Tag Archives: the venus flytrap

The Venus Flytrap: Every Age You’ve Ever Been

How strange it was, her reaction to the story about the famous writer who had been pulled out of school in the 8th grade for bunking class to go the cinema. “How sad,” she said, with sincere sympathy. “Poor child!” I said nothing, at least not immediately. She had forgotten, in the thrall of someone else’s life, her own daughter’s. She had pulled me out of school after the 6th grade, then the 8th, then refused to send me to college, then sabotaged my tertiary studies at least thrice. I never finished them. I am not a college drop-out in the cool sense of the word, not a genius who invented a software or sold an app or became a superstar. I am the other kind.

This is not a special story. I meet them all the time: high-functioning, ambitious – even accomplished – adults like myself who carry the scars of family dysfunction. Families who made bad choices and blamed it on circumstances. Families who justified abuse. Families who forced their young into situations the young should not know, so that they were raised half on their own sheer will and half on slow-release poison. More importantly, I meet scarred adults like myself who work hard to forge relationships with those same families. We do it out of love, yes, but we also do it because the alternative is an abyss of too much pain.

So to all of us who try, I want to say: I see you, I know you. I’ve seen you at all the ages you have ever been. I see their layers glimmer beneath every brick you lay in a life of your own assemblage, and I know what it has taken you and what it takes you every day.

There are places beyond which the well-adjusted cannot understand what we mean. There are places beyond which the well-concealed cannot carry their trauma across without spilling it, and so they refuse to acknowledge ours. And sometimes these categories are nebulous. We see ourselves reflected clearly, or we are oblivious of our blind spots.

I’ll take a crack in my heart over a chip on my shoulder, but some days it all feels the same.

As a writer, I believe the story belongs to whoever needs it. As a survivor, I believe the story belongs only to the one who lived it. These are contradictions, balanced by a single word, for a scarce thing: care. The story, like the survivor, is alive: it changes based on the hour or the day, evolves over years, is shaped by battering and by craft, sandpapered by retellings, distorted by silences. The story, like the survivor, requires care.

Redemption is not denial of all that came before. It’s only an extension of the sheer will through which that survival was – and is – managed. I am writing the future by force. The past is trauma, and trauma is memory. The present is a project, and that too will become memory. The ones we make today are the ones we’ll live with later. And wanting to live means having to try.

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

The Venus Flytrap: After Orlando

“What does it mean, though, gay bar?”

I’ll tell you. Some of the best times of my life involved dancing on tables and painting other people’s eyelids in unisex bathrooms and reading my poetry out loud in gay bars, in countries where the right to love and to wholly exist are not guaranteed. Queer allies don’t do a service to queer people by offering their support; we are here because of their generosity and trust.

Someone wrote that a massacre like the one at Pulse in Orlando couldn’t happen in India because we have no gay bars, but we do. Some just don’t advertise. Others occur like flash mobs, with seeming spontaneity: a random afternoon when the “Private Event” sign is placed in front of the door, an evening at the end of June when the décor, the music, the drinks are the same, but there are discreet rainbows on the flyer and flagrant ones on people’s bandanas.

Gay bars are not about sex. They’re about safety. They’re about selfhood, community, solidarity and fun. They are not divisive, compulsory, or automatically elitist. They are not (just) about partying and revelry; they are equally about resistance, defiance and speaking truth to power.

And sex with complete strangers? Wait, that’s not gay bars you’re thinking of, but your average heterosexual arranged marriage, in which all of Indian culture’s precious glory is banked (honour, of course, is stockpiled inside female bodies).

In gay bars you will hear the word family. Among those who have been disowned, those who had to create their own tribes, it means “s/he is also queer.” It means people among whom you belong.

In the holy month of Ramzan, in the heartfelt month of Pride, on Latin night in a club full of – mainly – young men of ethnic minorities, a hateful person opened fire and committed a massacre.

As I write this, I have deliberately not looked at the lists of names of the dead. What little I stumbled on regardless – one man who texted “I love you mommy” as the gunman drew near, another who helped build a Harry Potter ride in a theme park – undid me. I do not think I knew any of them, but in another way, I know every single one of them, that disparate group of dreams and flaws and kindredships and would-never-have-gotten-along-withs.

