In late 2017, a short story in The New Yorker entitled “Cat Person” went viral, like no English-language fiction had ever done before. The author Kristen Roupenian’s debut, it tapped into the Me Too movement’s complex and charged conversations on consent. Last week, Alexis Nowicki, who works in publishing, released a personal essay revealing that Roupenian had based the story’s protagonist on her. She had contacted Roupenian, and confirmed what she suspected. Nowicki wrote about how her actual relationship with a since-deceased man she called Charles was far better than the relationship depicted therein. 

The entire ethical issue could have been avoided if Roupenian had been more careful with her craft. The story would not have been impacted if the protagonist lived in a different town or pursued a different undergrad major. These were the details that Nowicki saw herself in; not, by her own admission, the most important parts of the story.

Speaking on the story’s fame, Roupenian told The Guardian in 2019, “I can’t think without feeling shrunken. It’s like everyone’s talking about me, and it makes me feel small.” In her essay, Nowicki writes, “I was angry, still – that someone who knows so intensely about what it’s like to watch your readers misconstrue fiction as autobiography would have dragged others, without their knowledge, into that discomfort.” This unpleasant feeling is known to many who encounter success, notoriety or both – from artists who draw on true narratives to those whose photos become memes. Roupenian felt this on a scale of millions. Nowicki felt it in her personal circles, who recognised her and Charles immediately. Neither experience could have been nice.

But no one involved in “Cat Person” – Nowicki whom the protagonist was built on, Roupenian who wrote it, Charles whom the three real life and fictional women all dated – is not messy. It’s not hard to imagine how Roupenian, triggered by a lover’s constant (and manipulative) talk about an ex, became a bit obsessed with that ex. Significantly, most of what she knew about Nowicki was not through social media, but shared by Charles. In catharsising her feelings through fiction, she should have been creative with a few highly interchangeable details. But if Roupenian’s motives are dubious, so are Nowicki’s.

Charles remained publicly anonymous despite the spotlight cast by “Cat Person”. Nowicki has violated his privacy, posthumously, despite knowing he was ashamed by the story. She has offered unassailable proof to anyone who knew him that Charles treated Roupenian (and possibly others) poorly. Knowing her identity, strangers can unearth his too. Her defense of him suggests internalised misogyny; the “he was good to me” argument is a human shield that many sexual predators get to crouch behind. Roupenian shot to fame through writing based on Charles. Nowicki has now done the same.

The ethics are less tricky than they appear at first. Roupenian was sloppy in her craft; Nowicki clever. Both got their revenge. If both privileged their own experiences above Charles’ – well, is it so bad when something doesn’t revolve around a cis-het man, for a change? Or are we still uncomfortable when women tell their stories, as fact or as fiction?

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on July 15^th 2021. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

This week, an anonymously-created, open-source website called S*lli Deals – named for a slur against Muslims – went live. On it were the photographs, names and social media handles of numerous Muslim women in India, and the lewd suggestion that these individuals could be purchased, like in any “Deal of the Day” promotion. It was an open invitation for harassment of all kinds.

Women have their photos stolen and misused all the time, especially online. I’ve written in this column in the past about discovering my own images being reposted by sleazy accounts, among hundreds of others’. But this latest cybercrime – the latest in a long line – should not be seen only in light of overall societal misogyny, but specifically has to be understood in the context of anti-Muslim hate. The women were targeted because of their religious background. This too joins a long line of similar incidents of varying levels of brutality, spanning from bias to genocide.

Anti-Muslim and anti-minority rhetoric in India currently happens very overtly, and from very high platforms. It has been a part of election campaigning. Hate speech rings out at major rallies, such as at the Hindu Mahasabha in Haryana a few days ago, where among other radicalised public speakers was a 17-year old who opened fire near Jamia Millia University at an anti-CAA protest last year. Those who openly incite violence against minorities have impunity. In the meanwhile, activists who work for equality and justice – usually with political secularism, regardless of personal sentiment, as a core value – suffer and even die incarcerated (like Father Stan Swamy) or assassinated (like Gauri Lankesh, or further back, like M.K. Gandhi).

