Pirated Poetry Anthology

A few days ago, I was walking through Pondy Bazaar and as I passed a few pirated book stalls, a thought popped into my head: imagine if my book was in there. Would I be pissed (well, yes)? But would I also feel a little validated, since piracy equals popularity?

And today I find myself in this pirated poetry anthology.

I took the trouble of downloading the pdf — and umm, that’s not my poem, folks. And apparently, the other 3163 poets in there have poems misattributed to them too. Maybe it’s a matching game?

Some people with alot of time and pot must have decided that poets were an interesting subspecies to conduct reaction research on. Real names, fake poems — in the thousands. I wouldn’t have been particularly miffed if a poem I really did write made it in there, given that in the absence of a credit card or decent poetry sections in my local bookstores, I do read quite a bit of poetry online myself. But neither am I miffed about the identity theft, truth be told. Above all else, I’m curious what the point of this experiment actually is. Own up, folks.

The Venus Flytrap: Honouring Our Destinies

A few weeks ago, I watched the Italian film Il Postino, inspired by the legendary Pablo Neruda, and found myself weeping in its closing moments. I shut my laptop and held myself as sobs racked my body. I was weeping not for the quaint charms of the film, but for Mario Ruoppolo, the guileless postman who worships Neruda to tragic consequences. I was weeping because I knew by then that I was not him, and could not fathom why I was this lucky.

Two days before this, I’d sat across from my publisher and watched a cheque for what I still find an enormous figure being cut. It was a surreal moment. The year before, I had a jar of coins from which I would count out enough change in order to eat. I was unemployed, on a precarious visa, everything in absolute ruins. Things happened. I moved back to India believing it was the end of my life.

It was. It was the end of a life in a horrible place in many senses of the word. But just a year later, my publisher was saying as the cheque was signed, “I don’t pity you. You are too talented to be pitied.” I wasn’t allowed to say thank you or cry.

And so I cried for Mario.

There is still a part of me that is a friendless 12-year old, the bus always dropping me at school forty minutes early. My classroom that year was a converted chapel, a detail I find appropriate in retrospect. Every single morning, I would write a song. Those forty minutes were my sanctuary. I wrote then because I had nothing else to do. Without writing, in the eyes of many including myself, I didn’t exist.

It’s astonishing to realise that only five years later, I was appearing in magazines and getting fan mail. It’s even more astonishing to write this to you today, having just seen the final proofs for my first book, knowing that in a matter of days, it will be complete.

The journey has been long, and is not over. It’s a journey that has shaken the agnosticism out of me. It’s been startling to see how people seem to have fallen out of the sky with their admiration and generosity, their dedication sometimes outshining mine.

An investor who refuses a cut from the profits; a photographer who wants only a good deed as payment; designers, pre-production and publicity people who work for free – at what point in the last decade did I go from being the girl in the chapel to this? I am humbled by the knowledge that these gifts are not for me; they are for the work that is bigger than anything I am or will be.

Instead of being reassured, I encountered my own resistance. Not believing myself deserving, I became self-sabotaging. I was so frazzled I literally had to sit on my hands during editorial meetings. But the book was a juggernaut out of my control, and I had to give in. I had to let go of my dream in order to allow it to happen.

A friend told me, addressing my anxieties, “Well, if it’s like good pasta, it better be a little al dente“. The little bit of rawness is what makes it perfect.

I am no Mario Ruoppolo, and neither am I Neruda. But I am the girl in the chapel who grew up to be the woman who wrote Witchcraft and whatever – little or much – it accounts to. I don’t believe fortunes are arbitrary. I see now that I am obligated to honour mine with every instrument I am gifted.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express. “The Venus Flytrap” is my weekly column in the Zeitgeist supplement. Previous columns can be found here.

Stream of Unconsciousness

In his dream, he was choking on an ice cube. He didn’t know what would happen first — if it would melt or he would die. He had been watching too much David Lynch lately. He called to tell her about the dream. She said, “You have a tendency of waiting for your problems to disappear. And sometimes they melt away. But there are times when unless you cough them out, no matter how painful for you or how much effort it takes, they’ll kill you, your problems.”

