The Venus Flytrap: A Deeper Shade of Brown

I probably wouldn’t have watched the new live-action Aladdin remake, but it was the birthday girl’s outing of choice. Social media had prepared me to cringe at just how problematic this beloved movie from my childhood really was, full of Orientalism, cultural conflations and racist tropes. But there I was with tears streaming down my face during the “A Whole New World” sequence, smudging the 3D glasses and my real glasses both, moved by the surrealness of watching the song in a new rendering. Briefly, I forgot the different sort of pang that had come earlier – seeing that Princess Jasmine, unlike her animated counterpart, was light-skinned. I was surprised by how hurt I felt, grasping then just how powerfully her original incarnation had impacted me.

As far as princesses go, it was 2009 before a black girl, Tiana of The Princess And The Frog, was illustrated. Amazingly, brown kids like me had Jasmine back in 1992. She was a rare representation. Not of brownness per se, but of darker skin (the actor in the remake is half-Indian: technically brown, but light-complexioned). Jasmine, the cartoon, was properly brown, “like dosas, samosas and stikki chikki”, as the title of a children’s book on skin colour goes. This was why I was also vividly drawn to Esmeralda, from the often forgotten The Hunchback Of Notre Dame. Brown like caramel and sapotas. Brown like me.

My skin tone is the kind that gets bleached out in sunlight and in smartphone selfies (there’s a historically racist bias in photo technology, some of which remains in play with manufacturers today). I prefer my true colour, and I wish to be visible as a darker-skinned woman who is achieving things, going places, and yes, is even attractive. I want to claim and share the space, the void really, caused by colourist erasure. It is currently over-run by light-skinned brown celebrities criticising racism in the West but promoting fairness creams and practising casteism in India.

An international publication once adjusted the settings so much on my portrait (which perfectly captured my true tone) that I looked positively pink. Bubblegum pink. Someone must have thought they were doing me a favour, like how people are quick to say like it’s a compliment, “Don’t worry, you’re not so dark.” Conversely, any fetishizing of dark skin takes me right back to the creepy man who told me when I was little – “Black Beauty. Like that book you’re reading instead of talking to me.”

But I am worried. Even today, many children do not have enough positive acknowledgments of their appearances. This includes all non-normativity in: skin colours, body sizes, hair textures, the shapes of facial features, heights, (dis)abilities, illness-related conditions, amputations, scars and more.

There’s a feminist twist in the new Aladdin and it can’t compensate for the whitewashing of the iconic original Jasmine for me. Despite all that character’s flaws, she was a way for some (though not all) darker-skinned children to see ourselves as being at the centre, admired. She was beautiful. For those of us who didn’t know we were too, it meant the world to be shown a reason to believe it.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on June 13th 2019. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: The Doomsday Clock

I had thought that human life on this planet had about a dozen years left, based on a UN warning last year, but it looks like a new report, released just ahead of World Environment Day on June 5, has given us an extension. Australia’s Breakthrough National Centre For Climate Restoration now sets the doomsday clock to 31 more years before climate change will have killed most of us.

“Even the ozone layer repaired itself,” someone shrugged when I chided them recently for a careless disposal of plastic. There is no doubt that the planet has self-healing capabilities. The problem is that we expect it to continue to both tolerate and heal from our damage at the same time. The anthropomorphisation of the planet and of its presiding sentience into Mother Earth and Mother Nature, respectively, are perfectly in line with how the human species regards its mothers too. Ascribing qualities like self-sacrifice, benevolence and forbearance while treating them really badly, and expecting them to take it. What’s the planet-sized version of misogyny? Whatever the punchline is, the joke’s on us.

Because there’s no reason to believe that this self-healing, evolving, extraordinary planet cannot go on without us. It will, no matter how we annihilate ourselves. Other life forms will replace us as the dominant one. Perhaps they will be all-seeing plants, because surely there must be plants. Or yet-imagined creatures made for new climes or through resourceful mutations. Or simply the sorts of species we used to crush underfoot, or consume, or whose habitats we turned into conurbations. We may not have their resilience. Nothing of our so-called superior intelligence has suggested that we will, not when we have allowed for all that has already happened.