Most were queer. Many were men. Some had to have been women. (Trans, cis, non-binary? Human.) Some might have had children. Some must have been allies. Some could have been outed for the first time, in death.

We’re watching Pulse from the outside, we’re watching it in retrospect. You may never have stepped into a gay bar, intentionally, and you may say you never will. “What’s a gay bar, really? What do they do?” you ask again. But you already know.

Because if you’ve ever sought love out – filial love, sexual love, companionable love, love that knows you – and if you’ve ever believed it to be a radical force, then you know what the inside of a gay bar looks like. It looks, under any light, just like the inside of your heart, your hope.

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

The Venus Flytrap: Cosmic Longing & A Heart-Shaped Bloom-Bruise

He found a way to tell me he was wandering near the house I lived in then, a way to get me to ask what he was doing there, to spritz my wrists impulsively with nocturnal jasmine and walk out the door. But I didn’t ask. All of that year so far, I had caught a refrain pulsing in me, with no proof: “my heart is going to break”. And so it did. I had known before I’d known. And then I knew, incontrovertibly.

But that was the week they’d flown by Pluto and sent back images of a heart-shaped bloom-bruise on its southern hemisphere. So, instead, I laughed with delicious bitterness at the meme that made the rounds – “so you dumped me years ago and now you’re driving by my house real slow” – of earth’s obsession with the ex-planet. I sent it to my friends, and they too laughed with me, and then I put my phone away and colluded quietly with the night sky. Its burning brightnesses, its invisible implosions. My heart was going to break, but so what, 320 light-minutes away was one that had broken billions of years ago.

I looked at those images of Pluto and marvelled at the perfection of that heart. It, too, was a scar, the result of a collision with interplanetary debris. They call it Sputnik Planum, sprawled across by a frozen, far younger expanse. Sputnik Sweetheart, I thought – but perhaps that was too sentimental for the star-seekers who know their gods and their stories, who named its principal moon for the ferryman of the dead, and dark regions after Tolkien, and one terrestrial macula for a goddess whose nepenthe helps souls forget lifetimes, and others for different beings of other underworlds.

That NASA flyby was the first time that human eyes had seen the celestial body with such clarity. Now, almost a year later, we know even more. Beneath that iciness, the young surface thrives with heat, continuously replenishing itself. Pluto’s heart beats, is what the astronomers and scientists now tell us. It beats like “bubbles in a lava lamp”, is their specific description, and I think of something silent and aquatic. What if we got closer, learned more? Would it beat the way wings flutter as a hummingbird descends to slip its beak into the flute of a flower? Would it beat like the throbbing at the corner of someone’s lips as they sleep, the one you don’t touch unless you hope to wake them? Blood-tide in the conch of the body, song-tide in the silence of the deep.

Would it beat the way his fingertips uncertainly drum surfaces around me now that he knows he can do nothing to thaw my wintry demeanour?

Someone else, longer ago, cracked open corridors that led me to the songs of pulsars. And later, listening to warbling conus shells – a mermaid, according to local legend – from my maternal homeland, I thought of those dying stars too. Does the beating heart of Pluto make a sound?

Only light-minutes of distance, not insurmountable light years, and each generation closer and closer. I’m listening. Are you?

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

The Venus Flytrap: Crows, Caution And True Colours

When Wendell Berry wrote of “the peace of wild things”, he could not have been thinking of the crow. For the crow, with its blade-like intelligence and its capacity for vendettas, might have longed for the same thing as the only domesticated creature that writes poetry (the human). In the human’s attempts to study the crow, we have learnt that they recognise faces outside their species, and warn one another of inimical elements. They also shower affection and aegis, as they do on Gabi Mann, a little girl in Seattle who feeds them, and to whom they bring gifts of beads and trinkets and objects deemed precious by their intentions.

Chennai is a city of crows, so it is easy to observe them. As they cast shadows on walking paths. As they cascade good luck in the form of shit. As they swoop down on early mornings to eat freshly cooked rice, and some part of us longs to confer on them the names of ancestors. As they keep sentinel silences from near distances, and unlike the needy nuisance of pigeons, never trespass.

In our folktales they innovate and connive, in our mythologies they chauffeur deities of double-edged power, like the righteous Shani, and Dhumavati who rises in smoke. And according to both science and legend, crows are known for their ability to hold a grudge. They don’t forget ill-will done toward them.

