commercials was a powerful statement. In each clip, Devayani asserted with a sweet smile that she was the “kudumba thalaivi” (the head of the household). The nighties conferred that confidence in her. The clincher? The final tagline: “engum engengum” (everywhere, anywhere).

No women from Thokalapalle have spoken up yet to say that the ban is oppressive. Honestly, they probably have better things to do and more pressing battles to fight. But those from the village who have talked to the press paint a uniformly eerie picture. They say that it was younger women from self-help groups who made a decision to “honour their traditions”. They say that everyone is happy. They also say that wearing nighties to go about public quotidian activities, like shopping for groceries, visiting temples, doing laundry or picking kids up from school, is “not good”. Why? They do not say.

All patriarchal societies have restrictions, overt or subtle, on what women can wear. In Thokalapalle, it’s nighties. In Chennai, it’s shorts. Thinking over how this plays out in different places is interesting. To my mind, a nightie is probably the furthest thing from lingerie. But to someone else, who remembers a time when anything other than a saree was shocking, a nightie may be loaded with other signifiers. It’s absolutely wrong to tell women they can’t choose their wardrobes. But there’s something worth observing here, about how desire and style have complementary semiotics, and how sometimes these break taboos, and sometimes reinforce them.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on November 15th 2018. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.