The Venus Flytrap: Taking My Anger Into Another Year

A fresh calendar year can bring with it so much promise, as dangerous as it is to be superstitious about it. Most people like to start new things, and even more people use it as a chance to leave certain things behind. This year, I’m very consciously bringing a “negative” emotion forward. I refuse to put my anger about misogyny and sexism in the past. Yes, it takes a toll on me. It makes me grit my teeth, stay awake raging, bear grudges. But no, I won’t give it up.

As this year turns, I finally feel this anger has a place to go: it is a hot, molten metal being poured into the mould of a weapon, made from the alloy of many. I finally feel like being an angry woman is not an aberration, but the status quo. I feel like after a lifetime of shouting that the emperor has no clothes, people are finally conceding that they too knew all along – but didn’t know it was okay to know.

Now, my anger doesn’t overpower me. I’m comfortable giving it space, even making more space for it, so it is less reactive, and therefore more capable. Recently, in what was neither the first and probably isn’t going to be the last time, it was brought to my notice that photos of me were being circulated on an online account sexually objectifying women. Once the account was reported and taken down, I went looking for more such accounts, and reported as many as possible. There are hundreds if not more, on various platforms. All of them steal images of women and caption them provocatively. Someone pointed out a potential danger to me: if someone were to see me in public and assume not only that I offered sexual services but that he was entitled to them, I would be at physical risk (this is a risk that sex workers experience constantly).

But another thought troubled me far more deeply. Not everyone will react with indignation alone to having her photos stolen. Some will feel profound, potentially dangerous, shame. Others will face consequences from their families. As someone well-meaning but with obviously undeveloped political sense said, “It could ruin ladies’ lives.” Yes, it can. It’s all well and good for someone like me to keep posting selfies no matter how many creeps there are on the Internet, or someone like the musician Sia to release her own nude images so no one could else profit from them, but there is a huge majority of women for whom such criminal activity has manifold consequences. Women whose pictures were stolen from matrimonial profiles, for instance. Women whose first taste of liberty came with a cellphone or a social media account they thought was private. Women held hostage by love. I didn’t get to my anger without wading through shame, without having my own education truncated, without being ostracised. I came from the same frog-pond too.

So this is why I’m staying angry. Because there’s still a deficit. I’m just helping hold the fort down until all the women have arrived at the same conclusion. And they will.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on January 4th 2018. “The Venus Flytrap” appears on Thursdays in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: The Reconfigured Forest

The forest had reconfigured itself in the years of her absence. At first, she could not find her bearings, and turned among the trees until her coordinates revealed themselves gently. Trees – so many trees – more than before, a lushness so vividly alive it could only be the afterbirth of cyclones, wildfire, calamity. Blossoms bright and wind-scattered. Birdsongs.

She arrived just as the women were about to leave, an hour from sundown, after a day of work among hearths and verdure. Light glints between leaves, on the rippling of puddled water, and along a line of spider’s webbing she pauses to smile at. They recognise her, call her back into their arms, call her by her name. They remember her by the doll she left in an old house, given room in a new one. She knows she once left a pair of sandals here, like an exiled emperor, but cannot recall what they look like. A dog she had hoped to meet again bristles, teeth bared, and lunges for her hand when she reaches for him. She had shouted his name down an avenue of areca-red earth, hoping that he – like her – was still alive. The years in between had contained their bereavements.

She accepts the sum of these facts as a teaching of some kind, and knows she allows this only because enough of who she once was has come back to receive it.

She had been reconfigured too, transformed like this sanctuary into something more deeply herself. Something had come to a close in her new life, and still something felt incomplete. She had held the forest within her for a long time, like a small fish cupped in hands filled with water, slowly seeping out of her. Perhaps she prayed for passage in a dream. And then the forest summoned her in ways that, upon telling, would belie their miraculousness.

If you have truly been inside the forest, you know that it can co-exist anywhere: an enchantment that adjoins a highway bereft of trees, a garden anonymous, a lone sapling slithering a tendril of desire for the sun between the cracks of concrete tiles. If you have ever been lost in the forest, you know that it retrieves all the shards of you and holds them – sometimes, you will think it withholds them too, yet it always gives them back when you ask. And if you have lost the forest, if it too is a place of your shattering, you know what it’s like to believe you can never go back. That the path briared – bewildered – itself into impossible convolutions.