Popular wisdom gives grudges a bad rap. Grudge-holders are said to be small-hearted and stuck in the past, while those who “let go” are noble. Those who don’t make it easy for others to keep trampling them are criticised as “being difficult”. But the way we talk about these issues – injury, forgiveness and healing – is all wrong. By diabolising our emotional responses, we actually allow the pain to twist into different sorts of cruelties, towards the self and others.

A grudge doesn’t mean extracting revenge. It doesn’t mean carrying negative emotions. It simply means recognising a person for what they are, instead of making excuses for them. And not forgetting lessons learnt.

A grudge-holder can be unfailingly polite, while also being cold. They can act kindly, without ever re-opening the door. They can even wish well, while simultaneously wishing to keep their distance. It’s not a grudge one truly holds, but a memory. Not a scar, but the concealed weapon of knowledge. It never needs to be used. Bearing it is protection enough.

Various fables about the crow suggest its intense colour is a form of punishment. But in a story belonging to the Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape people, its rainbow feathers are singed due to bravery. The earth is trapped in endless winter, and it travels on behalf of all living things to ask the creator for a solution. The creator imagines fire into being, and the crow is the first to experience it. The crow’s gift, however, is that in times of rain its wet feathers will glisten with their original variegation.

One can carry a grudge the way a crow carries a secret shimmer within. Where you’ve been burnt, a resistance: your true colours, and always, an awareness of theirs.

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

The Venus Flytrap: Being Adored

Chemistry is one thing, being adored quite another.

At the cusp of my 20s, there was a gorgeous man with whom I never became involved, even though a deep and evidently mutual crush existed between us for something like three years. A friend of his told me then, “We sit here and talk about every girl who walks by, but when you arrive, he falls completely silent”.

I saw his eyes light up whenever he saw me; and because I could ask for no purer reaction, neither could I ask for more.

No, that’s a lie – I am a shy woman. And I like to be asked.

But this is true: there is nothing really complimentary, deeply meaningful, about being found attractive. There is only a marginal, and often perishable, difference when it comes to being lusted for. Both are ultimately about the beholder and their pursuit. This is why, so often, it wilts upon fulfilment – curiosity satisfied, skin that yielded so tenderly so quickly thickening to hide. For by the light of morning none among us is anything but vulnerable, but some among us are so afraid.

I have not been adored often. I’d like to think that I would always appreciate it, and so would always recognise it. I say this knowing that there’s a part of me that is coy and cruel, and takes and does not reciprocate, while pining for other things that don’t spin intoxicatedly around the vagaries of my caprice.

Such spirals are not adoration, just another form of beholding: if fortunate, one knows better than to risk touch. In astronomy, there is the concept of evection. The word literally means “carrying away”: it indicates the eccentricity of the moon in response to the sun’s attraction. Even the moon is driven mad, and sometimes we are simply moon-kiss’d.

The last time I saw the man who fell silent, his eyes suddenly-lit, whenever he saw me, we had bumped into one another unexpectedly in a public place. Neither of us could contain our delight – we held both of each other’s hands and sparkled hellos elatedly, and then simply let our hands drop away. That too, was almost a decade ago, but I count it among the few times I knew myself to be genuinely cherished.

Should we have acted on it? Maybe, maybe not. He adored me, I adored him; this is not a bittersweet memory.

It was not Love, but it was love enough. Adoration is something else altogether, something soulful and joyous and often taciturn.

The hands, the feet, the eyes – these are the holy centres. The gestures: to kiss the hand, to touch the feet. And those most taciturn and most soulful things rendered by the eyes…

Not everybody knows how to do this, how to adore. It takes a certain grace, a certain respect, to be able to look at a person and make them feel beautiful without it being about the way they appear, feel desirable without it being a proposition, feel extraordinary and original and singular with it being only – and only – about some sublime and recondite essence of their own.