The reprehensible term “love jihad” has been used for years to control and punish Hindu women (and now, Sikh women too, as recent cases in Kashmir have shown). It is based on the idea of women as property, chattel that cannot be permitted to exercise free will. Abusive enterprises like S*lli Deals also operate under the concept of ownership, and by extension trade or trafficking, but with two additional layers: inviting public participation in the oppression, and explicit religious discrimination. 

No religion is free of fundamentalists. No matter its tenets. No matter how meaningful or uplifting a private spiritual life may feel, to deny that some will always use religion to create violence of all kinds is to help perpetuate that violence.

People like me – who technically belong to the Hindu religious majority – are often dismissed in conversation with versions of the statement: “You do not know the dangers of Islamic fundamentalism”. Actually, I do. I spent most of my life in a Muslim country, 17 years to be precise, with anti-minority edicts enshrined in its Constitution. I have personally undergone the quotidian discriminations of belonging to a minority and having my culture be erased on a systemic scale, and I raised my voice loudly against these maltreatments there too. None of this made me anti-Muslim. It made me anti-bigotry. I know the dangers of religious fundamentalism on a general population, full stop. It’s irrelevant which strain – all are equally violent, and must be rejected, for the good of everyone, of every denomination.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on July 8^th 2021. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

About a month ago, tennis champion Naomi Osaka announced that she would no longer participate in post-match press conferences, explaining that these events had a negative impact on her mental health. She went on to withdraw from the French Open, following criticism and paying a hefty fine for not attending a mandatory media event. Osaka posted a statement on social media about having “suffered long bouts of depression” since the 2018 U.S. Open and having “huge waves of anxiety” when forced to speak in public.

Some of the criticism, the most publicised of which came from white male tennis celebrities including Boris Becker and Rafael Nadal, painted Osaka as someone ungrateful who didn’t want to do her job. But Osaka’s job is only to train and to play to the best of her ability. As a successful athlete, she could choose selectively to engage with the press or the public through endorsements, interviews and other modes. To expect her to come off the intensity of the court and be cordial or even cheerful on a world stage, without having had time to process elation or defeat, is cruel. 

The demand that one be visible, accessible and open to scrutiny just because one’s work is appealing to large audiences is just wrong. This is a burden, not a part of the work. Whether the career in question is that of an international athlete, or of a home-based entrepreneur who is forced to develop influencer skill sets rather than focus on what they are gifted at making, precious time and energy is lost on cycles of feeding and fending off exposure.

Recently, musician Sinead O’Connor released a memoir in which she revealed her perspective on her own trajectory. Collective memory had held that O’Connor destroyed her career through a series of antics. But many of these – tearing up a Pope’s photo in protest against child sexual abuse, refusing to play the U.S. national anthem, boycotting the Grammys – were acts of activism. O’Connor now says, decades later, that her meteoric fame had undone her. These powerful statements were made from a platform that she was relieved to be deposed of.

O’Connor also shaved her head, considered very shocking in the 90s. Not coincidentally, another musician (another woman, too) who did the same in 2007 was Britney Spears. This was a furious attempt to wrest power back from those who controlled her public image, including her own kith and kin. In a statement made this week, Spears petitioned to have the legal conservatorship that her father and family hold over her removed. Some of the abuse that she recounts includes constant monitoring, not having control over her finances, having a birth control device implanted in her body without her consent, and much more. Spears’ situation makes it clear: the eyes of the whole world can be watching, and they’ll still have mutual consensus that they can’t see abuse or unkindness. 

In such a world, to release artistic work, exhibit athletic performance or share any creative, intellectual and practical bounties is already too much. Why then would anyone want to also let themselves and their vulnerabilities be open to discussion?

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on July 1^st 2021. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

“If Batman and Catwoman had sex, would he go down on her?” It sounds like a conversation between adolescents, but the question had the internet aflame last week, when Harley Quinn co-creator Justin Halpern revealed in an interview that a scene depicting this intimate act had been censored from the series’ third season. Halpern stated that DC, the powerful parent company that owns the original fictional universe of these characters and their myriad spin-offs, was generally supportive of creative choices. Except, when it came to this scene, the co-creators were told that “Heroes don’t do that.” That meaning giving oral pleasure.