I’m not here to offer solutions, because there’s nothing we don’t all already know. We’ve all seen the images of sea birds with six pack rings around their throats. We adjust our consumer choices with mindful boycotts. We don’t leave the water running as we brush. We even know that just 100 mega-companies are responsible for 71% of carbon emissions, and that while the blame doesn’t squarely fall on us, the burden does. And we do what we can.

We (must) live within the likelihood of apocalypse in the same way that we live despite the inevitability of our individual deaths. There are two ways to parse this statement. The first is insouciance: changing nothing about consumption or usage, insisting that the AC is personally well-deserved and there’s always mineral water to bathe in if the tankers don’t come, and generally continuing as though every resource, particularly one’s own privilege, is infinite. This is what many of us do. The second way is with awareness. To understand that individual effort without collective backing can do little, but to do it sincerely. To make choices which are really apologies, but at least those are better than excuses. To accept that the collapse is coming, but that our surrender will be with some certainty that we tried. To consider this goal daily: that this life, hurtling toward drought and misery, extinction and doom, was still experienced with honour and humility.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on June 6th 2019. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: Dutee Chand & Two Taboos

Champion sprinter Dutee Chand made history recently when she announced that she is in a romantic relationship with another woman, whom she describes as her soulmate. As the first sportsperson in India to come out as queer, she has hopefully paved the way for more people – in a field that is rife with gender-related difficulties, including discrimination towards those whose hormones don’t conform to a binary – to not have to be secretive about their lives.

But when Chand next spoke on the matter, she revealed that she had only come out about her personal life because of one of her sisters had been blackmailing her to the tune of Rs25 lakhs, threatening to inform the media about her sexuality, as well as physically abusing her. It seemed like Chand would not have discussed her personal life without the blackmail holding her under duress. The decision to counter it through speaking out first resulted in certain invasions of privacy, including the exposure of her partner’s address, whom she had not identified so as to shield from her such attention.

I would argue that this revelation about blackmail and abuse has an almost equal amount of cultural importance as her speaking about her sexuality. Family dysfunction of all kinds are still mostly taboo topics, because the institution is regarded as sacrosanct. Among these, sibling abuse is one of the least discussed forms. It’s intensely painful to concede that one’s sibling or offspring is malevolent, so we tread on eggshells, making excuses.

Sibling abuse can be extremely insidious particularly in adulthood, because it takes advantage of the fragility of the elderly, who are unable to comprehend their roles in creating that toxicity. It plays on every twisted dynamic in existence for decades. It knows where all the buttons are. One of my dearest friends and I endured a nearly three-year separation because one of our siblings conspired to break us up, and not being able to recognise sibling toxicity as a real force made that possible. That is my own most minor example. As much as I wish to be as brave as Chand and speak my truth more fully – in the hope that it can hold a comforting mirror to what many experience – I just can’t.

Despite the harrowing circumstances in which Chand was forced to reveal her relationship, she has since commendably chosen to discuss it in happy and revolutionary ways. There are still very few openly queer public figures in India, and among them lesbians are even fewer. Significantly, Chand has spoken about the right to wed, taking a tentative next step toward complete societal acceptance since last year’s scrapping of the draconian Section 377.

By sharing about the love, support, companionship, romance and joy she has with her soulmate, Chand makes a triple triumph. She has set a meaningful precedent for queer visibility, spoken publicly about the taboo of family abuse and specifically about rarely-acknowledged sibling toxicity, and then shown how it is possible for those wounded by it to build new and beautiful bonds. Free of the institution, and full of all the things that it is supposed to – but doesn’t always – provide.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on May 30th 2019. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: Natural Boundaries

The sea at Timbulsloko, Indonesia, didn’t just sweep in by itself, eroding the coast by miles. This gradual inundation was caused by human choices. Mangroves had shielded the land since time immemorial, allowing agriculture to flourish. But once people started to cut them, the sea began to reshape the coast, even washing away villages. Now, brushwood and bamboo structures have been set up to slow the tides, encourage sediment build-up, which will hopefully lead to the eventual formation of new mangroves.

The thriving, natural boundary that is the mangrove – lush, salt-saturated, interlocked grace, often the habitat of creatures of the sky and sea – has something to teach us. So does the restoration undertaken by the people of Timbulsloko. Sometimes we blunder. We think our boundaries aren’t important, and then we suffer. But we can correct this, provided we understand their necessity.

