the venus flytrap – Page 11 – Sharanya Manivannan

The Venus Flytrap: Not Loose

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Venus Flytrap: The Songless Female Of The Species

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

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

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

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

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

The Venus Flytrap: Sex Workers In Ayodhya

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Venus Flytrap: Lipstick On The Ladder

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Venus Flytrap: Ambitious Women Are Often Unpartnered

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Venus Flytrap: Smash Brahminical Patriarchy

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

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

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

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

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

The Venus Flytrap: Avni And Other Tigers

There is one particular detail of the killing of Avni, the tiger, in Maharashtra last week that I keep circling back to. She was lured using a trail of tiger urine mixed with a men’s perfume, Calvin Klein’s Obsession. The scent contains synthetics that mimic civetone, which is secreted in the perineal glands of civets, and has similar effects to musk, another animal-based perfumery ingredient. Tigers find civetone irresistible; it was deployed here because earlier experiments showed that they wanted to roll themselves all over where it was sprayed, rubbing their faces into it and sniffing with visible pleasure. Essentially, Avni was lured to her death through aphrodisiac pheromones.

Avni was a “man eater”, that archaic word so colonialist in its resonance, which keeps being used in reports about her killing. It’s a word from a worldview that’s clear in its division between animal and human, but specifically Man (colonial order wasn’t the only thing built into the language). As though women or water buffaloes don’t get eaten too (both equally inequal in the hierarchy of the Kingdom of Man). The dictionary suggests that it was first used for human cannibalism (more colonial inference), later becoming used to describe animals. “Man eater” is also still in common parlance as an innuendo, used to caricaturise women who are unapologetically desirous. The fear of the desirous woman is such that she is likened to a creature that kills to devour.

But for cultures that lived or live alongside the tiger, traditionally, fear is mixed not with bloodthirst but with reverence. In the Sundarbans, the tiger deity Dakshin Rai is appeased and asked for protection, while simultaneously expected to be mercurial and voracious. In Karnataka, the tiger god is Hulideva. Naga legend holds that the first tiger, first human and first spirit all shared the same mother. Among Warli and Koli people, Waghya (meaning “tiger”) is one of the principal deities, and Waghoba is the deity of the forest at large in Maharashtra.

It bears noting that it was at the behest of the people living in the Pandharkawada divisional forest, where an estimated 13 people were killed due to tiger attacks, that Avni was shot. While the lack of adequate tranquiliser usage, the decision to kill rather than capture, and the uncertain fate of her two cubs are all worthy of questioning, that she was a threat was something that we must accept. Otherwise, what difference is there between we who live in cities and have the luxury of choosing animal-friendly diets we don’t forage for ourselves, and those who colonised centuries ago and decided that the beasts of our lands were for sport hunting and that some human lives were less valuable than their own?

To return to man-eaters and musky pheromones, there’s another possibility as to why the scent attracted Avni. It’s heartbreaking to think that she died hoping that a mate was rambling in the vicinity. Perhaps what she thought she sensed was a competitor, another tiger on the prowl for the same prey. And so she died ferocious, protective – double-edged, just the way the tiger is understood by those who know it most.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on November 8^th 2018. “The Venus Flytrap” appears on Thursdays in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: How A #MeToo Story Is Told, Or Isn’t

Every woman has a #MeToo story. It just depends on how she tells it. On who asks her, on why they enquired, on what triggered the memory, on what she knows now that she didn’t at the time – on a hundred different variables, in short. No, scratch that – every woman has #MeToo stories. Two or twenty. The count varies, for the reasons already mentioned and more. It’s just that she may choose not to frame them all that way. Or that she would rather put some or all of them behind her. Or that this new vocabulary may later liberate her, but for right now it overpowers her in so volcanic a way that she would rather not feel the things it brings up. She’d rather put them away again – hopefully not in their old hiding-place of shame, but in some new site where light slants on them in a different way, and perhaps over time she’ll know what to do.