Harley Quinn is an animated series for adults, based on comic books that also contain adult content, including sex and violence. In today’s television streaming universe, to have a pearl-clutching response to pleasuring the oyster is downright archaic. This controversy is not about the portrayal of sex, or about sensitive material that may not be suitable for audiences of all ages. It’s about a discomfort with pleasure, specifically if the person experiencing that pleasure is a woman. It’s also about discomfort with tender expressions by masculine figures. Sex, as we know, can sometimes be about power or capital instead. Perhaps those iterations are more acceptable to some than mere, or sheer, pleasure – both given and received.

The Batman character was created in 1939, and was a forerunner in what came to be known as the Golden Age of American comics, which continued till the mid-50s. After the Comics Code Authority, an industry-regulated mechanism, came into effect in 1954, DC Comics included this edict in its in-house editorial policy: “…the inclusion of females in stories is specifically discouraged. Women, when used in plot structure, should be secondary in importance, and should be drawn realistically, without exaggeration of feminine physical qualities.” By the time I was a comics reader in the mid-90s, the last point at least had long gone out the window. Hypersexualisation of women was an overt part of the books and the animated shows, made for kids, that I consumed. But that wasn’t all: in 1999, writer Gail Simone created a list called “Women In Refrigerators”, listing the myriad ways in which women characters met brutal ends in comic literature. This history is relevant because the characters of Catwoman and Batman were shaped by these trends too, just the censorship of their relationship is now.

But it’s really the decision-makers at DC who’ve revealed a little too much about their own sex lives. Whoever told the Harley Quinn team that “It’s hard to sell a toy if Batman is also going down on someone” seems unfamiliar with the adult toy market, hentai, fan fiction, diverse audiences or – umm – sexual fantasy and sexual reality. We don’t all necessarily want to watch animated erotica, and we certainly don’t all want the same things in bed. But as Glen Weldon of NPR, one of many commentators who weighed in on the issue, said: “I’d argue that thinking of others and putting their needs above yours is pretty much the definition of a hero.” Not that just being a good lover makes anyone a hero, of course!

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on June 25^th 2021. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

I had no idea that the emoji lexicon had expanded to include one indicating small-sized penises, until I noticed a weird trending topic on Twitter’s “What’s Happening” sidebar. “Women in South Korea are mocking men’s penises and fuelling an anti-feminism movement”, the headline provoked. I ignored it for a whole day, hackles raised by the second half of the line. Women fuelling an anti-feminism movement? It’s not that it doesn’t happen. It’s just that when it happens, it’s usually other women who are the targets – not men.

When I finally did click on the link, it led to a paywalled article with a different headline. I gathered just enough to realise that this was actually a very interesting, and concerning, event. Some feminists had been using a symbol of a hand with an inch between the pointer finger and the thumb, before it became an emoji. It was also used in protests against gender-based discrimination and inequality. Subsequently, misogynist groups began to trace people and organisations that had used the symbol – to boycott, pressure into unemployment, and more.

I lack cultural or other contexts for this South Korean phenomenon, and what little I know of it is through English language conduits. But, it’s possible to have impressions rather than opinions, and let these impressions form the basis of developing opinions relevant to one’s own context. For instance, I don’t condone the mocking of physical features. I can’t agree with other feminists who use that emoji as part of socio-political expression. That said, I think this emoji has its uses in personal chats – as a response to unsolicited pornographic photos, and to malicious people who happen to have penises who threaten, extort, neg or shame the other party in an intimate conversation. As a quick comeback, it’s not entirely unfair. However, as part of broad political rhetoric or expression, it’s cruel and unproductive, and should have no place.

Body-shaming, like fraudulent use of anti-dowry laws or other gendered safeguards, isn’t a conversation that should be led by misogynists. It should be led by feminists of all genders, who can correctly contextualise the backdrop and the trajectory of a negative event. To paint the angered and wounded who do something less than perfectly fair as being purely in the wrong, without exploring and addressing the cause of their frustration, only fuels more retaliatory actions. A comprehensive set of solutions would hold space for it, but also address harm caused to the recipients of that frustration. It wouldn’t assume that all people of a certain category are alike. Misogynists, on the other hand, frame the issue from the start with their eye on the endgame – i.e. discrediting women. 