Another beautiful assertion of natural boundaries is how, in parts of the world including Kerala, Sri Lanka and Tanzania, marauding elephants have been kept from entering crop fields not through electric fences, but through a border of beehives. Not only are elephants frightened away (peacefully), but the devastation the planet will experience with the coming extinction of bees is averted just a little.

When it comes to interpersonal boundaries, many perceive them as restrictions only the unkind would impose. But the opposite is true. In order to have real goodness, one must have a clear sense of respect towards self and other. Healthy boundaries protect and nurture. Like cacti, palmyra and other organic fences used in rural homes, they are lovely to have, and hurt no one except those who intend to trespass.

Pondicherry’s French Quarter escaped the impact of the 2004 tsunami because of a 300-year old colonial stone seawall which was frequently reinforced. But the barrier had never had the larger population in mind, and hundreds of fisherpeople who lived and worked beyond its length were killed. Sometimes old protection mechanisms become insufficient, and we must find meaningful, updated methods. This can happen especially to those who are usually very good with maintaining boundaries. We fail to account for unexpected breaches.

Sometimes a barrier needs to be instated despite how unpleasant it feels to do it. Being reasonable and gentle does not always work. So if the scent of marigolds (known to repel rabbits, mosquitoes and certain insects) won’t do, perhaps the stink of coyote urine needs to be deployed. Coyote urine is used by agriculturalists in the US to deter against smaller pests including deer, skunks, rabbits and raccoons. As for larger predators: there is a point beyond which self-preservation must come first. When someone invades your privacy or space, threatens or disrespects you, demands your attention or drains you, you have every right to cut them out completely. They already have their explanation.

A story, too, can be a boundary. This is how sacred groves have survived around the world, through myths that rendered them inviolable. Long before the word “biodiversity” was coined, a native knowing ensured that what was precious was safe. Sometimes, the entirety of the story is just one powerful word, a word like “Enough”, or “No”.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on May 23rd 2019. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: Nobody’s Muse

When the legendary cultural critic Susan Sontag was 17 years old, she married a sociologist around a decade her senior, with whom she had a son. Her husband, Philip Rieff, published Freud: The Mind of the Moralist, widely considered a landmark text, in 1959. For years, rumour held that Sontag had such a large role in the work that she was practically its co-author. Now, her latest biographer claims to have evidence that it was her work all along, and that she had signed over authorship out of desperation to keep her ex-husband from gaining custody of her child in their divorce.

History doubtlessly contains more erasures like this. I recall once watching the cellist and poet Kevin Gillam perform Bach’s beautiful cello suites. But which Bach did they belong to? He cited scholarship by the conductor Martin Jarvis that it was Anna Magdalena, the composer’s wife, who wrote them. Perhaps this memory surfaced because I’ve been rationing the final few episodes of the cancelled TV show Mozart In The Jungle. I adore it. It “has blood”, to paraphrase the maverick maestro Rodrigo De Souza (deliciously portrayed by Gabriel Garcia Bernal) at its heart. He is irresistible – therefore, best on screen and as far as possible from in the flesh, please. Please! Brilliant, and potentially brilliant, women spin into disorder following affairs with him. One of them begins to receive visits from ghosts of musicians past, just like he does. But it’s women who come to her, beginning with Nannerl, Mozart’s thwarted sister. Then others: women forgotten because they weren’t allowed to shine. They come as warnings.

And there are those left to wreck themselves, supernovas self-imploding, as the profoundly feminist and beautiful Savitri Ganesan biopic Mahanati (which I watched to avoid finishing Mozart) illustrates.

It’s something I think about a lot in relation to #MeToo. A monster’s art isn’t as interesting to me as the art that they suppressed. Many women went underground, remained footnotes, lost confidence and disappeared with nothing to their names. They only came into the orbits of monsters because they had some spark of talent in them too. There must have been more Sontags who didn’t manage to surface again. Maybe their work was stolen. Or maybe it was never made. It might be better to be celibate than to be someone’s muse.