Still – for her, after all this time, the forest parted its draperies, and she was within it again.

And so she walks as deeply inside as she can, to the door of the altar-space. And even though she had turned off every signal on her device, wanting this world to be briefly self-contained, somehow the memory of the map she had been asked to show someone remains undisconnected. She peers through the sheer window on the door and a disembodied voice suddenly says from the palm of her hand, “You have arrived.”

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on December 28th 2017. “The Venus Flytrap” appears on Thursdays in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: Salma Hayek & So Many Working Women

There is a peripheral debate that’s raging now in the fields of arts and entertainment, the question of whether one should separate the art and the person (usually, the man) who made it. Whether, for instance, Woody Allen’s movies, Derek Walcott’s poems or Pablo Picasso’s paintings can be loved decontextualized, without having to take into account the moral failings of their creators. I have mixed feelings about this, and enjoy reading the opinions of those who are able to take principled positions either which way. For me, it’s usually on a case by case rather than wholesale basis. This is a problematic position, obviously. The first time I really had it challenged was last week, when I read Salma Hayek’s powerful op-ed in The New York Times in which she detailed the abuse she faced at the hands of the Hollywood tyrant Harvey Weinstein. Hayek’s revelation came after many others, at a time when I did not think anything further about Weinstein could shock me.

What shattered me was that the abuse had taken place during the making of a film that is very special to me, Frida, on the life of the painter of the same name. I’d followed its making and release in 2002 with the kind of devotion only a teenager is capable of (Kahlo is the foremother of so many of us), and to this day I believe it’s a magnificent, heartfelt work of art. I could watch it over and over – except I may not be able to again without having to close my eyes, like a child is asked to if a sex scene suddenly comes on while she’s watching TV with her parents.

In her piece, Hayek wrote that the film’s nude scene between Frida Kahlo and the Parisian dancer Josephine Baker had been coerced by Weinstein. I knew Hayek had struggled to make this film, and that it was a true labour of love, but this was the first time she had talked about this particular kind of sexual abuse during its production.

Hayek’s sexual rejection of Weinstein brought consequences. First, he attempted to replace her entirely as producer and lead actor, which she countered by meeting a list of nearly impossible tasks he set. At one point, as detailed in her essay, he even threatened to murder her. After all this resistance, Weinstein finally found a way to deadlock her: a full frontal lesbian sex scene, or the film would not be finished.

She fought that monster in secret for the project that made her career, something women do in workplaces all the time, giving in to his blackmail but biding her time.

To me, Frida is not – never has been and never will be – Weinstein’s film. It belongs to and is unequivocally the creation of the producer and protagonist, Salma Hayek; the director, Julie Taymor; and the composer Elliot Goldenthal. But in this film is a scene which bears the stain of a monster, extracted from the humiliation of a woman forced into a compromise. Frida has always been a feminist film. If only its making hadn’t also had to be – so painfully, so familiarly.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on December 21st 2017. “The Venus Flytrap” appears on Thursdays in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: There Are Things Worse Than Condom Ads

From 6am to 10pm, Indian televisions will no longer broadcast condom ads. They will, of course, promote everything from body dysphoria to consumerist greed during those hours, but just not safer sex. The ban comes because the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting finds these commercials “indecent” – especially for children. To be fair, the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights has welcomed this move. It cannot be easy to explain pleasure, sexually transmitted infections and pregnancy to a kid on the basis of a TV spot.

Can condom commercials be made differently, without the use of titillating images? Of course. So can commercials for deodorants, watches and mango juice. But this partial ban focuses only on one highly necessary health product. While the imagery of the ads in question can change, the importance of promoting it cannot be underestimated. It’s a mistake to consider the product itself provocative. It’s practical. And the latest study shows that there are 1.6 crore abortions in India annually, a more serious procedure by far than rolling on some latex.