Some comprehensive solutions come from holding space for uneasy topics, without being poised to respond with the right jargon, template reactions, mean-spiritedness or an unquestioning allegiance to a worldview. We need to learn to do this in smaller ways first, and eventually this will create ripples in the larger social fabric and on public stages. It can be far more tempting to resort to a rude emoji or a biting retort, but this isn’t always useful. Context, as ever, matters.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on June 19^th 2021. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

Kisa Gotami ran, carrying the corpse of her child to where the Buddha sat, observing the vagaries of the ever-moving world. “Give him back to me”, she cried. He had been so young that she could count the months of his life on the digits of her own body. His body, borne within hers only a little while before, weighed almost nothing in her arms. Only her heart was unable to bear the immensity of what was.

 The Buddha agreed to help her – but to do so, he needed a single mustard seed from any household that had not experienced death.

Gotami, who had earlier stopped strangers and begged for medicine that would revive the child, who had been told that only the Buddha could offer her the cure she needed, set off again in search of this antidote. She roamed from house to house, raising her plea at each threshold.

“Who is able to count how many have died here?” she heard at one door. At others, the look in the eyes of the one left behind, upon hearing her enquiry, spoke clearly. At every home, a story was shared in lieu of a single mustard seed. There was no one living whom death had not visited, who did not carry in their hearts even a mustard-seed measure of grief. Gotami returned to the Buddha having understood the essence of life, accepting her loss as a part of what it means to love or to outlive.

This powerful parable has been with me every day in the last few weeks, as I grieve my father’s demise. When the pall of the second wave of the pandemic began to loom over India a few months ago, I too knew that my life would not go unscathed – almost no household in this land would. Our days and nights of mourning are also other people’s days and nights of mourning. In comforting another, I find comfort for myself. The knowledge of collective grief is a strange balm. It is not comparative grief, but a catchment of bereavements. I open the clasp across my roaring heart and let my sorrow merge into the flood-flow of all the world’s grief. I hold it and am held within it, and I know its mirror-name. “We are so lightly here,” Leonard Cohen wrote. “It is in love that we are made; in love we disappear.”

Now the second wave is receding, and it calls to mind how coastal waves recede before a tsunami – all that is hidden on the littoral floor is revealed. We may wish to understand the warning. All cycles and catalysts of nature are inevitable. But they are not insentient or without mercy. We cannot always grasp the deeper eloquence of the universe, or put into words its delicate stirrings in the smallness of our lives. But to know we are within a tapestry, one that connects us to all that has breathed, all that has thrilled to know itself in the uniqueness of its experience, all that has lived for itself or loved another, is a gift. It is, as Kisa Gotami knew, a form of enlightenment.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on June 10^th 2021. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The day before my beautiful father passed into the light, I posted a Tweet, sharing for the first time this aspect of my private life. In it, I said that he had been on a ventilator for ten days, and that it was okay if one did not pray for him or for I, but that I asked only this: “Next time, cast your vote well.”

My father is one of lakhs of Indians who have been murdered by the Modi government during this pandemic. It is not only the deaths of those who were COVID+ when they died that count among these, but also every post-COVID death, every never-tested death, every fudged data death, every death by penury, every death by suicide because of an untenable situation caused by how public resources were funnelled into propaganda and unaccounted coffers rather into our infrastructure, every death from walking a highway because of an arbitrary lockdown, every death from another ailment that could not be treated because hospitals had no room or equipment, every death that could have been avoided had the election rallies and the Kumbh Mela that brought this second wave upon us had not happened. This is avarice and evil. It’s wilful. Negligence is an understatement.

I value my privacy; it was in a moment of need, not anger, that I posted that Tweet. It was also a moment of empathic unity with everyone who has suffered so much recently, and all who will continue to. I am glad I posted it before and not after he died, because what happened was this: regime supporters began to hurl abuse my way. Dozens of quote-Tweets expressing vile sentiments, cursing and blaming my family and I, without an iota of kindness. Some even skewed what I said to suggest that I was against the DMK government, which – since it is openly against the terror at the Centre – I’m currently grateful for. What I experienced happens daily online. Rightwing trolls (and to a lesser extent, progressive-posing provocateurs) descend on people in their times of pain and loss without decency or sensitivity, sending terrible words, and even death and rape threats.