Actually, to be honest, there’s one more alternative. The much-married Lawrence Durrell wrote (this quote is famously misattributed to his friend and fellow rake – I mean writer – Henry Miller): “There are only three things to be done with a woman. You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature.” Well, speaking as the woman, let me rephrase. Replace with the pronoun of your weakness and try again: love them, suffer for them, and turn them into literature. I prefer to do it all, do it bleeding, and put my name on it too.

Come to think of it, it’s a sweet irony that Durrell is rarely credited for these words of his either. I wonder what Sontag (or her ghost, appearing to an ingénue on the cusp of a mistake) might say about that.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on May 16th 2019. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: So Many Stalkers

A random cricket fan went from anonymous to anything but overnight, thanks to zealous people on the Internet who thought that brief footage of her cheering her favourite team on was an invitation to stalk, name and even impersonate her.

I’m willing to buy that the first few who posted wondering who she was were idly curious. We sometimes use social media fairly unthinkingly, sharing what we’re watching, eating or doing. But the aggressive wave that followed was not curiosity. They – first people, then press – ran image searches, stalked her social media, revealed her name and profession and reposted her photos. They felt entitled to know all about her, and then to use her likeness and identity to their own ends. They believed the world shared this right, thereby making their own breach of her privacy acceptable. Objectification is inherently dehumanising; but this went further, conferring celebrity status and professing adoration as veneers for crude behaviour. At its worst, it reinforces the belief that a woman cannot have fun for her own sake; it must be repossessed for male pleasure.

I had a hunch that she would have been forced to lock her Instagram account because of this scrutiny. What I found was worse. There were multiple profiles in her name (which I won’t mention). I clicked on a couple. Each had tens of thousands of followers. Her photos had been stolen and reproduced, and accounts impersonating her had mushroomed. Sickened, I didn’t keep looking for her real profile.

There’s a chance that the woman at the centre of this is enjoying the attention, and may be using it productively. More power to her, if so. One good way to subvert attention, desired or otherwise, is to leverage it. But the moment she begins to, she’ll find herself trolled, and be accused of opportunism. This salivating horde will never allow her to have a personality; she can only be an object of fantasy.

In the best case scenario, she will be thick-skinned, boost her career, raise awareness for whales and abandoned children, and live happily ever after. But this is not just about her. We aren’t only just beginning to work out the ethics of such privacy violations, because we’ve seen them before. A teenage actor winking, a tea seller with eyes the colour of colonial aspiration, a student standing in the background of a Shah Rukh Khan selfie (have you forgotten most of them? Good.). And the most sobering cautionary tale of all: last year’s so-called #PlaneBae.

During #PlaneBae, someone overheard a man and a woman getting to know each other on a flight, live-tweeted their interaction, and got thousands excited about what seemed to be a developing romance. The man was happy to make TV appearances afterward. But the woman had to issue a public statement pleading to be left alone. She had been doxxed and stalked both online and offline. She had neither asked for nor benefited from the situation, and it had come with consequences.

One stalker could be called a creep. But what do you call a crowd of them? And what about when global Internet culture itself cheers along?

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on May 9th 2019. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: A Yeti And A Lot Of Internalised Colonialism

Who knows what really made those prints in the snow near Makalu Base Camp, Nepal – the strange, evenly spaced line of tracks that suggest an enormous foot-shaped pogo stick as much as anything else. The Indian army has declared them as belonging to a yeti, an elusive, extinct or perhaps imaginary creature, causing great amusement to many.

But there’s something about the seeming one-leggedness of what made those prints that conjures a more mysterious possibility. Lepcha people traditionally believe that if the corpse of a hunted animal is left in the forest overnight, the deity whom we know (through a series of confabulations) as a yeti would come to revive and retrieve the animal. To prevent this, one foreleg and one hindleg of the creature, on opposing sides, have to be maimed so that it can no longer be reintegrated.

Consider how one of the names of the yeti is “Abominable Snowman”, coined by a British journalist who mistranslated the Sherpa term “metoh” or “man-bear” to mean “filthy”. Not a leap, then, the subsequent popularity of “abominable” – like the rest of us subjects of the empire, primeval and uncivilised. Lepchas call the entity “Chu Mung” (Glacier Spirit), a feared, venerated and altogether meaningful part of their mythology.