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

The Venus Flytrap: Laying It Out In Lavender

“When I am an old woman, I shall wear purple” goes the famous poem by Jenny Joseph. Well, Aishwarya Rai is just 42, old only by the punishing yardsticks of the entertainment industry. She looks fabulous, but wouldn’t be forgiven if she doesn’t, or if she looked beautiful and aging. On the red carpet at Cannes, she appeared whimsical, winking at the camera in a lavender lipstick like it was the most natural thing in the world, while the world itself looked on aghast. The often-forgotten title of that poem is “Warning”. In it, a woman trapped in a conformist lifestyle promises to misbehave in her elderly years, and wonders if she should start practicing; she begins with wearing purple.

Why is a woman putting on a cosmetic so temporary that she’ll only have to blow her nose once into a tissue to have most of it come off the subject of debate? “Debate” was a word actually used in headlines (why were headlines made because a woman wore a cosme… never mind). In one article, several inquiring ladies gave the shade a shot and found that that particular lipstick, by a brand that Rai is an ambassador of, does not retail in India. Their trip to two stores seemed to yield no equivalent, which led them to concoct the colour themselves through mixing white and purple eyeliners with a concealer base on their lips. They didn’t like the effect (their photos don’t have too many smiles, which may have made a difference).

Which brings us to this ridiculousness: how does white eyeliner exist when a lilac lipstick, which is stunning when offset by the dark skin of so many Indian people, can’t be readily found? For local manufacturers and franchisees, my sapodilla skin is probably the swarthiest tone they consider. My even more dark-skinned friends must either fork out several thousand rupees per product for elite brands like MAC or Inglot, or forego skin cosmetics altogether. Similarly for more deeply pigmented colours which will stand out on an array on eyelids and cheekbones and lips. This isn’t simply about whether people can afford it, or even a hyper-ethical question of whether any of us should wear makeup. Beauty standards are enforced by diminishing not just diversity, but self-esteem, as envisaged and enacted through self-presentation.

Here’s the thing: Rai may have made ill-advised fashion choices in the past but when it comes to this lipstick, my guess is it was neither faux pas nor advice. Some L’Oreal executive would have held out a palette of options and suggested a baby pink to go with the floral print on her dress or a bright scarlet to go with the blood-boiling rage against the system. Rai wore violet because she wanted to. Maybe her child liked it. Maybe she was making a subtle homage to the queer rights movement, whose emblematic hue is purple. I’d like to think that the Jenny Joseph poem was the most plausible reason. After decades of being micro-managed and body-shamed and made complicit in the way other women are manipulated and devalued – through a pastel smile, was she issuing a powerful warning?

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

The Venus Flytrap: She Of The Coal-Singed Soles And The Stillwater Ponds

In Wayanad some years ago, I found myself outside a temple compound in the forest, its doors closed for the malefic afternoon hours. It may have been lovely to enter the temple, but what I had come for was just beside it. A pond, its surface caparisoned by moss. Trees leaned toward it, cascading silent strings of leaves. Its water was perfectly still.

I sat under a tree and immersed in the quietude for several minutes. Was the sadness palpable in the place native, or had I carried it with me? The name of the pond was “Sita’s Tears”, and legend says that this was where Sita had wept before she re-entered the earth. Among the many Ramayanas, in one that culminates in Wayanad, it was in this forest that she lived the latter part of her life. The earth had cupped her tears and kept them, and they in turn had maintained a façade of serenity. While beneath that surface, a tempest of a thousand years teems.

As I sat beside Sita’s Tears, I recalled a dream I’d had some months earlier from which I had woken with great sadness. In it, I had visited a Sita temple near Nuwara Eliya, in Sri Lanka. This is where, in many tellings, Hanuman finds Sita, in the grove in which she tells him to take her jewels but not her. Lanka was destined to burn, for her beloved would only be suspicious to see her in the arms of another. Even if, as in Kamban’s verses, he lifts her not by limb or waist but by the earth beneath her body (for she herself, after all, is the earth). In Seetha Eliya, the earth is black, as if scorched by fire.

Some say she was born in Mithila, Nepal; others prefer the version in which she is a Lankan princess, daughter of Ravana, exiled upon water like Moses or Karna when a soothsayer reveals that she will be the cause of her father’s death.

I finally received an answer to a question I had posed sardonically: “I wonder when Sita Navami is?” It turns out that it is this Sunday, and is in fact observed annually on the 9th day after the new moon in the month of Baisakh – although clearly not with any major aplomb, anywhere. The only information I could find was painful. To celebrate Sita as an ideal wife is equivalent to celebrating her suffering. And to do so with words like ‘chastity’ and ‘sumangali’ are nothing but celebrations of the suppression and subjugation of women everywhere.

