the venus flytrap – Page 16 – Sharanya Manivannan

The Venus Flytrap: Dismissal Under Guise Of Advice

Nothing is promised to anyone. No trajectory is so definite that one can claim it unequivocally for oneself, let alone assign it to another as a matter of assumption. Some things are not just a matter of time. Some things are not going to happen just because no one ever told you that you can imagine other storylines, other ways to measure a happy ending or a better beginning. No one warned you about what is known as “the danger of a single story”.

And most certainly – if we can be certain about anything at all – nothing is going to happen just because saying it will is the easiest way to extricate yourself from someone else’s problems. It’s not that you lack empathy – most of the time, the problem stems from truly wanting to say anything to give them immediate assurance. But you do not have the right to parrot a prevarication and call it a promise.

It’s a disrespectful thing, you know, to dismiss someone or their choices – and a cruel thing to dismiss their pain – through a throwaway warranty.

So if – for instance – someone tells you that they have made a plan to adopt a child because they haven’t been able to conceive, don’t say, “Don’t give up”. If someone tells you they are going to seek professional mental healthcare, don’t say, “You’re so negative. Try positive thinking.” If someone says they’d rather stay single than marry for anything but love, don’t say, “You’re so picky.” If someone says they need to leave an abusive relationship, don’t say, “It’ll be okay once you have a baby.” If someone tells you their heart still hurts a year after a romantic disappointment, don’t say, “Get over it, there are many fish in the sea”. If someone tells you they are offended culturally by an idea you brought to a board room, don’t say, “Don’t be so sensitive.” If someone says they think they may be queer, don’t say, “Pshaw. Yeah right.”

In short, if someone tells you they are left-handed, don’t say, “Highly unlikely. Don’t be silly. Only demon children are lefties. You just haven’t tried using your right hand, that’s all.”

Because really – how dare anyone make these proclamations, assuming that everyone has equal access and equal luck, identical hopes and identical coping strategies?

Bad advice is dangerous, but equally dangerous is any kind of dismissal. All that will happen is that the person will feel, well, dismissed. They’ll turn to more indulgent sources – not all of whom will mean as well as you do.

The best way to comfort is not to try and provide solutions, but just to listen. Most of the time, the answer is within us – and speaking out loud helps us arrive at it.

So instead of informing someone how their journey should be (and therefore will be), why not let them tell you how they wound up where they are, and what they think lies ahead? Don’t make the offbeat path harder than it is. Just give them a little company – a crying shoulder, if need be. Words can make certain things better – but who should do the speaking, even so?

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

The Venus Flytrap: Gaslighting Genocide

Once, photojournalism and visual forms of documentation could be relied on as a noble, if not always unproblematic, way of testimony. Especially in the days before the internet and the mass availability of cellphone cameras, images had the power to wake the conscience. We know this because of iconic photographs such as Nick Út’s 1972 click of a young girl in a napalm attack, which would become emblematic of the Vietnam War and of chemical warfare. Images of malnourished children in the Ethiopian famine of the 1980s also moved people in the West to offer tangible monetary donations to help them. In India, Pablo Bartholomew’s photograph of a dead baby after the 1984 Bhopal gas tragedy made people all over the country understand its seriousness. Visual journalism has always helped us not just imagine, but to understand.

So I am not sure why we – who now see images of pain on a daily basis – are less moved by them than we once were. There shouldn’t be a saturation point to empathy beyond which we become desensitised. This is not acceptable– especially not when taking positions of active denial.

In interpersonal relationships, the term “gaslighting” is used when a person’s reality is manipulated through another’s outright refusal to acknowledge it. For instance, one sibling telling another, “Our parents were not abusive; you’re making it up”. Or a spouse who says “It’s not inappropriate for me to go on holiday with my ex; you’re delusional”. We see that gaslighting now continuously where narratives of mass suffering or fear are concerned. When Myanmar’s extremely well-spoken Aung San Suu Kyi tells a BBC interviewer that there is no genocide and we nod our heads and decide to accept her propaganda, complete with captions about the “TRUTH!”. As for footage of Rohingya people wailing, fleeing, begging to be killed rather than to be deported – telling their own stories – we decide that they must be lying. We decide they must be setting fire to their own homes. We decide they must be killing their own children. We watch a video of a man carrying his mother on his back for four days and we call it a political stunt. We watch a video of a child carrying her baby brother on her back, their dead parents miles and miles behind them and say she was bribed into crocodile tears. We scroll past the video after that.