So when we laugh at the idea of the yeti, lets be mindful of who we are really laughing at.

What’s missing in all this is the fact that we ourselves are colonisers. In this case: mainland India’s enfolding of peoples, ethoses and regions. They fall under the umbrella of diversity but in actuality suffer various erasures and deficits. So what happens is an interesting recursive colonisation. First, the adaption of imposed Western colonial thought, then the application of this thought onto cultures which themselves have been usurped of power – by cultures which now control the narrative.

I know about the yeti’s importance only from reading (Tintin isn’t enough), and to open my mind to these stories is the respectful thing to do. I have not been to Sikkim, but I’ve experienced the arcane in other places, and know the subtle shift between what I’ve been taught to see and what I can see when I shed that imposition. If it wasn’t for this, I could go to Sikkim and still laugh. Many do.

Internalised colonialism, when conflated with rationality, logic or science, does the work of entrenching both new and old colonialist modes. Not only in the realm of stories, but equally and detrimentally so in medicine, fashion, economics, immigration and more. There’s a difference between working with the consequences of the past – such as, for instance, reading and writing in the language of the oppressor – and allowing those consequences to swell – such as treating as inferior those who are illiterate in it.

This embarrassing gaffe by the Indian army’s social media wing will probably fizzle out with some bland information about what made the tracks. But I like their statement on having released the photos to “excite scientific temper and rekindle interest.” They did, and I read some lovely lore, and learned. Curiosity, after all, is really the opposite of being certain of what you’ll find.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on May 2nd 2019. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: Voyeurs & Vultures

Nobody’s saying a divorce can’t be celebrated – except, that right belongs only to those directly affected, who may feel a sense of liberation or closure. But imagine having hordes of people enjoy the news of your divorce, because they hope you’ll be miserable enough to make art from it. That’s what’s happening to singer-songwriter Adele, whose personal announcement has caused great excitement among many fans. Gleeful reports about how she was spotted entering recording studios, with “sources” saying a heartbreak album is around the corner, add fuel.

Some dug up how she allegedly joked to the press, early in her career, “When I’m happy, I ain’t writing songs. I’m out having a laugh. If I ever get married, it’ll be, ‘Darling, I need a divorce. It’s been three years, I’ve got a record to write’”. As though a carefree statement made when she was both younger and just getting acclimatised to success makes such vulture-like anticipation acceptable.

How does Adele feel about her divorce? The correct answer is: none of our business. Is she going to make beautiful music from it? If she does, let it be for her own catharsis. Let her lock it up and have it be revealed in a hundred years. Because those who think she owes it to them to mine her pain for their pleasure – or as a soundtrack for their own cathartic moments – don’t deserve it. An artist’s only obligation is to honour her own journey, in life and work. The audience is incidental. Honestly, so is the art.

I remembered how disappointed I was in 2005 when Tori Amos, my personal queen of teenage intensity, released a seemingly uninspired (but actually deeply grieving, gently healing) album called The Beekeeper. Like other entitled fans, I thought moving to Cornwall to raise chickens and a child had made her lose her edge.

But so what if she had? Did she not deserve her peace? I understood only once I was on the other side, and felt the exhaustion of being projected upon. A literary author is not a superstar, but in smaller but still prickly ways, dehumanisation happens. It runs the gamut from backhanded compliments like being told at a celebration for a book how someone preferred an earlier one and expected more like it; to disrespect of boundaries because personal interaction was presumed to be an all-access pass; to an ugly experience when readers knew a loved one was dying, and someone still had the malice to send me casual criticism while claiming to usually enjoy the pieces they’d never once dropped an appreciative word for. The equanimity I strive for now is this: knowing both praise and aversion are reflections of the recipient, not the maker.

And you know what? And after all those dramatic years of loving Amos’ dark albums, it’s funny how The Beekeeper is almost the only one I still listen to. And I understand now: it’s not that she had lost her charm, or her edge, back then. It’s that I needed to grow before I could see it, and recognise the grace and fire that had withstood what went into the work.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on April 28th 2019. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: Waiting For A Love That May Not Come

Some years ago, a list of 36 questions from a study on intimacy became popular because of an essay on how these questions could make two people fall in love (its writer’s bio at the time said she was “working on a book about the dangers of love stories”). I would’ve liked to try that experiment, just as I would’ve liked to report my findings after serving Come F*** Me Penne à la Vodka, an urban legend aphrodisiac.