Children will see age-inappropriate things on TV anyway, and will have all kinds of emotions and questions about them. Normalising contraceptive usage only empowers them for when they get older.

Is sex, or even sexual innuendo, the worst thing that a child can see in an advertisement? Here’s a small selection of memorable TV and Youtube commercials which ran in the last few years which are ethically questionable. Havell had an ad for fans which suggested that a girl rejecting the caste reservation quota to which she has a right was a sign of national progress, a highly dangerous insinuation which a child viewer could pass on to the dynamics and conversations in their classroom. Cadbury Bournville had a white man passing judgement on Ghanaian cocoa beans, and a group of deferential Ghanaian men – how that doesn’t look and sound like slavery or colonialism to some people, I’ll never understand. And of course, we’re deluged with advertising for fairness products. They used to call it “whitening”. Now, they think “brightening” is a softer way to deal the prejudiced blow.

Advertisements that promote gender inequality are a category unto themselves. We already know that women’s bodies have openly been used for decades to sell everything from cars to shampoo. The flagrant objectification of those “vintage” ads now adapts understated tones. Sexual objectification isn’t the only form of misogyny, which remains rampant. We saw it recently in Surf Excel Matic’s “As Good As Mom’s Hand Wash” (a glorification of regressive gender roles, which competitor Ariel one-upped with #SharetheLoad, which is nice and all but don’t be fooled by the capitalism), a Santoor ad called “Mummy You Rock” in which people are shocked that a young musician is also a mother (because mothers cannot possibly belong to themselves, too, and be attractive or talented to boot) and when Amazon India plugged the stereotype that women are compulsive spendthrifts in #WhenAWomanShops.

Children watch and internalise the messages in such advertising too – and grow up to be racist, casteist, sexist prudes. That’s surely a lot worse than a child who knows what a condom is.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on December 14th 2017. “The Venus Flytrap” appears on Thursdays in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: Other Sitas, Many Ramas

The lines flow like waves along their skin, or radiating circles. The same word over and over again in faded-tattoo green in the Gondi language, in Devanagari script. Ram Ram Ram. I came across the Ramnami people of Chhattisgarh in a stunning feature written and photographed by Joydip Mitra for the People’s Archive of Rural India. Ramnamis are descended from Dalits who rejected the caste system, and calligraphed the sacred onto their skin. Only the elderly write their devotion onto their bodies now. In the photographs, only their eyes and lips carry no ink, and around their shoulders they wear fabrics that repeat the name they hold holy. Ram Ram Ram.

“Ram is written all over us,” says Pitambar Ram of Raigarh to the journalist. “So, you see, we are the Ramayana.”

There are so many, you know. My newest book of poetry, The Altar of the Only World, began with someone who held this name holy too. It was always Sita, only Sita, for me, and this too is a long tradition – found in folksongs and variations, the way a story becomes a new one each time it is told. It began with her weeping in the forest – there is a Sanskrit word for that, “aranyarodhan”, even though the Sita I got to know was not a Sanskrit version at all. Instead, she is mothered by Mandodari, who drinks a grail of sacrificial blood and sets her miraculous, curse-born child to drift away on the water like Moses or Karna. Instead of being the daughter of the earth, she is the earth itself. As well as a Persian angel, exiled from heaven because of too much devotion, and a goddess of love and war who enters the underworld to confront her shadow, who in the ancient Sumerian texts that describe her looks strikingly like the lion-headed Pratyangira Devi.

When I started to write The Altar of the Only World, nine years ago, it felt like it was a safer world to tell stories in. And a safer world to tell the truth in, too. Not so anymore. This casts an edge over all the usual trepidation before a book release. And then there’s the ambivalence of letting go of something that has been incomplete in you for so long that you can hardly imagine it fulfilled.