This is the naked face of all who support this despicable regime, including those who are not Internet trolls. There is no temple that can be raised that will be enough to cleanse their souls of sin.

You see, I’m a believer. My father’s last rites were performed by the people he loved the most in the world: four women, two of us menstruating. In the absence of crowd and formality, we sent him across in the way we needed to: with our hands, with our words, with our own ceremonies. 

My father was a devout man, who identified as Hindu – and like anyone with a pure heart opposed the regime at the top. He had a beautiful, non-Brahminical, non-patriarchal, and most importantly heartfelt farewell, replete equally with the Sanskrit prayers we know by heart as much as all else we were moved to offer. It was not a political gesture.

But may I remind you of this: here in this undeclared yet evident Hindu Rashtra, the waters of the holy Ganga have been clogged with bodies that could not be given this dignity. Mass, indistinguishable pyres have spread ashes over cities. Ask your conscience whether a government that believes in God or Goodness, orthodox or otherwise, would have allowed for all this to happen. This terrible regime has caused such immense despair across this land – intent instead on raising monuments, erasing history and distorting if not destroying the possibility of joy, peace and prosperity for everyone who lives (or lived) here.

I was with my Appa etherically in the last minutes of his life, guided by the divine to connect with him even though I did not know what was taking place. I had a profound spiritual experience that will hold me in grace for the rest of my life, and to the afterlife that he will greet me into one day.

This is something that the rotten-hearted who use God as a prop without practicing compassion will never understand. My faith is strong, and so I am in the chorus of all of us who chant this: the evil that has consumed our country must go, and must be replaced by leadership that is equal, just, rational, honest and can begin to repair all the damage that this regime and its cheerleaders are doing.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on June 5^th 2021. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

“It wrenches me beyond describing, therefore, to accept that I have violated that long-standing relationship of trust and respect between us and I apologise unconditionally for the shameful lapse of judgement that led me to attempt a sexual liaison with you on two occasions on 7 November and 8 November 2013, despite your clear reluctance that you did not want such attention from me.” In November 2013, Tarun Tejpal – the accused in a rape case against a younger, subordinate colleague – not only sent this email to the survivor, but even had it published. This confession did not suffice; over seven years later, a “fast-track” court has just acquitted him.

In Eve Ensler’s book The Apology, she channels/imagines her late father, who had sexually abused her, and gives herself the apology she longs for. In Michaela Cole’s TV series I May Destroy You, which fictionalises a crime she experienced, she creates her closure as well, through a series of fantasised potential outcomes to confronting her trauma, including apology. Layli Long Soldier’s poetry collection Whereas is a response to the duplicitous language and covert non-delivery of the Congressional Resolution of Apology to Native Americans, a U.S. government decree that was quietly signed in 2009 – so quietly that many indigenous people, including the poet at first, did not hear about it. Sometimes an apology means nothing – it cannot hold water in court, cannot repair what was done, cannot give back what was lost. Or it is tendered in a crafty way, to further exploit, to attract sympathy, to offer ruses and excuses.

When I was contacted casually by someone who had hurt me in an incident that I later understood as having been sexual assault, I felt a mixture of dread and curiosity. My therapist said, as I processed my feelings: “You need justice.” I think I smirked, recalling everything I knew about how abusers of all stripes get away with wrongdoings of all degrees of severity, as I replied, “What is justice?” It was a question I had to answer for myself. After weeks of anxiety attacks, I sent him a long email. I wrote unequivocally about the impact of his actions and begged him not to reply if he could not do so gracefully. He didn’t; a relief. It was never his apology I needed.

But in the aftermath of Tejpal’s acquittal, I experience again the fear of being manipulated through words, the fear that the recipient of my email has just been biding his time and now has permission to be vicious, dishonest or glib. A bit of that old shadow creeps across my heart: here, on the public stage of the world, under the aegis of the law, is proof that an offender can make a confession and still be absolved. What if this sets a behavioural precedent, and not only bolsters a legal one? What do words mean then? What do apologies?