But to do either, one needs a willing participant. And those are few and far between.

Interestingly, of those 36 questions, four pertain to death – three of them, to imaginings of one’s own death. Let’s refer to an out-of-syllabus philosophical question: “If you could find out exactly how and when you will die, would you want to know?” Paraphrase it: “If you could find out exactly how and if you will find lasting love, would you want to know?”

Be careful before you say yes, because remember: death is an inevitability, but love is not. Do you know the boarding school horror story about a girl who saw a grotesque image in the mirror after performing an occult ritual meant to reveal her destined beloved? What if you peered into the future and found there was nothing to see? Or something that spins all you believe into disorder?

I’ve had my share of tarot cards turned over. I’ve watched pencils track planetary orbits on paper-charts. I’ve circumambulated shrines wearing garlands that turned to flower dust, as they waited without explanation for the one who did not come. Prosaically: I’ve held my heart open. I’ve wanted, I’ve wanted, I’ve wanted. I’ve waited. Were they lies or miscalculations, the things that did not transpire? What if someone had told me, at one cusp of questions or another, that they never would?

What if it happens now, at the next onslaught of yearning – that someone will fold my fingers over my fate lines and finally tell me the brutal truth? Would I want to know? Would you?

Or what if the truth was that the route ahead is sinuous; that one day, after long  meandering, I’d come upon it, add it to my silvered strands, someone else’s children, the sweet tattoo of the scarlet letter, a bricolage of experience – a life so unlike what anyone expected? How would I choose to fill the years ahead if something was to reveal that the apportionment of time I will have with what I long for will be but a fraction of my life? How would I fill my “nothing”? Or is it better to not know, to hold hope that beyond each turn in the brambled growth is the fulcrum?

So be careful as you consider that question. And move delicately when another person shows you their own longing. Don’t tell them they will certainly find the love that they’re seeking. Don’t tell them it’s their fault that they haven’t. Don’t tell them that you know, because that’s a lie. Some lives fork into unmapped places, and are whole even so – even if, in some slants of starlight, something still tenderly aches.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on April 18th 2019. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: Learning To Love

It doesn’t matter, ultimately, what your marksheets say. Some doors will open because of them, others will open in spite of them, and still others will be slammed in your face anyway. So many students, actively having been taught otherwise, crumble under the pressure of having to prove themselves within systems that exclude more than they educate. So it’s refreshing that Kanishak Kataria, the IIT-Mumbai graduate who topped this year’s UPSC civil services final exam, is being discussed so much not for his academic achievement, but for a statement he made to the press when asked about the same. For what seems to be the first time anyone can recall, Kataria thanked not only his family but his girlfriend too for having supported his efforts.

It says so much about us, about the culture we live in, that what should have been an obvious and even casual statement was instead an unprecedented one. Noted activists celebrated it as a challenge to India’s caste-codified and otherwise constricted societies, in which love has neither place nor value. Others also applauded how so simple an acknowledgment proved how relationships, and by extent our general emotional lives, are no hindrance to hard work, or success. This small of note of gratitude delivered a double blow both to many families’ insistence that romance is damaging to studies, and to the profoundly toxic way in which young people are forced to hide their romantic and sexual selves, often to their own detriment.

And for once, it’s a beautiful thing that a woman wasn’t named, but was acknowledged for her role alone. She need not become his spouse, or follow any other trajectory that leads back into a normative model of societal expectations. Through her anonymity (which will hopefully continue, for her sake), Kataria’s girlfriend can be just that: a person whose support made a difference to him at this stage of his career, and because of whose existence we have another reason to talk about the deep linkages between love, caste, gender and social progress at our dining tables and our tuition centres.