A year and a half ago, I was on a flight that made a missed approach. Like other frightening things, I had never known such a thing existed until it happened. In a terrible storm, the plane almost touched the tarmac and then suddenly swooped upwards again into the roiling thunderclouds. We circled the airport for many long minutes, not a word from the captain or crew for a while. The cabin remained quiet, and there was applause when we finally landed. I remember feeling aware, not afraid. This is how letting a piece of long labour into the world feels like: you cannot tell if it will make it or not, but you must suspend absolutely the idea that you can control what happens. And given the vagaries of the journey, be grateful for touchdown at all.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on December 7th 2017. “The Venus Flytrap” appears on Thursdays in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: Kadalai? Kadavule!

Putting kadalai is one of my favourite hobbies (a close second to a most favourite hobby, which is receiving kadalai). The etymology of “kadalai podrathu” is probably from the Marina Beach romance culture, which made the too-healthy-to-be-sexy sundal an aphrodisiac.

Kadalai is not kaadhal, kadalai is not a commitment. Kadalai is just flirtation. Kadalai is repartee and possibility. The best thing about kadalai is that it’s very uncomplicated. So you can share a cone with anyone, metaphorically speaking, and usually be perfectly satisfied with just that. But no less than Rumi is credited with a poem on the chickpea, which includes these zesty lines: “Grace first. Sexual pleasure, then a boiling new life begins, and the Friend has something good to eat.”

I recently discussed this while in the midst of another favourite activity, procrastination (also fun to do with another person). “I wonder what sundal would be, then,” I procrastinated with my friend Sukanya. She expanded the Tanglish lexicon of lust and love immediately: “Sundal would be a booty call text. It’s quite spicy and it’s been cooked – by then some process has happened.” Kadalai progression.

Sukanya lives in an exotic foreign country known as Mumbai and when I visited her once, she asked me to bring a certain local delight – rose milk from the airport Krishna Sweets. Thankfully, it did not bukkake in my luggage. Rose milk would be “final achievement unlocked” she winkyfaced. Except, of course, it turns bad the next day. A comparison I am, sadly, very familiar with.

Chicken 65 is obviously what happens when a height-disproportionate couple tries to have an egalitarian oral experience (quite overrated anyway; in fact, we could say it’s only semiprime). A karuvadu situation might generally mean something dried up beyond redemption, but do you have any idea how tasty karuvadu actually is, after days in the sun? Heat plus anticipation equals much deliciousness. Slow burn. Keep it roasting.

A vengayam, to misquote a famous politician, would be a dudebro who seems complex and deep at first (you know, listens to Cohen and always meant to listen to Mitchell too, takes long solo bike rides to brood in scenic settings, maybe reads a little Zizek – or just reads a little at all), but once everything’s peeled off there’s nothing there. Oh, and he also makes you cry.

Speaking of when everything’s been peeled off, a pachaimolaga is a thing that looks disappointingly small but is capable of imparting much fieriness. Or maybe you’d prefer the pappadum or appalam – the hotter it gets, the more it expands. Apropos which, long before the eggplant emoji, we were already saying “oru kathrikai kooda ille”. Sigh.

Which brings me to how, in these days of both grocery apps and dating apps delivering juicy convenience to our doorsteps, some of us still thiruvify the thenga ourselves. The good old-fashioned way. By hand, the way God and Dr. Ruth told us to. If you don’t think this analogy applies to your anatomy, it’s quite possible that too many already do. And if all this Tanglish has been lost on you, let’s just say the last word is simply: ladies finger.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on November 30th 2017. “The Venus Flytrap” appears on Thursdays in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: A Good Ghost(ing) Story

If you’ve been ghosted and have sincere doubts that you’ll ever enjoy vengeance for it, take vicarious relief in the recent story of a man who learnt that ten years after he abandoned his partner (by moving out of the country without letting her know!), she had become his new boss.

This sordid tale with an assuredly happy ending comes courtesy of a workplace advice website called Ask The Manager. The ghoster, a Maths teacher at an international school, had written in to ask how to handle the situation, after finding out that the new school director was none other than his ex, who he names Sylvia. Before responding, the advice columnist wrote back and gathered a crucial piece of information: the duration of the relationship. The ghosting hadn’t happened after a few dates or an awkward one night stand – which we all know is bad enough – but after three years together, two of which involved cohabiting. I repeat: he moved to another country without telling his live-in partner.