Harassment that’s cut short through a slap, as recounted by several women in viral-friendly videos and tweets, also constitutes a #MeToo story – not the avoidance of one. Because the weight of the story lies not in the response, but in the intended outcome that the perpetrator had (and always, always – an unwelcome advance is about power, and a non-consensual action is about power; desire is never the main factor). So, in some of our #MeToo stories we’ve slapped our way out of a situation. In others, we’ve sweet-talked our escapes – the screenshots will not reveal how we gritted our teeth as we said mollifying things because we’d been raised to be diplomatic, or because we were afraid. In still others, we kept sleeping with our oppressors because we’d been gaslit into thinking we were loved. And in so many more, we’d diminished our presences so we’d seem to be unthreatening (read: unattractive) wallflowers, nodded or smiled and said as little as possible, or cut our losses and quietly left. A slap and a clean getaway are only possible if you don’t have a salary on the line, are assured that you can leave both the location and the context easily, do not have other kinds of politics and dynamics in the environment that convolute it further, and most importantly, aren’t at risk of retaliatory physical or other violence.

Over the past few weeks, as the #MeToo movement experiences its second wave in India, I made space to reflect on why I’ve yet to publicly out anyone, even though I’m fully supportive of the courageous people who’ve done so. My reasons are partly circumstantial, partly circumspect, and entirely complicated. I know this to be true for many people, because beneath the public wave are countless, powerful small ripples – private conversations and reckonings. I wish those who claim they’ve never been harassed or abused would reflect too. Open declaration is only one way of parsing trauma. If it doesn’t suit, pure denial or abject shame are not the only options. Slowly, we must teach ourselves new ways of healing and standing in our truths. Slowly. Because we aren’t just recalibrating our stories, we’re remaking the world.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on October 25^th 2018. “The Venus Flytrap” appears on Thursdays in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: The Jealousy Of The Genius

The enigmatic Annapurna Devi died in Mumbai at 91 last week. Her gift with the subahar and as a singer were legendary; but almost no one ever heard either, except if very selectively allowed into her home as a disciple. In her youth, she was also the first wife of Pandit Ravi Shankar. In an attempt to quell his jealousy and salvage their marriage, she took a vow that she would cease to publicly perform, and continued to keep it even after their divorce.

The Malayalam author KR Meera has spoken often of women she met when she was a young journalist who were introduced to her as the wives of eminent men, but whose true talents had been suppressed. As she once told me in an interview, a particular incident illustrated this state of affairs. An elderly woman who was married to the great man she had come to meet seemed especially intrigued by Meera’s work. Out of politeness, Meera asked her if she had ever been a writer herself. As the author recounted to me, “The graceful woman who was the incarnation of love, care and compassion turned angry and ferocious, and said: Used to write? Who? Me? This man sitting here saw me for the first time on a stage while I was reciting poetry. The great poet Vallathol had blessed me, saying, ‘You are Saraswati, the goddess of learning’. And this fellow fell in love with me and married me and then what? My literary career ended then and there.And he was climbing up the ladder while I was toiling in the kitchen and giving birth to his kids.”

Annapurna Devi, too, had been called the embodiment of Saraswati. By her father, the celebrated composer and musician Allauddin Khan. One could say he was possibly biased, except that he had first refused to teach her music. He had educated Annapurna’s older sister, and because this had caused problems in her marriage, he’d refused to teach the younger girl. She’d learned from simply listening to others’ lessons, and when her father eventually discovered her talent, he felt compelled to begin her formal studies in music. Eventually, it was an unfortunate marriage that thwarted her career too.