We decide they are not like us, because we decide first of all that we are not like them. And that’s where all such crises begin.

In times like these, I’m not interested in which “side” started a conflict, or who allowed it to fester. The distance of analysis like that belongs either to less empathic people or to a later time. Is it or is it not a genocide? It will be before long. Experts will count the numbers later and say “oh yeah, it was” – but today, right now, is when those numbers are being racked up. Maybe we as individuals can do little of real value to assist. But it should not be so easy for us to tear our eyes away.

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

The Venus Flytrap: Desires Unmet

In Balli Kaur Jaswal’s novel, Erotic Stories For Punjabi Widows, a group of mostly illiterate older women share and write down sexual fantasies and revelations with one another in a gurudwara classroom, while those in charge believe the old ladies are actually learning English. In Alankrita Shrivastava’s film, Lipstick Under My Burqa, four neighbours with significantly varied lifestyles conduct the shine-and-subterfuge that so many women in conservative places like India do. In secret, they work, party, sing, join protests, read erotica, conduct affairs – slipping on and off masks (or more literally, articles of clothing, be they burqas or swimsuits) that allow them to move between their true and ordained selves.

In both cases – the book, set in suburban London, and the film, set in Bhopal – the women’s solidarity with one another is a natural falling-together, an effect of proximity and circumstance. They have not been influenced by rhetoric, or raised with exposure to it; they have been moved only by logic and desire, despite how incompatible the two may seem. Indeed, I can see both groups together, crossover-style: among them, the resourceful Shireen who climbs the ladder of a sales career without her husband’s knowledge, the elderly Arvinder who reveals a memory disguised as a story, the wilful student Rehana who articulates rebellion in front of the sudden spotlight of a camera, the grieving Kulwinder who finds that life can still hold pleasure.

It was by coincidence that I watched Lipstick Under My Burqa on one of the days when I was also reading Erotic Stories For Punjabi Widows. They complemented each other so well, such that the middle-aged, widowed character of Usha in the film, played by Ratna Pathak, would have found herself at ease in the English gurudwara. Like the migrant widows, she is regarded as a non-sexual being. In truth, they are anything but – something which is routinely unacknowledged, either in fiction or in life. It was only extraordinary to see her portrayed in Indian cinema, for the many Ushas around us are dismissed daily, their desire seen alternately as non-existent, humourous or shameful.

Lipstick Under My Burqa left me saddened for hours afterwards. Was this the movie that had caused such a controversy with the censor board (not to mention the creation of that odd little phrase – “lady-oriented”)? There’s a little bit of sex, sure – but more vividly, there’s rape. Marital rape, to be precise, which does not legally exist in India. And humiliation, heartache and helplessness. It’s a film about women’s fantasies, yes – but more pertinently, it’s a film about women’s realities. About need and nature and how both are crushed by force. Nothing titillating about that.

It’s a film about fulfilled desire only as a matter of luck, and sexual repression or frustration as demands. I won’t say more, because I shouldn’t give away what happens in this poignant and disturbing film. But I will say this: if, like me, you are filled with sorrow afterward, turn to the surprisingly uplifting Erotic Stories For Punjabi Widows as a chaser. I’m grateful I was consuming both pieces of art at once. Book and film, too, fell together in quiet solidarity.

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

The Venus Flytrap: Crown Shyness

You lay on your back on the leaf-layered earth and see the sky rivered blue between patchworks of green. Crown shyness: the reluctance of certain species of trees to touch at their heights, so the canopy is a really a configuration of boundaries. The limit at which something is withheld. We don’t know why those trees do it any more than we know why we behave in our own mysterious ways, at odds with our natures. What’s the worst thing that can happen if your fronds or your fingers linked? What abrasion could be so injurious that what you will lose in the wind anyway cannot be risked? What larvae more fearsome than the way regret eats at you from the inside?