He had moved countries and cut off his hair. He was going to get therapy. He talked psychobabble now. More importantly, he paid attention when she did the same. It didn’t amuse her, as it could have, which meant she still cared. Sometimes she felt like she had his balls in her purse, and was desperate to return them, but that would involve acknowledging she had taken them in the first place. He was a watch collector, a failed auteur, a misogynist. She was the kind of woman who would crack a rib if someone looked at her too sweetly, and cry for six months if he didn’t, a masochist. They fit together, but with some effort, like Tetris blocks.

He was very far away. She didn’t smoke anymore. They were forever in freefall, forever maneuvering their positions in the hope they could land in some sort of coordination. Or avoid the other completely. They shared the hate of siblings. They were both alcoholics.

A million years before, a stranger had stopped them both in front of her college and told him, “This is a burden for the rest of your life. Your eyebrows and hers. For the rest of your lives.” Then he walked away. That made her very happy for a long time.

That was a million years ago. And now she saw the stranger was right. Burden. It was not a word lost in translation. Burden. He had seen it. He had known.

A Song, Schnabel and A Handful of Sex Goddesses

There’s a little something exciting happening mid-next week, as you may or may not already know. Meanwhile, though, here are a few more things that have me excited lately.

1. Candace Bushnell’s original Sex and The City columns in The New York Observer. I’m actually surprised to have not read about this on other blogs, so either I’m way ahead or way behind. Despite my affection for the TV show, I always kind of wondered if it had to be in some ways a little lowbrow (sue me), because it made  too ridiculous a number of women believe they they could see themselves reflected in it, realistically or otherwise. As a reader and writer, I also wished those columns that Carrie was constantly typing out in her undies would actually make it into the show in some way. And here they are, and heavens, they are gold. Finally I see, really and truly, why this was so groundbreaking, how it was writing like this that actually laid the blueprint for the cultural phenomenon. I take my pretentious writerly beret off to Candace Bushnell — this archive proves that no matter how many imitators, there really can only be one CB.

2. Jerome Kugan’s home-recorded cover of “On The Street Where You Live” from My Fair Lady. Some covers really are better than the originals, and other covers of. Harry Connick Jr. ain’t got nothing on you, JK baby! This needs to go on your next album. So the poor folks who aren’t your friends can hear it too. Hahaha. ;)

3. This slightly snarky New York Times article says that Julian Schnabel is going to have a show in India. Where where where? Please say Chennai.

4. This 1996 essay by Sandra Cisneros, which I read in order to remind me again why it’s okay to be a certain kind of writer. This week I have been saying a litany of graces for the great ones who paved the way for someone like me to be myself and be okay with it. Without Frida, I don’t know if I would have been able to live with many aspects of myself. Without Sandra, I don’t know if I would have stopped writing funny, sexy, confessional poetry in favour of smarter, more serious stuff. Without my great-grandmother Valliamma, I don’t know if I could have learnt how to feel the fear and do it anyway. There is no shame in acknowledging inspiration.

5. Two Guardian profiles on gifted bad girls, Manet’s muse, Victorine Meurent, and another Guadalupe, Lupe Yoli.

Homecoming Anniversary

Yesterday, October 1st, marked a year since I moved back to India.

This is a cause for celebration, but lately has been marred by something niggling. Let me take this opportunity to correct a rather annoying perception.

A few months ago, a Malaysian student wanted to interview me for his final year project, and I agreed. He was kind enough to send me a draft of his article before submitting it. The truth is I was a little horrified. For some reason, he had gotten the impression that I am lost and longing for Malaysia, that my career has failed without KL, and that I am awaiting the day that I can recoup my former glory.

It was neither the first nor the last time that I heard something similar.

Let me put this in perspective. At the time I left KL, I was flat broke. I weighed 7kg more than I do today, bloated up from the stress and oh, the fact that I had all of four periods that year and the year before it. My body was shot to hell. So were my nerves. I was severely depressed. I was effectively unemployed, all my attempts at freelance work having dwindled to nothing owing to the stress of having to border run every 30 days, in a country I had lived in for seventeen years.