Some obituaries of Annapurna Devi romanticise her reclusiveness and praise what is perceived as her non-attachment to the material world. Doubtlessly, she found a way to sublimate her creativity into a spiritual life, of which teaching was an extension. But it’s dangerous to call that her choice. It’s, firstly, an erasure of her truth, which she shared in rare interviews in which she did not mince words about Ravi Shankar’s abusive and deceitful nature. But it’s also dangerous for all those out there whose passions are simply called hobbies, who rub the ink on their fingertips onto their aprons and watch as the words they wanted to inscribe evaporate like steam from a boiling pan, whose thoughts unfold in ragas they must wait for a secret hour to hum, who hide their illustrations inside plain notebooks that lie like obsolete currency in locked drawers. To call such sacrifice a choice is to abet their suppression.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on October 18^th 2018. “The Venus Flytrap” appears on Thursdays in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: Swords In The Hands Of Children

How does a sword end up in a lake or a river, and stay dredged in its bed for millennia until one day someone’s small hands or feet chance upon it when none had before? That it fell overboard, that it was offered ceremonially or amidst a sacrifice, that its weight helped drown the body that wore its scabbard – the possible stories of how it came to be there are myriad, limited only by the imagination. But its long and silent afterlife in those depths is sheer mystery. This week, 8-year old Saga Vanecek was playing in southern Sweden’s Lake Vidöstern, its waters in low season due to a drought, when she discovered a pre-Viking era sword, which archaeologists have since dated to around 1500 years old. The archaeologists are still wading in those waters. So far, they have found a fibula brooch, which dates to 3 or 4 CE. And a coin from as recently as 18CE, which seems almost mundane in comparison.

If anything can be mundane, that is. What if the actual history of that coin is stranger than that of the sword?

There are other stories of children finding ancient swords in water bodies. In 2014, 11-year old Yang Junxi found a 3000-year old bronze sword while washing his hands in China’s Laozhoulin river. Last year, when another little girl found another sword in a lake, the discovery was laughed off by the person who claimed he’d put it there. Legend has it that Dozmary Pool, England, was where the mystical Lady of the Lake bestowed on King Arthur the sword named Excalibur, and where it was returned to as he died. Legend also holds that only the rightful Queen of Britain would next be given the weapon. Imagine being Matilda Jones, then age 7, and pulling a huge sword out of this very lake. And then having a local man who said he bought a cinema prop in the ‘80s with which he would drunkenly “knight” people claim he had thrown it into the lake back then as a Celtic ritual. How disenchanting.

When Monty Python and the Holy Grail was written, the lines “Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony” must have seemed both brilliant and accurate. And they were, and would be still – except that we’ve seen what both capitalism-driven democracy and “due process” enact in the world, and don’t do for us, and the alternates don’t seem so farcical at all. Would I rather put my trust in a thrilled child who chances on a relic than on a predator who moved up level after level of power through entitlement and intimidation? Yes, I would.

I’m reaching for these stories neither as metaphor nor as deflection. Though it’s true that some things must lie in wait for a long time, and that the fantastical is sometimes real. It’s just that some weeks need a story out of the ordinary, for they help us cope with what is staggeringly, unconscionably unjust – and common.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on October 11^th 2018. “The Venus Flytrap” appears on Thursdays in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: The Adultery Law

What could we have told the woman who took her own life this week in Chennai – after her cheating husband allegedly told her that adultery was no longer a crime – about how that law had never been meant to protect her? The now defunct Section 497 of the Indian Penal Code, which had read: “Adultery: Whoever has sexual intercourse with a person who is and whom he knows or has reason to believe to be the wife of another man, without the consent or connivance of that man, such sexual intercourse not amounting to the offense of rape, is guilty of the offense of adultery, and shall be punished with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to five years, or with fine, or with both. In such case the wife shall not be punishable as an abettor.”

Note that precise phrasing: “consent or connivance”. Conveniently, the law as well as those who upheld it understood consent, and applied it so alliteratively – to connivance! Unless a man participated willingly in his cuckolding, his wife’s lover could be charged with a crime.

Could we have explained to that deceased woman how she had never had any recourse to justice through this law? That it had been devised for one man to punish another, and that for any woman (as per the moral codes of our society), shame itself would have been the first among various insidious punishments. If wives, being chattel, were allowed to emote, anyway.