It is not difficult to go so long, crown-shy, tracing but not trespassing borders. It is more difficult by far to begin to make the reach again, to remember how to unfurl into a close but forbidden expanse.

“There’s a reason why it hasn’t happened for you in so long,” she says. “And that is because you have forgotten how to want it in a way that forgets all else but the wanting.”

Forgets self-preservation. Forgets uprooting and decay. Forgets the sky itself.

Somewhere, on a farther continent, is a wolf tree, disorderly in its bearing, thriving on too much sunlight and too much space. The wolf tree is the one that was the last one standing, the one left for pity or prettiness while around it axes made way for pastoral land, the one that survived fire or pestilence. Without restriction, its branches shoot forward, devouring all available nutrients: light, moisture, soil, air. It is no longer necessary to reach only toward the sky, hemmed in by the needs of other foliage. So it throws its wooden limbs forth like some form of medieval punishment, protuberant boughs in too many directions at once. They grow horizontally, low on the ground, forking like snake-tongues or strikes of lightning, which have splintered it often. Its crown too is wide, ever-increasing – and un-neighboured, never-encroaching.

A century can pass. Around it, fresh verdure finds cultivation, flourishing just beyond its shade. And then the wolf tree begins to recede – no longer as abundantly nourished, a plethora of resources at its personal disposal. It does not die, but looks like it will, or – if a being as venerable as a tree can be assigned so shamefully human a trait – that it wants to. It isn’t so easy now, to be so crowded in, to be so damn obvious a testament to having withstood the damage of many seasons of solitude. Gnarled into glory. What can anything be, anew, having already been the only thing it will be known or remembered to ever have been?

“There’s a reason why it hasn’t happened for me in so long,” you say. “And that will not be explained by these metaphors, or by your idea that you can explain it.” You let the shadows envelope you. You know it’s not clear from the outside what has happened: if many crowns have collided, or if only a single canopy blots out the sun.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on August 31^st 2017. “The Venus Flytrap” appears on Thursdays in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: Women Infantilised By Society And Law

A young Indian woman named Hadiyah, moved and perhaps given meaning by a faith other than the one she was born into, decided to convert. She eventually signed up on a matrimonial website that would allow her to find a like-minded partner. Despite Hadiyah being 24 years old, and despite the fact that Kerala high courts had rejected two petitions filed by her father claiming she had been forcibly converted, a third such petition resulted in her marriage being annulled – and her being sent into parental custody with this infantilising statement: “A girl aged 24 years is weak and vulnerable, capable of being exploited…”. The Supreme Court has since ordered an investigation into the marriages of formerly Hindu women to Muslim men as a potential terrorist conspiracy.

The concept of “love jihad” is not only Islamophobic, it is also a clear insult to all women. And with violent overtones: recent reportage has revealed some truly terrifying tactics including kidnapping, coercion and even drugging women (at an Ernakulam hospital) so that they comply with their parents’ wishes. In every such scenario, the freedom of an adult woman to make her own choices is either questioned or curtailed. It is also worth iterating that marital rape is not criminalised in India. Marital rape cannot exist in this worldview because women’s autonomy – the right to reject or consent – does not exist. She is her family’s, community’s, state’s – or in a panchayat-style redressal, her rapist’s – property. A woman in India can’t assuredly choose or refuse a partner, but a man can rape his wife under protection of law.

Another recent case involved Irom Sharmila, who ran for election in Manipur after a 16-year hunger strike. After defeat at the polls, she retreated from public life and reportedly found solace in Kodaikanal. But when she announced her engagement to her long-term partner, the welcome proved to have been short-lived. A Tamil Nadu-based Hindu group filed a petition to keep her from marrying there, alleging that the city’s security would be at stake. Oddly, it was marriage – the antiquated notion of “settling” – that had roused the petitioners.