I said seventeen. Count ’em.

I was not happy in KL. But you need to understand that as an artist, there is a certain adaptability that comes with the job. I managed to keep my work going there. I had a following. I had a certain amount of personal conflict in my life, not related to my issues with immigration, that fanned my creative flames. I was also very young. In case you don’t know it, I am 23 now. The only time I lived in KL out of my own choice, I was 19. Sometimes it takes awhile to climb out of the holes you dig yourself.

I could recount exactly how off the mark the Malaysian student I told you about earlier was, but since you’re here, I think the evidence speaks for itself. Suffice to say, leaving Malaysia was the best thing that happened to me in a very long time, if not ever (and yes, I would say that moving to Malaysia was hands-down the stupidest decision my family ever made. Do you hear that, anyone who dares call me “Malaysian”, in spite of mountains of contrary evidence?).

Leaving was a choice. My visa was technically valid till February 2008, although I had to renew it every month. I had the marriage option, which I wisely did not pursue. One terrible incident at the border and five hours of crying on the bus back from Singapore (they let me in for a week on the condition I plead my case at a KL branch) was all it took. I exited the country just once more, to go to Indonesia for a festival. And on the day that I would normally have taken another bus south, I got on a plane and came… home.

And you think I miss Malaysia? Although I had decided to never go back, the life I’d left behind did linger on my mind — for all of two months, before one of your politicians thought she could cast me as an extra in her movie. What a circus I so narrowly escaped! I am proud of the fact that I did not respond when I was dragged into it. I didn’t have to. All the hostility and the rumours and the cowards crawling out of the woodwork to make their statements about me told me that I did the right thing, because otherwise why get scared of this little girl with a big mouth and a blog? I handled one journalist ineptly, assuming that like all badly-written articles, it wouldn’t matter so long as I had the transcript. But I did the right thing. It was apartheid. And I did flee.

Miss it?

I miss the shoes I left behind — but I now make enough to splurge on imported ones. I miss my friends — but I chat with them daily. I miss nasi lemak — but I miss Singapore’s frogs’ legs more. So fucking what?  I’m not nearly deluded enough to think that any of those little things can compare to the happiness I enjoy today, a happiness I know I could never have had in Malaysia (and god knows I tried). In my writing, I tend to deal explicitly with location and geography. But Malaysia does not come up in my work (and I started to write at seven). That’s how superficially it shaped me, internally speaking, in all the years I lived there. I could only write non-fiction.

At the first poetry slam in 2007, someone came up to me and said, “I heard you are the best writer in the country.”

I said, “I’m not from this country.”

I’m not bitter anymore. You see, Malaysia, I have let you go. But a year later, I have a sneaking suspicion that  your torch may still be lit. Maybe, just maybe, you miss me more than I miss you. Much more. Don’t co-opt me as your own now. You had a very long time to be gracious. And you weren’t.

—

P.S. A few things. I understand that I am supposed to play nice now that my book is coming out. But really, Malaysia’s given me enough stress headaches, and I shouldn’t give myself another one repressing what I feel. Also, this is nothing personal, so don’t take it that way. I’m sure you won’t, if you’re a friend or a person with any reasoning — and once again, I am immensely grateful for the support of certain people in Malaysia through the years and especially through my last few months there. And lastly, before you get sanctimonious with your overflowing patriotic loyalty, here’s a simple statement: You love your country and would never blaspheme it like the ungrateful foreigner that I am? Excellent! You keep it then! I certainly don’t want it. ;)

Please Help Yuki

This is heart-wrenching. I read her story and am completely gutted for her. She was abandoned by her husband five days before her sex-realignment surgery, and is now unemployed and almost homeless. Please help. Got this from Lainie. Please do pass it on.

—

Dear gals and pals,

I would like to bring your attention to a special cause today: a dear friend of mine, Yuki Choe, a male-to-female transsexual, is in dire straits and urgently in need of donations to support her living expenses.