Personally, I have a history of being cyberstalked by people who have ghosted me, both flings and friends. Please don’t ask me what the logic behind that is. I can only tell you that I have very good taste in everything, with the notable exception of people. So you can bet that no one who’s ghosted me will wind up as my subordinate unless that’s exactly what they planned on.

“Ghosting” was coined as recently as 2014, but hit such a chord that it made it to the Collins Dictionary the following year. Applying it retroactively to various confusions of the more distant past helped many. There has never been anything honourable about abruptly dropping communications with another person, leaving them bamboozled in every sense of the word.

But there are also people who claim ghosting when in reality the ghoster had been driven to an impolite extreme because all their efforts had failed. What’s the word for that – when someone has consistently ignored the other’s requests, responses and feelings, possibly even been abusive, then feels surprised that the other person has let go? The Dictionary always has more room, especially as our hearts don’t always have to be so accommodating.

To get back to the drama at the international school: the advice website recommended that the teacher write a pre-emptive note acknowledging the situation, so that Sylvia wouldn’t be in for an unpleasant shock at her new job. The teacher accepted the advice, and we who have too much time to spend on the Internet were then treated to an amazing follow-up.

Without responding directly to him, Sylvia arranged for a meeting with the chairperson of the board to discuss the scenario and ensure it didn’t affect their professional environment. The teacher decided to quit.

Even told entirely from the ghoster’s perspective, this is a great story. Imagine how much more beautiful Sylvia’s version must be! It may not have all the elements of our best revenge fantasies but we can almost be certain her wardrobe was on fleek. What would you wear on a day when karma is likely to rule in your favour?

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on November 23rd 2017. “The Venus Flytrap” appears on Thursdays in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: No Wider Than The Heart Is Wide

Once, when I was much younger, someone laughed because I said I loved Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poem, “What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why”. He did not know that I could see the future. I did not know until I was in that future that Millay had only been 28 when it was published in November 1920. Perhaps she too could see the future, or perhaps for her too, the future had come too soon. So young, and already, to quote the sonnet’s last lines: “I cannot say/ what loves have come and gone, I only know that summer sang in me/ A little while, that in me sings no more.”

Millay characterised herself as a lonely tree in winter, when to many she must have seemed to still be in the prime of her life. I thought of this when my friend, a wonderful middle-aged woman I’ve known for years, asked me what my age is now, then took my hand and huffed as if to say “Don’t be ridiculous” when I told her. This was after I had spent several minutes nostalgising the liberation I had felt in my mid-20s. Past, present and permanent had come together that morning. I had met this visiting friend in a part of a city I rarely go to anymore, but in which I had spent many meaningful nights and days at one time in my life. Being there, I was reminded of what once was, but which I doubt is likely to ever be again. The boughs of the tree of my life were so laden with flower and fruit that they broke.

Earlier, I had also asked my friend whether she will always live in her 3rd floor Paris walk-up, because of the stairs. It was an impudent question, as I realised only upon asking it, and it said more about my preoccupations than her abilities. Having just turned 60, my friend has already outlived Millay by a couple of years. Is it normal to be this morbid, to seek such calculations and measure against them? I count other years: I am as old as my mother was when she had me, I am as young as Christ was when he was crucified. I have either stopped lying to myself that I haven’t been keeping count, or else I started to without quite knowing why, the way a season can leave your landscape before you’ve even sensed the next one. Some things have wintered in me too. And I don’t wonder what made the young Millay so cold in her foreknowledge when she wrote that poem.

“But I am older inside than most people will ever be able to relate to,” I had told my friend, in explanation. But clearly, others can or did. Rereading “What lips…” today, I discovered another poem of Millay’s. “Renascence” was published even earlier, and is about a frightening mystical experience which left her all-knowing. In it was one answer to the question of bitterness, an almost inevitable corollary of wintering: “The world stands out on either side / No wider than the heart is wide.”