If we’d been ignorant of this archaic decree, that was also likely to have been because as a law that men could invoke against one another, it hadn’t received much exercise in public memory. Men don’t so often go after one another in quite that way. Not as often as women get the blame. Not as often as women are turned on each other, conditioned for example to hate the one who got caught in a deceitful husband’s web and not the husband himself who so dexterously spun it. Or even if she hates that husband, to possibly not love or know her selfhood without even him.

This law had no provision for women to lodge a case. Not for women whose husbands were having affairs, nor for women who had been fooled by married men. In fact, lawyers speaking to the press suggest that one of the rare usages of Section 497 was as an act of retaliation by men facing dowry harassment proceedings. It’s vaguely disquieting how when a law that was hardly ever used was repealed, the fact of its rare usage only reinforces many things about misogyny in our social fabric.

I wish the deceased Chennai woman whom that law was used against, at least in speech, this week will be the last one ever to suffer because of it. And I wish also that after the striking down of the sexist Section 497 and the homophobic Section 377, the next to go will be Section 375, which considers rape within marriage to be criminal only if the survivor is below 15 years old. Where is consent here? All that’s evident is connivance.

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

The Venus Flytrap: A Neem Tree For A Neighbour

My closest neighbour is a neem tree, and she rests her lovely-leafed branches on the glass of the window by my reading nook. This is not a forever home, but for the little while that I’m here, it’s where I plan to spend many hours. Sun slanting on the greenery, on my skin, on the pages I’m holding. This, to me, is luxury. And have you noticed over the past year or so how kuyil songs are more frequently heard around the city centre? I hear them all day now. Something is shifting towards kindness and vitality, in a way that maybe will touch us too in our conurbations, our attempted civilisations, our many cages. I hope it touches me in mine, and I strive to reach for it every day – something resembling belonging. Here in this nook, I watch as squirrels run up the branches and along the windowsill. Ours is, I think, an undemanding co-existence.

Of course, I know they are rodents. And certainly, I know that prettiness alone shouldn’t be trusted. After all, one of the most famous squirrels ever (not counting the sabre-toothed Scrat in the Ice Age films) is the vicious Ratatosk, who scampers up and down the span of the great world tree of Norse mythology, Yggdrasil. He tells the dragon chewing at the roots what the eagle in the high branches allegedly said; and then passes another falsehood to the eagle.

But I am lucky: I speak to my neighbour the neem tree directly. And sometimes in the evenings I go downstairs and circle her, caressing low-hanging leaves with my fingertips. I have a feeling that she is a tree who is good at absorbing tears.

I don’t need a squirrel messenger. In fact, I don’t need anything from the squirrels, and so I prefer another tale about them: about how the Indian palm squirrel got its stripes after being gently stroked by Rama in a gesture of gratitude. It’s a small story about tenderness within a large story mostly about the ego, and more than the story itself, it’s the memory of my father’s narration of it in my childhood that I cherish.

I was intrigued to learn that North American cookbooks, including the iconic Joy of Cooking, featured squirrel meat even up to the cusp of the millennium, with dishes such as Brunswick stew and fricassee. As recently as a decade ago, the UK’s The Guardiancalled it the “ultimate ethical” meat, as a free-range, low-fat, locally-sourced and apparently quite tasty alternate to other kinds. Locavores in the West aside, species of squirrels both small (such as the orange-bellied Himalayan squirrel) and large (such as the Malayan giant squirrel) are traditionally eaten in different parts of India. Perhaps this mix of inspirations was what made London-based chef Rakesh Nair come up with a “Rajasthani spiced grey squirrel” for Jamie Oliver.

I’m never eating these squirrels at my window, of course. They give me so much more food for thought than they could give my stomach nourishment. “Hello Aniloo,” I coo (this is my name for all squirrels). “Are you visiting me – or am I visiting you?”

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