HER CURRENT SITUATION:

Yuki is currently unemployed and living on what remains of her savings. She is also relying on some donations made through her blog but PayPal is not recognised by most Malaysian banks. She has few friends. Some are helping but not enough. Her family has turned her down as well.

She has applied for over 60 jobs but had only 2 interviews, one of which rejected her, and the other offered her a job as a mortgage and home loan provider. She is eager to take it up as a part-time job, as well as start her own business (selling art pieces), but lacks start-up capital.

She has been disqualified for state welfare. She is currently staying in a single room in USJ until she gets evicted.

HOW YOU CAN HELP:

(1) Donate to Yuki –
All donors will be listed at Yuki’s blog (www.yukishock.blogspot.com). Donors can choose to be named or remain anonymous. Any amount will be deeply appreciated.

(2) Notify Yuki if you know anyone willing to offer her a job with a stable income –
Those of you involved in LGBT activism will know that many transsexuals in Malaysia entered the flesh trade after failing to notch a single decent job offer, but Yuki is determind not to meet the same fate. She is also the only actively blogging transsexual LGBT advocate in Malaysia. Let’s help her help herself, so that when she finally finds a firm footing, she can be a role model to all other transsexuals in Malaysia to lead independent, healthy and responsible lives.

(3) Spread this message around –
Post this on your blog, tell your friends, email your contacts – spread the word, get as many people as possible to chip in a little bit.

Please help Yuki get by, one day at a time.
Your help will be deeply appreciated.

FOR MORE INFORMATION:

She can be contacted at yuki.choe@yahoo.com.
For those who want to read about her life story, they can refer to yuki-thejourney.blogspot.com and yukishock.blogspot.com.

Please help if you can, donations, crossposting on your blog, whichever works. Yuki is an NCC Diploma holder, well versed in administrative work, sales and teaching. More a customer service person, with good computer skills.

The Venus Flytrap: Going There And Going Back

When I tell people that my favourite film is Alfonso Cuarón’s Y Tu Mamá También, they do not understand. They do not understand how this coming-of-age story about two Mexican boys could be the film that I love the most; what could I possibly see of myself in it? But it is true. It is the one film that I can slip into seamlessly, without knowing when or where or if at all I will cry, without expectation, without the hyper-attentiveness that jades so many of our viewings of the films we think of as panaceas, as personal religion.

Like all great stories, this one lends itself to many perspectives. There is its strident sociopolitical commentary, the subtle, powerful and altogether unusual rendering of the female gaze in a manner devoid of fanfare, and of course, the pain, comedy and sensuality of lust. But those are a deconstructionist’s ways of approaching a film that is all these things but in its essence, far more. Ultimately, all that remains are the teenagers, Julio and Tenoch, and Luisa, the woman who lets them spirit her away to look for a secret beach that they invent spontaneously as a joke.

In one way or another, not one of them returns to the city. The journey changes them all. One finds absolution. The others slip back into their lives, disconcerted to find that it does go on, that memory is a broken record but the passage of time is rarely so sentimental.

Like anyone who has ever been on a highway in the wee hours of dawn, under a sky so bruised, so dark like a heart, I am enamoured by the quintessential romance of the road trip. The self suspended between someplace and someplace else. I feel geographical attachments viscerally. Some of the most poignant moments of my life have been in the infinite silence of this suspension.

Poignant because happiness is a thing of hindsight. Julio and Tenoch have no idea that this trip – this joke, this cheap thrill of whisking this attractive older woman off in their car in aimlessly hedonistic pursuit – will contain so much. They do not know while it happens that they will see joy for what it is only in the wake of devastation, and that perhaps it will never again be so uncomplicated, so complete.

We come so far, we cut so deep. And then we flee the scene, retreating back into life as we believe we know it. But whether we choose this or not, we become like the monk in the Japanese poem made famous by Elizabeth Gilbert who stands atop a mountain and watches the world unfurl before him, all its secrets within his sight. And like the monk we return to the marketplace, to ordinariness, forever carrying the mountaintop under our robes.