I had wanted to know if a Sita Navami existed because I had wondered if she had been forgotten; instead I found that she had only been misremembered.

But this I know to be true: we celebrate Sita most often when we don’t realise it. When we vocalise support for single mothers. When we stand up for those abandoned by their spouses. When we breathe quietly in nature and allow her alone be our witness.

I have sat beside the still water of Sita’s Tears. If it rippled at all, it was because of my own.

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

The Venus Flytrap: When You Burn A Bridge, But You’re Still On Fire

The forests are burning, again, and so are the bridges. In one of the most striking images that I‘ve seen, a trajectory of incandescence outlines the distant black hills against the night sky, while the reflection of the blaze dapples the Ganga waters. Visually hypnotic, but terrible both in cause and consequence. The burning has gone on for a long time.

Those bridges I spoke of are only metaphorical: one way to find sense and language for this much incineration.

How does one withdraw support from those who abuse it? Amputation is a question of the correct knife. Sometimes, a needle will do to loosen a knot. Sometimes, it takes the the heaviness of a guillotine. Most times, it requires pulling out the knife that was plunged into one’s back and using it to stake freedom.

You built a bridge so you could share the bounty of your own land. You built a bridge so you could live more of other places, other impressions. You built a bridge because there was someone on a further bank who seemed to need it badly, and you misunderstood those who paid no heed as cruel, not cautious. You built a bridge so you could stand at its centre and marvel at how you suspended everything – doubt and mistrust and past failure – to build it anyway, and here it stands. And still you arrive at the day when you find the balustrades breaking down, the traffic one-way, and silt  weakening the foundations you lay with your own hands. And so you set a torch to it, and as the first flicker kindles, the words in your mouth and your beaten, beating heart are I’m free, I’m free, I’m free.

What is not known about amputation, except by those who have successfully performed it, is this: you don’t cut anything of another person away. You only excise that which has become gangrenous within you because of your involvement with them.

I woke very early one morning this weekend with the awareness that I was carrying tight orbs of anger and unhappiness, forms of thwarted love that had outlived their circumstantial triggers. I was as surprised by them as I would have been to find mice in my mattress, and I responded in the same way. They had no place in my life, in my body, in my bed. The arsonists behind those conflagrations had long since left or been left, but this was what they had left behind.

Who set the forests on fire? Who taught you tears could douse them? I looked at those red-hot burdens and said: this is my work to do.

Boundaries are just as beautiful as bridges. They keep out those who don’t deserve your bounty, your benevolence. But as you draw the lines and keep vigil within them, know that everything that wound up on your riverbank still belongs to you. Some things you cannot transmute except by way of bonfire.

You’ve been an inferno for a long time, any way.

What rises from the ashes is aurelian, smoke-feathered, jewel-eyed. It takes flight by the light of broken bridges as they burn.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on May 5th. “The Venus Flytrap” appears on Thursdays in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: Beyoncé And The Badass Ancestral Self

This week, I mulled over a divination card I came across in an interview with the queer indigenous healer Lettie Laughter. It said: “Your future ancestral self is a badass magician of the heart who will never stop loving you.” The conflation of time in the line was what intrigued me. One becomes an ancestor regardless of whether one has progeny, just as one reaches for ancestors, blood-kin and guiding lights both, from the braided branches of the tree of life. One can go back in time to love one’s known younger self, to unsnag that self from something that doesn’t heal. But the idea of being healer-ancestor and unbegotten-beloved at once was so richly textured that I turned it over and over in my mind.

The following day, giving in to sheer curiousity (the kind where the analysis you’ve read is so powerful that you wonder if the real thing will hold water), I watched Beyoncé’s Lemonade. Here, too, what stood out for me was ancestry. The proverbial sins of the father are only set scenery. The real story is the suffering of the mothers. We mother ourselves – a line you can read as profane or as protective. In this rendering, Beyoncé counts among her mothers the young poet Warsan Shire and the late radical Malcolm X. There is plenty of amazing black feminist political and spiritualist writing already out there about how she consciously channels the goddesses Oshun and Erzulie Red-Eyes, among other mothers.