To these two high-profile cases relating to marriage, mobility and the denial of adult women’s agency, here’s a third one that suggests how such a societal milieu comes about and is maintained. Earlier this year, the Supreme Court denied an abortion to a 10 year old who had been raped by her uncle, ignoring medical experts’ caution that the risks presented by a late-term termination were outweighed by the risks of carrying the foetus to term and undergoing childbirth. (Abortion is legal up to the 20^th week, after which special permission must be given). She gave birth via caesarean section last week. According to reports released after the delivery, the survivor was never told that she was pregnant, but that she had a “stone” in her stomach. This can only mean that despite having undergone the horrors of rape, she continues to be denied basic sex education, or the right to information. Neither her body nor her mind have been treated with respect.

She gave birth to another girl. And so the cycle continues.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on August 24^th 2017. “The Venus Flytrap” appears on Thursdays in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: If Money Isn’t Found In Books…

When I took a workplace sabbatical to become a consultant, one of the first things I researched was whether going many days at a time without wearing a bra causes sagging. I am happy to tell you that Google told me the opposite is true, but the reason I can enjoy this at all is because of another, far greater, luxury: to work largely out of home, at least for long as I can manage it. Lest you think I’m sitting in some posh veranda, blowing bubbles, bra-lessly contemplating Deep Thoughts and quilling Poems with a peacock feather – when I say working out of home, I still mean working for other people, writing or editing a variety of things for them so that they, in turn, can write me cheques. “Other work”, you see, is what all artists who don’t have inheritances, spouses with sizable incomes or a steady stream of foreign commissions or royalties must do. And that is the vast majority of us.

But don’t we make pots of money from our books, you ask? There are outliers in commercial fiction and selected non-fiction (like celebrity memoirs), but literary work sells very poorly in India. The agent Kanishka Gupta has written extensively about these nitty-gritties, but to break it down for you: the average author makes about 10% on the cover price of each sold book. I remember buying a box of sweets for my former office, a mid-sized advertising agency, when I signed a publishing contract and thinking – only if every single colleague bought a copy of my book would I make enough in royalties to cover the cost of that treat.

Like me, many authors work in allied fields like communications, journalism, media, academia and publishing. Then there are those who can’t or choose not to monetize their literary skills, whose breadwinning careers are unrelated. To give you just a few examples: Upamanyu Chatterjee is an IAS officer. Tanuj Solanki works in life insurance. Kaushik Barua works for the UN. Mainik Dhar manages a global food company. Amrita Narayanan is a psychologist. N.D. Rajkumar, by his own description, is a “coolie” on the Indian Railways. Poovalur Jayaraman, who is in his 80s, sells vadas and bondas from a pushcart. Kavery Nambisan is a doctor, as is Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar – who was suspended from his job as a civil surgeon last week because of a controversy about his writing.

As you can see, each person’s resources and financial security thus vary. At best, any literary income usually only supplements a base revenue from another profession. At worst, as in Dr. Shekhar’s case, even that is risked by the fact that there is very little respect for the arts and their makers in India.

“Office?” people have exclaimed to me. “But I thought you were a poet!” It’s unfashionable to admit to having a “day job”, but I want to demystify the idea that we don’t need one. Unless one is extremely fortunate or already privileged, the pragmatic reality is that we do. Readers, this is what goes on behind the curtain. Aspiring authors, this is only some of what you’re in for…

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on August 17^th 2017. “The Venus Flytrap” appears on Thursdays in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: Paan Or Peen?

Two old ladies were smoking outside their nursing home when it started to rain. One of them immediately pulled out a condom, snipped off the end, rolled it over her cigarette and continued to smoke. (Don’t ask me about the logistics: let’s just say it wasn’t really a cigarette but a cigar, or maybe a fat roll of medicinal herbs). “This way it doesn’t get wet,” she says coolly between puffs. Her friend, impressed by this jugaad, asks where she can get her own, and is informed that any drugstore will have it. So when the rain abates, the little old lady pops down to the nearest local one and asks for a box of condoms. The pharmacist is embarrassed (again, don’t ask me why – maybe this story is set in Chennai), but tries to be professional. He asks her which brand she prefers. “Anything will do,” she shrugs. “As long as it fits a Camel.”