As we don’t know her name – and have no right to know it either – she also avoids being identified forever after in reference to this relationship. This is a trap that even highly accomplished women, including human rights lawyer Amal Clooney, activist Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and actors Meghan Markle and Angelina Jolie, have repeatedly been dragged into, both in the media and in the collective imagination. The anonymous woman who is the girlfriend of the UPSC topper can go on to become anyone; if we ever learn her name, let it be for who else she is, not for whom she is currently dating. And as for Kataria – no matter what he makes of himself in the future, he’s already made a difference now. Not because of his academic ranking, but because he has shown students and their parents that all this is possible, at once: to be in love, to be open with one’s family about romantic relationships, and to respect and acknowledge people while also respecting their privacy, all while aspiring to (and sometimes accomplishing) great things.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on April 11th 2019. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: Alebrijes

In 1936, the artist Pedro Linares Lopez fell into a delirium during a high fever in which he saw a group of fantastical creatures in a forest. There was an eagle-headed lion, a rooster with a bull’s horns and a donkey with butterfly wings – all vividly-coloured and striking, and all shouting the same word repeatedly. “Alebrijes! Alebrijes!” When Lopez recovered, he set to work recreating the hybrid creatures he saw using papier-mache and cardboard. He named his statuettes alebrijes. Lopez lived well into old age, and in the 1980s his alebrijes (which had caught the fancy of the Kahlo-Rivera household, among other tastemakers, when he had first made them) came to tourist attention. They began to be produced from copal wood, held sacred in Mexican culture, and alebrijes are now common souvenirs.

I heard of alibrejes in an interview by the TV journalist Jorge Ramos with an author who influenced me greatly, Sandra Cisneros. Both of them are American citizens of Mexican heritage, and Cisneros had a particularly interesting trajectory: she grew up in Chicago in a conservative working-class background, defied familial expectations by rejecting marriage and pursuing literature and travel, discovered that she was profoundly unhappy trying to fit into and study in the white western academic context, and pioneered a linguistic style that mingled languages and connotations, eschewing translation, trusting in the heart’s power to emote and be understood. Following her success, Cisneros tried her luck in Texas, a little closer to her cultural roots. Still not content, she finally moved to Mexico in middle age.

In the interview, Cisneros described both Ramos and herself as being alibrijes, winged and amphibious and capable of understanding and being in many places. It’s one more lovely way to name ourselves: we who don’t truly belong, who know ourselves best in the margins.

Here is me as an alebrijes right now: light-footed, carved of petrified wood; feline in so many ways; winged, sharp-stingered and solitary as a wasp; my halo held up by flimsy but proud horns. By the time you read this, I will be somewhere in my own heartlands, in a place I’d belonged to my whole life before I’d even set a paw in it. And to where I’ve kept returning, pursuing the truth to a point so deep it becomes fiction. And here is the alebrijes who’s been my obsession, the creature because of whom I first gave myself permission to come to these lagoons: a fish with the upper body of a woman, or a woman who is half-piscine. She doesn’t speak; she sings, and weeps. I have heard her. I have listened carefully.

Over my recent visits, I have found others like me: a new kind of diaspora, neither broken into amnesia nor uncomfortable with our discomfort. Perhaps what we have in common, us alebrijes, is that we know we are different. We know our own sharp edges. And we have learnt to thrive by using the friction of ambiguity as polish. Perhaps it’s a lifelong project, but surely it’s possible: to be made of so many contradictory fractions, but to always hold the knowledge that they re-assemble into wholeness.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on April 4th 2019. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: The Spacewalk That Wasn’t

Every March 8, International Working Women’s Day, institutions and companies around the world participate in activities that celebrate women. While many fail, making it a day about rose-and-chocolate distribution and even gobsmackingly regressive events like beauty contests, some do hit the mark and do something meaningful. Even if it’s just for a day, it still feels powerful to see all-women plane crews, media coverage on gender issues, announcements of long-term equalising strategies and the like. Those that consult their calendars a little too late but want to jump on the bandwagon sometimes aim for Women’s History Month instead. It’s hard to know for sure, but it seems a bit like that’s what happened at NASA. The US space agency announced at the start of the month that the first ever all-women spacewalk, supported by an all-women team on Earth, was to take place on March 29. Only they must have come up with the idea quite soon before that announcement, because they’ve just made another one.