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on November 16th 2017. “The Venus Flytrap” appears on Thursdays in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: Compliments For The Crime

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that not only do you never get the one apology you deserve while it still matters, but in the meanwhile, all manner of crooks and creeps you stopped caring about will keep trying to get a foot beyond the padlocked door. Last week, Hawaiian judge Rhonda Loo delivered a sentence to one such super-persistent villain. Daren Young couldn’t take a hint, which led to his ex-girlfriend having to get a restraining order – which he then violated by sending her 144 nasty text messages and calls in under three hours one day this May. He served a prison sentence of a few months before this trial, where a Maui newspaper reported that Judge Loo minced no words, saying: “It’s so childish to think a grown man can be so thumb-happy.”

She went on, mincing even fewer words, “I don’t know whether I should cut off your fingers or take away your phone to get you to stop texting.” Instead of either the inhumane first option or the insipid second one, she devised an unconventional punishment. In addition to fines, a probation period following his prison sentence and community service, Young was also instructed to write 144 compliments to his ex-girlfriend. One for each text or call that had harassed her. The extra catch (I like this judge!) was that he could not repeat any words while doing so. What fun – like something in a creative writing class! He has 144 days to complete this punishment. Imagine – a haiku a day keeps the handcuffs away.

I can’t speak for the ex-girlfriend, but I’d have absolutely no interest in the wordplay of someone with no respect for boundaries or for why people even set them. The criminal in this case has promised the court that he will stay away from the woman in question in future, and I hope he does. This would be a more sordid story if it wasn’t for Judge Loo, and I hope she gets a good chuckle from his list of compliments. She deserves it, for the levity she’s brought briefly to the very sinister, extremely common crime of stalking.

Most of our stalkers don’t wind up in court. It’s easy to say more of them should – but inherent in that expectation is an increase in the trauma we must first go through. It’s easier to use the block function, easier even to change our numbers than to take something to a justice system. This is all the more challenging when one has had a personal relationship or friendship with the stalker at any point, and private or intimate communications become legal evidence. That’s why I haven’t named the ex-girlfriend in Young’s case, although the news reports have. She doesn’t need to be permanently associated with a protective order she was forced to take out. Only the potential employers and future dates of the man she had to protect herself from need to know about it.

If Young happens to Google himself and see this, he could definitely use this as one of his 144 court-ordained compliments: “You, woman whom I hurt and harassed, are so very brave.”

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on November 9th 2017. “The Venus Flytrap” appears on Thursdays in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: #MeToo, Obviously

Last week, a young attorney collated a privately-verified, anonymity-assured list of male sexual predators in Indian academia. The list revealed Indian feminism’s splinters: a dozen senior feminists rushed to condemn it, a move seen as being protective of their own interests based on kinship, institution and caste. One defensive response heard often was: “Women have always had a whisper network, so why go public?”

I was recently interviewed for a documentary on workplace sexual harassment by Lime Soda Films. It so happened that the Harvey Weinstein allegations had just broken, and a cascade of #MeToo posts filled social media that day. My hands shook after the first segment we shot, in which I detailed one particular incident in a corporate scenario. But my anger was neither at the perpetrator nor because of the incident itself, but because of the environment in which it had happened. The hostility in that workplace was fed by numerous characters – among them women, too. It made my hands shake with emotion even years afterwards. But I could only circle around it.

The story of a particular predator in that environment was only the easy one to tell, the starting point. I named him off-camera, but didn’t bother to onscreen. He was irrelevant to my trauma, ultimately, despite being illustrative to the conversation on why people don’t report sexual harassment. At the core of that story is something else, another story based on my consent and how it was abused, a story too painful to tell about a man deemed by those around him as too desirable to be a predator. No, story is the wrong word. Experience. And other experiences too terrible to transform into tell-able tales. Friends who attacked their partners. Abusive partners who turned out to also be predators in their fields. Manipulators so dazing that we’re inside their lies before we realise they are labyrinths. Above all: the way I use the plural because to use the singular already feels too specific, too much like a story and not a secret.