And above all else, this may be why Y Tu Mamá También resonates so deeply with me: I cannot name my favourite scene. There is no one sequence so conspicuous in my mind that it outshines the rest, and this is why it feels so much like life. The experiences that shape us most are like mirrorballs, catching the light at different angles, revealing different facets at each one. We spend the rest of our lives turning them over and over, always finding something startling. We spend the rest of our lives trying to understand those moments, to encapsulate them somehow in anecdotes or inspired art. We spend the rest of our lives trying to go back.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express. “The Venus Flytrap” is my weekly column in the Zeitgeist supplement. Previous columns can be found here.

Lavanya Sankaran Fellowship

I am delighted to share that in addition to having been accepted into this year’s residency programme at Sangam House, I have also been given the Lavanya Sankaran Fellowship for 2008-2009.

The Venus Flytrap: Dial M For Misuse

The government of Tamil Nadu launched an “integrated emergency care” scheme last week, which will make getting assistance during any emergency situation just a phone call away. Naturally, this is a welcome measure, especially since our national security has recently come under threat. The only problem is, an emergency is a relative thing.

A woman in Scotland, for instance, contacted her local version of the 108 because her pet rabbit’s ears weren’t floppy, as promised in a newspaper ad. Perhaps she was a believer in chaos theory – and the floppiness of her bunny’s ears directly correlated with, just guessing here, her sense of perspective. Other Scottish calls of interest and exasperation included a complaint about too many onions in a takeaway meal and at least two about being splashed with puddle water by passing vehicles. The Japanese police force, meanwhile, claims to have suffered 950,000 nuisance calls in 2007, among them some real crisis situations like wanting a lift home in a patrol car owing to not having enough money to take a taxi.

Since we do live in a most melodramatic country, and that too in a most melodramatic city, I’d wager that the new emergency response scheme is going to have its many hands and hotlines full.

To begin with, when I said that emergency is a relative thing, I really do mean that it is almost definitely going to be a relative thing. My parents once dropped by the neighbourhood police station because my sister didn’t pick up her phone for an hour. Now, they can just put the emergency number on speed dial.

Joining them, of course, will be all the usual suspects – the neighbourhood spies, the know-it-alls, the rumour-mongers, the jealous spouses, the even more jealous mothers-in-law, the in-fighting heirs… Make no mistake about it – this emergency number is going to take centrestage in quite a few misadventures of the Great Indian Guilt Trip variety. What’s a Tamil film without a scene involving cops? And what better way for life to imitate cinema, that old favourite Indian aspiration, than to have them at one’s beck and call to intervene in any commotion one feels like creating?

The demand could be so overwhelming that the emergency response hotline centre will become the new, trendier call centre. Hip youngsters with fake accents and non-existent curfews will make way for sensitive new age types with seductive stories about the latest cat they miaowed to over the phone and convinced to climb down a tree, or more entertainingly, about the Savita Bhabhi-esque damsel they sweet-talked out of her “hysteria” over missing her travelling husband. Chetan Bhagat wannabes galore will be spawned, derided, envied and made wealthy – only this time, with community awards to boot.

What’s more, 108 being a somewhat religion-friendly number, and the lot of us being somewhat superstitious people, I’m sure it won’t be long before someone gets it into his or her head that starting the day by dialing a sequence of auspicious numbers might be a good luck prescription. At least the person handling the call will be greeted by a serene voice, for a change.

All this frivolousness will make for some funny news stories. But as someone somewhere keeps the line engaged by crying wolf, someone else somewhere else could be in a real crisis. And all the floppy bunny ears in the world might not be able to get them out of that one. So spare a thought before you dial the hotline. After all, you wouldn’t want that aunt who goes through your call register to suspect a conspiracy.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express. “The Venus Flytrap” is my weekly column in the Zeitgeist supplement. Previous columns can be found here.