I came across this joke on the same day that an Indian condom company announced its new pickle-flavoured launch, and so I laughed extra hard (that pun was so unintentional that I’m going to keep it). At first, I thought “For the Parantha and Achaar lovers!” was just too bad a tagline to be real, and refused to believe this product could exist. After all, a global competitor had punked us a year ago by announcing an eggplant-flavoured one, which turned out to be a publicity stunt to spark more discussions about safer sex. Then I remembered that the less easily impressed you are, the more difficult it is to get laid. Clearly, I wasn’t their target market.

In fact, a little research told me that betelnut-flavoured condoms were supposed to be made available to the Indian market ten years ago, developed specifically after taste tests with Mumbai sex workers, who preferred it to common ones like chocolate, banana and strawberry. I can imagine why – wouldn’t you rather have some paan in your mouth than some random man’s peen? I also learned that in addition to the usual ice cream flavours, bacon, durian, and even garlic condoms have been manufactured around the world. (Don’t worry, there are mint ones too). And sure, you could say they’re all more likely to be party favours or novelty items, but I guarantee you that in the heat of the moment, many people have been glad to have some latex lying around. (PSA: Flavoured condoms are meant only for oral sex, and may cause allergies if used otherwise).

Then there’s everything from cannabis flavours (not to be confused with cannabis lube, which can actually get you high), a limited edition caipirinha one that was sold at the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, and even vegan liquorice ones. Manforce, the company behind the achaar one, already has the synthetic tastes, or at least scents, of jasmine, butterscotch and banana (also known as the original eggplant emoji) in its range.

So is Manforce going to, erm, withdraw instead and claim the pickle condoms are just a conversation-starter campaign? Or are things going to get ooruga-smic (yes, I had to go there, and I’m not sorry!)?

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on August 10^th 2017. “The Venus Flytrap” appears on Thursdays in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: Recycling From Home In Chennai

I’ve been recycling from home for a couple of years now, and it’s such a normalised part of my life that I’m confident when I say you can do the same, with just minimal effort.

As recycling isn’t big on Chennai’s municipal agenda or imprinted on our civic consciousness, the personal initiative is important. However, we have one major deciding factor which isn’t available everywhere: doorstep collection. I am familiar with two such service providers: Kuppathotti and Paperman (the latter also lets you contribute financially to charitable causes). Both services tie up with small scrap buyers and paper traders in your locality to collect recyclable trash from your home.

When you read about how there’s enough plastic on the planet now to cover Argentina, or about brimming, city-sized landfills, don’t just shake your head and sigh. Know that you can commit to reducing your personal contribution to environmental apocalypse. You’d be astonished how much so-called waste material each individual produces that can be recycled. Once you start, it’s like wearing green goggles: you’ll automatically know what items to collect, without deliberation!

Begin by educating yourself on the process. For instance, did you know there are seven types of plastic, which is why bottles and other materials have a numbered symbol? Once, when a collector declined one kind, saying it could not be recycled, I knew that while that particular scrap buyer didn’t have the resources to accept it, another would. So I called them instead of dumping it all.

I keep a large, covered laundry basket lined with a rubbish bag to collect my recyclable trash, knotting and storing away each bag as it fills. A little wise space management will allow you to do this. If you’re careful about food packaging unless it’s residue-free, you’ll never have issues like bad odour or insects. And always: reduce, reuse, then recycle.

There was a point when I would wash yoghurt cups and other food packaging in order to recycle them, then realised the water wastage negated the effort. It’s important to keep the big picture in mind: it’s not recycling itself that is the point, but how you reduce your ecological footprint. This can extend to various other efforts, depending on your personal capacity: taking shared or public transport, planting and raising trees, composting food waste, consuming local organic produce instead of imported goods, Skyping instead of meeting, reusing cloth grocery bags, avoiding turning on the AC, advocating for solar and other clean energy forms, and so on.

Bear in mind: currently available recycling service providers are small organisations, and rely on a chain of equally small waste traders and their collection staff. This is a chain that can break down, and not because the services are themselves unreliable, but because the system isn’t perfect yet. It can be frustrating to not be able to get through on a phone number, and the sight of garbage bags in your home may become exasperating. But it’s us, ordinary people who want to reduce damage to the environment, who will eventually perfect that system. The more we get involved, the more efficient solutions will be designed and implemented.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on August 3^rd 2017. “The Venus Flytrap” appears on Thursdays in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: Fire-Trampoline Marriages

We need to talk about those fire-trampoline marriages. You know: the kind where after a grand time running around town setting other people’s hearts on fire, someone takes a leap off a ledge, bounces right into the waiting arms of the patriarchy, and looks back up (still bouncing, not a toenail singed) and shouts: “I always told you I’d marry someone of my parents’ choosing!”.