Long Soldier writes: “Yet the root of reparation is repair.” Healing is more beautiful than justice. Perhaps they are sometimes synonyms. We cannot always have it. When we can try, we must – giving to ourselves, guiding our own ways into restoration.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on May 27^th 2021. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

“It wrenches me beyond describing, therefore, to accept that I have violated that long-standing relation

For Tanuja Patil and Shardul Kadam, a Maharashtra-based straight couple, starting their marriage off on an equal footing meant exchanging mangalsutras. They will both wear the traditional nuptial chain, conventionally worn only by women.

Objects like this are inherently loaded ones, even though they are also privately sentimental ones. For some, the radical abjuring of all such markers is the only form of acceptable self-presentation. For others, there’s sincerity in adapting markers so that they reflect the self, the partnership and shared or specific beliefs.

There are certainly strong arguments to be made for how an accessory isn’t going to equalise an institution, but these apply most at large. If all woke couples began to wear matching nuptial chains tomorrow, this will become just as meaningless as those cringey karuppu kannadi wedding photos that every Chennai couple takes (sorry folks, you look like rejects from a 90’s boy band music video). But within the scope of this one partnership, the ornament has been chosen to represent the kind of marriage the couple is making an effort to co-create. As Kadam stated, “Tanuja and I can define our relationship better than anyone else; we support each other’s work, believe in each other’s dreams, and are in this journey together. So, who cares what the world thinks?”

A friend of mine got married sitting on her mother’s lap recently. I’ve never been married, but I wore bridal mettis for a few years, because I wanted to (an aside about the evolution of gendered ornaments: mettis were originally worn by men to indicate their marital status – to women who were taught to keep their sights on the ground, rather than look a man in the eye). Many have opted for legal registrations over the uneasiness of figuring out how to have a ceremony that doesn’t reinforce regressive mores. Some reinvent the rituals to suit what they believe in, from eliminating certain portions to rewriting incantations. The mangalsutras mutually tied at the Patil-Kadam wedding would fall into this category.

Now and then, these little things happen that rearrange one’s personal equation to overarching institutions and traditions, and the way we navigate these as people who know that we all internalise conditioning, but can grow and choose anew. They are not radical things, just individually precious ones. Inter-religious and inter-caste marriages, even if they have the most traditional ceremonies, will always be more progressive on a larger and more long-term scale than small gestures. So will marriages that transcend racial and heteronormative boundaries. Then, of course, there’s the eschewing of marriage altogether in favour of partnership, and bonds that are forged and renewed without the scaffolds of societal and legal sanction.

But marriages and partnerships, even if they have elements which appear to be open-minded and reformist, are only as successful as what goes on out of sight. True equality within a partnership can’t be gauged only in comparison to cultural norms. Neither can acceptance or acquiescence be understood as contentment. The truth is our standards are low, with centuries of abusive relationships in our collective histories. Our simple gestures must open the door to deeper transformations, and broader change.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on May 20^th 2021. “The Venus Flytrap” appears in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

Here in this brutal second wave of coronavirus in India, with mental health problems endemic in a population that’s suffered economically and emotionally for upwards of 14 months, how are there still people glibly ignoring the reality of the situation in favour of chirpy phrases and flu tonics? That is not hope. That’s toxic positivity.

If you’ve done this, you may feel like you are helping. But this sadly doesn’t do anything useful for the person on the receiving end, who has to make an effort to be polite in response to platitudes when there’s so much else that needs (sometimes urgent) attention.

Loved ones who say “be positive, test negative” mean well; often, they want to make the recipient feel better. But there are much better ways to do this than to try to diminish the threat of the virus. Being unwilling to hold space for the fear, confusion, exhaustion, grief or other difficult emotions of a coronavirus or coronavirus-adjacent experience has adverse emotional repercussions on the person being told to cheer up.