Just Discovered

The Poetess Counts To 100 And Bows Out

The poetess gathers interim herbage,
aged bread, ash right from the knife,
herbs for the outcomes and the first rites.
Maybe she likes the legacy the strong ones claim,
the studious group, hands free, hearts shut.
Who, he or she? oathbound, bound for the future:
Scions of a bitch baying so sweetly for the word, begging how
to get to the saint, her mistful tongue.
Last night there were stones on a nation’s back,
much coal smeared on far village cheeks.
But then they gave thanks, shook hands, told some lies,
pulled back June and July for hunger. That there might be hunger.
The good girl counts to 100 and bows out.
The bad girl counts to 100 and bows out.
The poetess counts to 100 and bows out.

Ana Enriqueta Teran

(A completely striking book cover, the first volume of her work translated into English, here.)

The Cover of Witchcraft

If you would like to see the cover of my new book of poems, out next month, please go here. And do consider this a personal invitation to join the group. On that note, please don’t add or message me on Facebook as I prefer to correspond with people I do not know over email.

I am immensely grateful to the photographer, Bradley McNeill.

The Venus Flytrap: Just Ask Jeeves

I hired my first secretary last week.

Unlike most other collaborations in this book publishing process, I got exactly the person I wanted. She’s smart, young, confident, and the sort of girl who actually prints out an agenda when her grandfather holds a magic show at his apartment. She is also – fortunately – the kind of secretary I can hug, which was pretty high on my requirements list.

If you have met me, you may know that I have a famously fuchsia business card, and it was only fitting that she carry something suitably reflecting my, um, values too. This led to the question of what her official job title would be. As a relatively benevolent megalomaniac, I naturally opened the subject to debate.

There came the fictional character suggestions. Could she be the Smithers to my Mr. Burns? The Alfred to my Batman? The Herbert Cadbury to my Richie Rich? The Jeeves to my Wooster? And of course, there was the hardcore literary reference that’s actually been adapted into common lingo: Girl Friday.

I liked the Robinson Crusoe analogy, but Girl Friday was slightly sexist, and reminded me for some reason of Helen Gurley Brown’s 1960’s instructions to the working gal (“In taking a man to lunch, I suggest you not reach for the check with your limp little arm in his presence” would be an example). My secretary didn’t want to be named after a butler, so that knocked Cadbury, Alfred and Jeeves off the list. As for Smithers and Burns, well, the whole one-sided infatuation thing didn’t go down too well with her. Too bad, I personally quite liked the allusion to the fact that I am actually very much a sinister, balding despot with a prominent overbite and hands perpetually in the scavenger mudra.

“Would you like to be my right hand man?” I asked, hoping to slide a bit of subversion in sideways.

“Um… no?”

Then came the absurdly fancy and meaningless titles. I once held an NGO job in which I was officially the “Communication Rights and Media Advocacy Officer”. In other words, I did the press releases and copywriting. So we came up with: “Liaison Coordinator”, “Administrative and Liaison Manager”, “Administrative Specialist” and “Associate Publicity and Public Relations Aide”.

She said, “My god, when I submit my resignation, I would probably die of exhaustion before I finish typing that.”

Bringing up a resignation was not a good sign. So we moved along.

I summarily dismissed the demeaning options – minion, underling and gofer – because I’m a TV villain despot, people, not a bitch, and those are not even remotely endearing.

Which brings us to the mummy-baby names. I have the kind of megalomania that makes me sometimes think I’m the Messiah and sometimes His mother. Tyra Banks has the same kind. Fortunately, I happen to know this, so I refrained from suggesting “descendant”, “sishya”, “poppet” and “protégé”.

In the end, we settled for something suitably professional, not too pretentious, and which will not result in poor Shilu having to tell people she works for a crazy lady – Executive Assistant. The name came courtesy of our friend Anand, a former child actor who is soon going to outdo and exceed his claim-to-fame of having danced on a table with Silk Smitha, and will need his own secretary then.

So, friends, frenemies and future patrons of disorganized poets: if you want to schedule in some face or phone time with me in the next few months, kindly consult my Executive Assistant.

Now excuse me while I go and enjoy feeling smug about the fact I can actually say that.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express. “The Venus Flytrap” is my weekly column in the Zeitgeist supplement. Previous columns can be found here.