If only real life was as comic panel-perfect as this analogy. Because what happens next largely happens out of sight. While the man or the woman with the trampoline conducts their socially-sanctioned conjugal bliss in full public view, cheesy captions and all, there is also a person trapped in that metaphorical burning building. The ashes of charred dreams and the mess left for them to clean up are not metaphorical at all. (The jumper’s spouse is a contemplation for another time).

It should be no surprise that in an India where only 5% of marriages are inter-caste (i.e. actually based on something other than upholding the system), there are a whole lot of fire-trampolines. This applies especially among those who are more educated, more affluent and for the most part, urbanites. There’s a profound disconnect between the veneer of liberal values and sexual mores that are enjoyed superficially and one’s actual beliefs.

But more so than a question of ideologies, this is really an issue of accountability. To mislead and treat someone badly then write it off as something you needed to do for the sake of family, culture, religion, money or general appearances is not “the right thing to do”. There’s nothing honourable about it. The most devious version of all is when the jumper pleads their cowardice, and claims they wish they were strong like you. Don’t believe it for a second.

I hear many stories from the people left holding the broom, the bucket and the bad end of the stick. Here’s what I told the last woman who cried to me about a man who suddenly got engaged to someone else while almost simultaneously declaring his love for her for the first time. (Yes, men do seem to jump into fire-trampolines more than women because the system is essentially designed to serve them better). This is what I told her: “It’s not that he doesn’t know what he wants, despite what some will tell you, including him. It is that he knows what he can have. He can have the convenience of his marriage, and by leaving this door ajar, he can also have emotional intensity – and more – from you.”

Because anyone who keeps a fire-trampoline handy has got other tricks up their sleeve. It’s no leap (pun intended) from “I told you I’d marry someone of my parents’ choosing” to “You knew I was married.”

At first it’s horrific, the aftermath among the embers. But eventually, you see distinctively what happens to the two survivors. The one who jumped continues to keep jumping, through more and more hoops of their own making. As for the one who was trapped in the inferno, the one who walked through flames? You already know what resurrects from ash.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on July 27^th 2017. “The Venus Flytrap” appears on Thursdays in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: A Matter Of Time

Some people will do nothing they deem important in the month of Aadi. They will not marry, they will not purchase property, they will not begin a business venture. I was born in this month, and I measure what is malefic and what is auspicious on another set of terms. The pages of calendars turn differently at different times. Anyone knows this. Some years rush by before you can count them. Some lacerate you so deeply that nothing ever comes to pass again without a sense of a reset, a point at which things came either before or after.

The wise have already taught us that time is an illusion. The wise-but-still-practical have taught us that it is a construct. It exists as we understand it because we invented clocks and calendars. There are other ways to measure even this, this practical view of reality. The shifting seasons. The way sunlight is partitioned by darkness. And then there is the moon, a perennial example even as she waxes and withdraws, even as she moves away from us at an inch and a half each year. (It tells you something about me, that I know this because of a poem, “Facts About The Moon” by Dorianne Laux. And each of our years only lasts so long because of this heavenly body’s orbit around its sun, and not by how its satellite gets further and further away).

Then there are the needs and cycles of the human body, and also the way nothing can stop its gradual decay. Some of my friends had crows’ feet at 25, and loved them, yet I know sexagenarians who dye their hair jet black. Another illusion. I don’t know how long I’ve had a smattering of dark dots around one eye but I think of them like spots on a deer’s pelt, I will not part with them even if they could be kissed off. I am told the dancer Chandralekha’s hair turned ivory not with age but in a cosmetic accident. Another illusion: perhaps that’s one of many ways in which she transcended time.

When I hear people say “it’s only a matter of time” to the unconsoled, I hear a platitude that allows them to not have to sit with them in the present, the place to which they are pinned. I’ve been the unconsoled, often (a useful but still vague measure of time). I know no one can have that assurance. I also know that very few have the grace to be patient alongside those who have no choice but to be.