Unless you are going to personally visit a patient’s or caregiver’s kitchen (double-masked mandatorily, obviously) and pluck, peel, chop, hand-pound and strain the selection of rhizomes, leaves and spices that you casually suggested over Whatsapp that they consume frequently – Don’t. It isn’t that these remedies are ineffective; it’s that it’s far easier to shoot off a prescription than to prepare something. You don’t know what the practicalities of their schedule, the ingredients or income at their disposal, or their energy level on any given day are.

I’m writing this amidst a respite from the way the virus has affected my own circumstances, and I’ve noticed what actually helped me in terms of communication. Since updates vary even between different parts of the same day, so if someone has reached out to you to, respond promptly. If you’re not usually in frequent contact, ask before you call – a caregiver may have their hands literally full; a patient may be resting. Catering, financial aid and such essentials may be appreciated; if you can provide, do.

In lieu of insensitive or even stupid phrases, ask meaningful questions or offer things that balance the difficulty of the situation with the hope that you feel (because you can; you’re not in their shoes).

“I pray for this night to be safely behind us,” a dear friend texted, showing me he wouldn’t pretend things weren’t scary with some “It’ll be okay!” nonsense. This crucial assurance let me safely pour my anguish out over a 2am phone call.

“I am curious about what is guiding you emotionally and spiritually right now, helping you find your own inner rhythm and be cared for and loved?” another dear friend asked. This beautiful question opened up a space for me to name, request and receive nourishment.

 On that note: supplementing prayers with angry questions toward the authorities who let this country down will go far in helping us collectively recover from this horror. We must inculcate heartfelt resistance over toxic positivity. That’s what will give us resilience for the long haul. Those of us who survive are going to need it.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on May 15^th 2021. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

Oh, how low the bar is for cis-het men to appear to be romantically impressive. 

The actor Riz Ahmed, walking the Academy Awards red carpet with his partner, the novelist Fatima Farheen Mirza, asked press photographers to pause for a few seconds as he reached over to play with Mirza’s hair. I guess he was trying to look like he was adjusting it. Except it didn’t need adjusting. Mirza’s coiffure, a side-swept and very smooth fringe and even smoother straight hair left down her back, had probably already been worked on by professionals who had ensured it would stay in place. Which it did. No flyaways, no wisps, no pedestrian disarray. In fact, he could have wound up messing it up by touching it at all. Which he didn’t, but still: what was the point of that unnecessary, interruptive, red carpet-traffic-holding up caress of her hair? Or here’s a bigger question: why did so many press outlets and people get so excited about it, as though it was the 21^st century equivalent of a gentleman covering a puddle with his cloak so that a lady wouldn’t have to take a slightly longer step across or around it? Some kinds of chivalry are best left dead, thus avoiding both dry cleaning bills and dramatic eye rolls.

Look, who knows what the dynamics of their marriage are. Maybe random acts of interference are their love language. Maybe it’s none of our business.

But that moment on the red carpet, that little performance for the public eye? That was for us to see and maybe even for us to fawn over, but mostly it was just territorial behaviour on Ahmed’s part. The gesture is not necessarily controlling in and of itself, because people do appreciate different kinds of displays of affection, depending on their temperaments, needs and comfort levels. But it’s certainly territorial – Ahmed put his back between Mirza and the photographers, as if to say, even if lovingly, “Remember that she’s mine”.

I’ve been meaning to read Mirza’s work ever since I became aware of her through the couple’s last viral moment in the media. That was when Ahmed revealed in an interview that the couple had a rom-com style meetcute – they were both vying for the same power point for their respective laptops at a café. It’s the classic un-pandemic daydream of certain introverted, ambitious types: to be immersed in your work, and then serendipitously find love just by stepping out for a change of scene (her hair was probably perfect that day too, as it is in all such daydreams). Mirza is a bestselling author. I’m annoyed that I hadn’t known of her except through her spouse talking about her, and that I’ve been reminded about her only because he drew the spotlight again.

I checked out a sample of her novel, A Place For Us, and smirked because right there on the first page was a line that was kind of funny, miscontextualised. A man greeting guests at his sister’s wedding is described like so: “He smoothed down his hair, as if a stray strand would be enough to call attention, give him away.”

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on May 1^st 2021. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.