The whisper network doesn’t suffice because the worst experiences are ones we don’t share. I looked at that list and thought: What’s 70 names in a rape culture of 1.3 billion people? A few women were brave enough to whisper loudly enough. That’s all. And we know of, but are still circling, the worst of it. How can I protect someone from going through what I did when I cannot even speak of it? I can’t. Most of the worst people walk free in the world. Perhaps that’s why we who see the private struggle behind a public list fight so hard for the hypothetical. We’re tired of women being cautionary tales. We want the villain to be the protagonist for once.

Justice is a long shot. We get used to the idea that we’ll never get it. So we count and recount our stories. The ones we yell out loud. The ones we whisper. But mostly, honestly, the ones we don’t divulge at all. And the ways we tell and retell them to ourselves anyway, whether we keep track that we’re doing it or not.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on November 2nd 2017. “The Venus Flytrap” appears on Thursdays in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: Every Woman’s Instagram Messages

My Instagram direct message requests folder is currently full of men who think they’re on Tinder. Every single day for a few weeks now, I’ve been blocking a steady stream of unwelcome messages. It’s like having a dripping tap: it may not seem like a great inconvenience, but it adds up. You could tune it out if you’re wired that way, but it’s constant nonetheless. Drip, drip, drip. Heart emoji, “hai so hot”, unsolicited dick pic. Probably. Instagram has one security feature – blurring out the sent image – but even if was a floral “Good Morning” a la Whatsapp groups, I’m not about to give anyone the benefit of the doubt so quickly. If there’s a way to turn off DMs from people you don’t follow, I’d love to know it.

What makes me feel bad is that all this unwelcome attention came after I posted a photo against the sexual objectification of women, using a particular hashtag. Body positivity, empowerment, style as a form of identity, freedom of expression: clearly, none of these matter to the hundreds of men who began following and messaging me. They didn’t even read the caption.

Even in the best case scenario, they saw photos of a woman they found attractive, and decided she would appreciate and respond to their interest. They’re foolish enough to think that a woman they don’t know will say thank you, privately – if not more. And I’m only talking about the more polite, non-explicit ones here. I’ll go so far as to say that many of these strangers must think they are complimenting me. But that’s not how this attention has made me feel.

I’m also aware that among these strangers must be a few really contemptible people who are perfectly cognisant of the effect their messages have on the recipient. I’ve encountered plenty of men like that: ones who take pleasure from provoking women, desperate to register their presence to her even in the most annoying of ways, if that’s all they can do. Then there are those who feel that if a woman shows her face or her shoulder or her cleavage or her toes on camera, she is duty-bound to receive their responses to the same. They cannot imagine, even though it is gospel truth, that her photograph has nothing, nothing, nothing to do with them.

When I started to write this piece, I wanted to explore how – hypothetically speaking – a man could express his attraction to a woman he doesn’t know, whom he has seen online in a non-dating app context. He can’t, really. Because her inbox is too full of unsolicited sexual attention. And her hackles have only been getting sharper and sharper.

So let me reverse the gaze and tell you what I’d do. I’d do nothing. I’d engage with his work if I found it interesting. I’d enjoy my crush on my own time. I would never think I was entitled to his attention just because I gave him mine. And the funny thing is: this has worked out for me once or twice. And once or twice, I’ve noticed someone doing just the same, and said hi.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on October 26th 2017. “The Venus Flytrap” appears on Thursdays in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: The Buffer Around Predatory Men

There is a buffer around every man who mistreats women. This buffer protects him so that the wounded party can barely get the indicting words out of her mouth to begin with, and if she manages to, she will be dragged through the dirt for doing so. On a systemic level, it is the toxic masculine that forms this shield. Within this, for a certain kind of man – the kind of man who has a halo around him composed of charisma, privilege and erudition – his most effective layer is not simply made of men, but also, sadly and strangely, by women.

Women who say they know him well. Women who say they love him dearly. Women who didn’t feel abused when they dated him. Women who don’t think someone with such good manners would do such a thing. Women who harbour crushes but not expectations, who are content to be known as his associates and friends. Women deeply enamoured of his work. Women who dismiss the memory that under certain lights, his irresistible aura appears more like a sinister gleam, and they’ve seen it themselves, they’ve held the collar of their shirt a little tightly that day, they’ve almost stumbled as they tried to leave quickly that night without stopping to ask themselves why.