Because time, ultimately, moves in ways beyond our control, even within the measures we seek to know it in. A construct, a concept or otherwise, it is what we are. The composite of how we move in the world, spend our lives (birth and death, and the in-between: that’s one decisive measure of time). Our long-sighted visions, our infinitesimally small moments. The things that they say will take time only truly take presence, our persistent belief that something will come to pass. Even if it is out of our hands. Even if it’s only an illusion.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on July 20^th 2017. “The Venus Flytrap” appears on Thursdays in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: Breastfeeding – In Public, In India

We had just ordered lunch at the 5-star hotel when Shamala Hinrichsen’s 8-month old got hungry too, so his lovely mom reached right into her dress and started to feed him. Our conversation continued as she rocked him gently. That was the first time I’d seen a woman breastfeed publicly in Chennai, without hiding her body. A foreigner of Tamil origin who’s been travelling extensively around India on work, she says, “I’ve seen women in rural areas do it with unapologetic authority. It’s a perfectly natural act.”

The Indian railways announced recently that 100 of their stations will have segregated nursing areas. In a letter to the Ministry of Women and Child Development, these areas were specified as “[a corner] provided with a small table and a chair with appropriate partition/screen around it.” But is that enough? Dentist Dr. Deepa V., whose child was recently weaned, never nursed openly owing to shyness. She says, “In public facilities, people still turn to the wall to hide themselves. I remember the looks my relatives gave me whenever I lifted my salwar to feed while travelling with them. I think this discomfort is the main reason why we train babies to accept formula milk earlier.”

Another mother, now nursing her 7.5 month old, related how she sat at an eatery in a Chennai mall and started to nurse, unable to do so in the stuffy public toilets. Immediately, the staff directed all the male customers to sit away from her. She was appreciative of the concern for privacy and comfort. “I think the horror stories we read about breastfeeding moms being fined, shamed or trolled are really a US problem,” she says. “There’s a solid sisterhood solidarity everywhere for the nursing mom. No judgement if I’m in a salwar kameez or saree or tank top or shorts and I want to feed the baby – that’s it, the sisterhood comes into force.”

Theatre director Samyuktha PC returned to work 3 months after childbirth, bringing her daughter to rehearsals, and openly nursed when required. “At first, I did cover myself, but the cloth over me just made Yazhini and I sweat so badly. And it felt cruel to do that.” From then on, she simply asked if others were comfortable, and carried on – anywhere. “But outside of home and work, bad experiences happened quite often – men staring, women thinking it was their right to drape me. But I was also supported and told I was courageous. I would rather it be normalised.”

While it comes down to personal preference, there’s no doubt that these preferences can be inhibited by societal norms. Which is why Shamala’s unapologetic public nursing seemed especially triumphant to me. In Mumbai recently, when she began to breastfeed on the ground floor of a café, men on the balcony level took their phones out and started to photograph her. She kept feeding. “Would I be gawked at or judged if I were feeding someone with a spoon? I think not. Possibly because it is from an appendage. My breasts. I would like to think people would be as judgemental if I were feeding from, say, my nose.”

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on July 13^th 2017. “The Venus Flytrap” appears on Thursdays in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: Cassandra In The Kingdom Of Closed Eyes

A boy is knifed in a train and bleeds to death on his brother’s lap on a station platform and no one sees. A young woman is stabbed and bleeds to death on another station platform and no one sees, but someone covers her with a shawl so that her womanly shape isn’t visible, for that is all they can see of her. Something cold sits on my heart, listening to them; how do they do it, looking me straight in the eyes and blithely revealing that they are among the unseeing?

They don’t register the headlines, the statistics, the faces, the stories. They demand proof even as it plays out before them. They claim blips and skewings, and when faced with facts, claim conspiracy. Last weekend I saw someone carrying a poster with a version of Bob Dylan’s words: “How many deaths will it take till we know that too many people have died?” Some – no, many – deaths don’t count because some (many) lives matter less than others. There’s a quota that can never be filled enough for them to say “Enough”. That’s not a riot, they say. And a riot’s not a holocaust. And at least a holocaust is not… well, no one will be left to finish that sentence.