The historic spacewalk won’t happen because, despite some of the most meticulous planning that takes place on this planet or any other, they somehow failed to account for the astronauts’ spacesuit sizing requirements. Given the incredible things that happen to our bodies in space (from growing taller to losing fingernails due to compression), and how carefully these variables are met or made as comfortable as possible, it’s interesting how standard size differences weren’t considered. In the case of something as simple as stocking enough variations more likely to be used by women, who are often smaller, the need simply wasn’t expected to arise.

It gets more awkward. Of the two astronauts selected, Anne McClain and Christina Koch, only one will now be able to execute the spacewalk. Both require a medium size hard upper torso of the spacesuit, and there’s only one available at the International Space Station. Koch will wear the spacesuit for what will now be a routine spacewalk. It’s obviously just an embarrassing lapse of attention on NASA’s part, but it still causes a twinge. Because unfortunately, here on Earth we’re used to power games where there’s room for only one woman on a team, and women are pitted against each other as competitors even otherwise. Routine, for us.

Somehow, the iconic words that Neil Armstrong, first astronaut to walk on the moon, spoke there come to mind. Actually, it’s the misquote that made history that comes to mind: “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” Armstrong told the press that he had actually said “a man”, but the word wasn’t heard or registered. Millions readily accepted that he said something more abstract and vast, but why? The parody account @manwhohasitall explained English’s internalised sexism best with this Tweet: “I’m not hung up on the term ‘spacewoman’ because I know it refers to both women and men.” Tim, age 44, male spacewoman.

This muddle in NASA’s attempt to score woke points during Women’s History Month shows how in certain ways, some people are definitely still stuck in 1969. If “man” is to “person” as “mankind” is to “humankind”, what’s “woman” then? Well – “token”.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on March 28th 2019. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: The Pollachi Crisis

The media shorthand for the situation is “the Pollachi case”, but with possibly hundreds of people directly affected by it, it might be better to call it the Pollachi crisis. A violent scheme in the town, in which women were lured, filmed while being assaulted, then blackmailed, was exposed recently when the brother of a survivor pursued her assailants. The police were alerted upon discovering the videos on their phones. The number of women who have been assaulted is estimated to be as high as 200, partly based on one of the five accused claiming that “99 women” consented to sexual encounters (Did they consent to being recorded? Did they consent without coercion? If not, it’s still assault).

The organised nature of the racket has induced widespread horror, but the reality is that the violation-and-extortion method is not uncommon in the digital era. It happens in less organised ways too, mostly by abusers exploiting the fact that women (and all queer people) have a precarious standing in our society, especially when found to have exerted agency or challenged patriarchal morality. Blackmail cannot happen otherwise. The societal rot goes so deep that photos of a sister of one of the accused were circulated with calls to rape her. Those seemingly outraged by the crimes of this racket actively encouraged further crimes, revealing how little they understand or care for the personhood, autonomy and right to safety (which is completely different from right to protection) of women.

I drew a distinction between victim and survivor, just as I drew a distinction between safety and protection, because the quantum of damage inflicted is almost certainly larger than what we know. Reports say police are reopening investigations into women’s suicides in the region over the past year because there may be a link. Given the entrenched societal misogyny, it’s likely that certain cases within this larger crisis reached such a harrowing conclusion.

It’s equally likely that the families of victims, having internalised that misogyny and thus only able to reach for its lexicon, will use terms like “love failure” or “spoiled her/her life” to explain events. It’s similar to how the original media shorthand for the crisis was not even “Pollachi case” but “Pollachi sex scandal”, as though an affair coming to light and criminal assault can both be described using the same tabloid terminology. The inability to distinguish between violation and sex – an inability that can trickle all the way down to survivors themselves, who may or may not have unlearned misogynistic conditioning – is what allowed this crisis, and others like it, to occur in the first place.

Because ultimately, “the Pollachi crisis” is also a misnomer, for it’s not restricted to Pollachi alone. The crisis in its broadest scope envelopes us all, and makes vividly clear how boasts about South India, or Tamil Nadu, being safe (or comparatively safer) for women are purposefully illusory. If hundreds of women were silenced by just five men, imagine the bigger picture. The façade of safety is maintained through denial and complicity at every level. And define “safety”. Once again, let me remind you that it isn’t the same as “protection”.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on March 21st 2019. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.