A person has a right not to believe what another is saying. The world is full of liars. But when doubt extends to protection of the alleged perpetrator, it’s no longer reasonable. And one doesn’t need to take a public stance to protect perpetrators. In fact, the far more damaging stance is in private. The thing said to the victim desperately trying to articulate her experience. The shrug. The wry smile. The “oh haha, but he’s like that with everyone, and actually he’s got a big heart (or a sad story)”. That’s just a basic example.

So this is in praise of all the women who reject a place within that buffer of cushy, complicit mutual protection. Here’s to all the women who don’t make excuses for reprehensible actions and those who made them. Here’s to the difficult women – difficult because they don’t make it easy for terrible men to keep coasting through life. The loud ones. The cold ones. The acolytes who chose ethics over patronage. The family members who don’t stand by abuse, even by their own kin. The exes who refuse to “stay friends”. The former friends who did the right thing.

As my feed filled with the #MeToo hashtag this week, I thought about some of those terrible men I’ve known. Their social media feeds would also have cascaded with posts by the women who didn’t defriend or block them like I did. Who hadn’t been sure of taking the risks of so clean and clear a cut. And some of those women would have been condescended to with these predators’ pretend empathy or outrage.

So let’s be difficult. Because I guarantee you: there’s another woman lingering somewhere, who doesn’t know she can choose not to pad up that buffer. There’s more than one, most probably. And maybe they need to know there’s more than one too.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on October 19th 2017. “The Venus Flytrap” appears on Thursdays in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: Contained Within All Homecoming Is Risk

October 1st was the tenth anniversary of my move to Chennai. I observed it by escaping to my motherland, Sri Lanka, my third such trip within a year. This will not seem as amazing to you as it is to me if you haven’t known for yourself what displacement does to the mind. On the first trip, I accepted the jarring I felt at not having a foothold that wasn’t built of childlike nostalgia. I chose to risk it by building an adult’s orientation. By the third, I love that I have bearings now: tangible mappings, viable anchors.

I love Colombo for its airport that brings me into the island, so I can wend my way into the places that fill my dreams and my pages with their waters and groves and pastoral lands – places I didn’t grow up in, but have me in a bloodbound soul-hold. At first, I thought: why do I need a relationship with the capital city at all, even if it was my first home?

But then, I love coming down Galle Road as the sun sets and looking to my left to see the sea at the far end of each avenue, dazzling between the facades of buildings in that west-facing marigold light.

I love that in this terrible economy, where nothing costs as little as it should, avocados – among the more indulgent fruits in my regular life – are a mere SL rupees 15 for a 100 grams, even in supermarkets. “What’s that?” asks my Tamil auto driver when I call out at the road-side fruit stall. “Oh, butterfruit,” I say.” He repeats to himself for practice the (he says) “stylish” word I use. Ah-vo-cah-do.

He offers me the Sinhala word: “Allibera.” I ask for the Tamil word. “Tamil le butterfruit dhaan.” he says. But of course.

I love the chill that goes through me as I have a moment of double recognition on a familiar road from my childhood: the indelible image of a “dreadlocked man under a dreadlocked banyan tree”, imprinted in my earliest years somehow, regurgitated in a homesick poem nearly 20 years after, coming together still later, because these trees are still here. And so am I.

I love the love-cake. I love speaking in my native dialect.

Are these small things love, and if so, what is their sum? Maybe I can’t be sure whether I love this city, or even need to anymore, but I do know how deeply you can dislike a place that is your utter comfort zone, your geographical arranged marriage, the place that cannot ever break your heart because you never fell in love with it to begin with. I love not being in Chennai.

Contained within all homecoming is risk. Those who take it move beyond nostalgia. This can be a bitter loss, or great luck. Let us say I have been lucky. Let us say by assuming nothing I gained much.

It’s a simple thing, really: when I say that I love that I can be here, what I mean is that I love that I could come back. That I want, still, to keep coming back.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on October 12th 2017. “The Venus Flytrap” appears on Thursdays in Chennai’s City Express supplement.