And someone will ask me (I know the script) – how can you connect them, the boy with the skull cap and the girl with the stalker – and like a fabulist I will have to try to prove a theory of invisibility. About how there are reasons why some people can only see some things and not others. And I will play right into their hands when I tell them: when a girl was raped on a bus five years ago, you lit candles and raged, when the same thing happened to another girl in Salem a month ago, you scrolled past her, just like you did the one whose body was towed in a garbage truck, the pregnant one found brutalised at the bottom of a well, the one who was never written about at all but whom you would have ignored anyway.

Then they’ll say: where were you when the earth first wept (not yet born), or when that other silence stuck like tar (raising my voice, then as now, but it didn’t carry in the wind) or when those other dead were named (I hadn’t known then – but you had). As though their wilful, obstinate unseeingness is vindicated because of my not being omniscient. And they never turn the same question on themselves: where are you now, as this unfolds, and why do you justify it? And if you ask, they say flatly, “But there is nothing happening.”

They cannot see the forest burning for all the ashes in the trees. Cannot see structure, system, sense. Cannot see anything beyond their own noses, even as they fill with noxious smoke.

Here’s what I see then, if you can tolerate a Cassandra in the kingdom of closed eyes: nothing we have not already seen. Nothing humanity does not already know. Nothing humanity can forget – unless humanity has forgotten the meaning of itself.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on July 6^th 2017. “The Venus Flytrap” appears on Thursdays in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: The Exhumation of Salvador Dali

It’s a suitably surreal story, the kind that would make a fascinating novel (and later, when the author can finally quit her day job after selling the film rights, a good movie too). Picture it: it is the 1950s. In a small Mediterranean village called Port Lligat, a celebrated painter builds a waterfront home where he spends some decades, most of them married to his muse. When not busy with her own work, she poses for him as the madonna, a sleeping nude about to be pounced on by tigers, and herself as a matrix of suspended spheres, among other renditions. The couple are childless, but there are families who live near them who employ a young, married nanny. The painter and the nanny have an affair, and more than sixty years later, a professional tarot reader comes forward and convinces the courts to order an exhumation of the painter’s body to determine whether he is her father, as her grandmother once told her.

So Salvador Dali is to be exhumed, although his estate – worth over 300 million euros – will fight the court order. The big hitch in the paternity suit is that Dali was rumoured to have a phobia of female genitalia. Unlike stereotypical muse-artist relationships, it was his wife, Gala, who enjoyed their open marriage (along with some other atypical dynamics like requiring Dali to receive her permission in writing before visiting her at the private castle she spent her summers in). The plaintiff’s mother, the nanny, is now in her late 80s and suffers from Alzheimer’s, and corroborated the parentage story only a few years ago.

The whole thing is mildly entertaining, but also mildly distasteful. Still, who are we to judge? So many people are still hung up the concept of bloodlines as proof of superiority – or something – and that’s even without millions of euros in the picture.

I was curious about precedents for Dali’s exhumation. The 19^th century English poet Elizabeth Siddal, who also posed for her husband Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s paintings, was buried with the only copy of his early literary attempts, and her body was later exhumed so he could retrieve them. Then the poets Pablo Neruda and Federico Garcia Lorca came to mind. The former had been a civil servant who died suddenly days after Chilean dictator Pinochet’s 1973 military coup; the latter was long known to have been executed, with three others, in 1936 by fascists in a Spanish civil war. Neruda was exhumed in 2013 to investigate murder claims, but when he was reburied in 2016, the mystery remained. Lorca’s corpse has never been found, although over the years numerous excavations have been made to determine where his remains lie.

What’s interesting about the search for the truth about Neruda and Lorca’s deaths is that, unlike the Dali exhumation, they speak to, and are reminders of, a larger cause. Thousands died in the same events, yet we only know of the famous few. And there are mass graves the world over: they contain not just the bodies of the dead who had no rites, but also the pain of the surviving who have no proof.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on June 29^th 2017. “The Venus Flytrap” appears on Thursdays in Chennai’s City Express supplement.