“Mother dearest, let me inherit the earth,” Beyoncé enunciates slowly, right before the work moves back into the theme of sexual humiliation in a shattering marriage.

I don’t think that speculating about Beyoncé’s marriage to Jay-Z is any of our business. An artist exposes her vulnerability not to have it dissected; her real life is not a circus act. Judging by the ecstatic reactions to it, Lemonade might be the kind of work that mirrors anything the viewer brings to it, which is why the infidelity and betrayal in it have been so resonant for so many.

Is the work personal? Who cares, when it is personal for so many. Truthfully, the spoken word and cinematography were more interesting to me than the music – one needs no embellishment for lines as stark as “[I] plugged my menses with pages from the holy book, but still inside me, coiled deep, was the need to know…” But Beyoncé’s willingness to be a conduit for collective pain, regardless of whether or not her own is a basis for that exploration, is what I admire.

I must not have brought a particularly wounded self of mine to my viewing of Lemonade. Because what I saw was the artist clearly cast in the mode of Lettie Laughter’s divination card: simultaneously archetypal and in need of healing. This was one way to be a badass ancestral self, for sure. Every creative day of my life, I write mainly so as to make amends for ancestral silencing, and mostly only to console myself. It was glorious to watch another artist do the same, to step into that liminal space and chant to her sistren.

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

The Venus Flytrap: Calling To A World That Isn’t Listening

Deeply disheartened, I stood before a lit lamp and tried to find a reason to raise my voice in a world made deaf by its own silences. A line flickered to mind, and I recognised it as the title of a book I’d wanted to read, but had never purchased. That line was: “finding beauty in a broken world”. The environmentalist Terry Tempest Williams wrote a collection of essays by that name, on seeking a way of being that integrates all the fragments shattered by human brutality. I yearned for the book suddenly. I have buried myself in language for as long as I can remember. It salves me. It puts me, too, back together.

I sought an excerpt online, the way another person might view a movie trailer. In the first page, Williams writes – “…I faced the ocean. ‘Give me one wild word’. It was all I asked of the sea.”

That was how I had felt, at my altar – and that page led me to this page you read now.

All libraries carry the memories of trees, and sometimes it is to the source that we must go. The summer streets are carpeted with the yellow flowers of rusty shield-bearer trees. I recall the closing lines of Adam Zagajewki’s poem: “Praise the mutilated world/ and the gray feather a thrush lost,/ and the gentle light that strays and vanishes/and returns.” This is what I try to do, in the evidence of the lines that precede them: “You’ve seen the refugees going nowhere,/ you’ve heard the executioners sing joyfully./ You should praise the mutilated world.”

As I write this, my voice hurts – both spiritually and physically. For the latter, I drink a kashayam, and for the former I seek the balsam of words. And as I do, I remember something: not too long ago, I was a part of a panel on women’s issues. After the event, one of the other participants asked me, “So, did you never fight with your parents as a teenager?” Of course I had, I said lightly. “Oh really? How is it fighting when you have a voice as soft as yours? Not possible.” The indignation I felt was at once blunt and sharp, like a pair of precise surgical scissors. But in the interest of politeness, I said nothing. I looked her in the eye and allowed a tactful bystander to laugh the situation off with a “that’s just her voice!” How little the person who had insulted me knew of war, I thought, to not be able to tell a fire from a blown fuse.

Tonight, through my bedroom window and yours, the first full moon of the Tamil year will blaze. Perhaps you’ll see it, awoken by mosquitoes or misery (or just the stealth of moonbrightness). And if you do, remind yourself. To sleep well is an act of self-care, and those of us accused of caring too much frequently forget to tender ourselves the same. A mercenary measures steps in blood, a soldier in miles, and a warrior in how gently one’s footfalls shape the earth. Were we only so gentle with ourselves, too.

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

The Venus Flytrap: What We Don’t Talk About When We Don’t Talk About Delta Meghwal

Delta Meghwal wanted to study. She was raped, murdered and towed away in a garbage tractor.

Delta was the first girl in her village (Trimohi, Rajasthan) to go to secondary school. Then she went on to Jain Adarsh Teacher Training Institute. She was Dalit. She was 17.

On the evening of March 28th, the hostel warden instructed her to clean the PT instructor’s room, where she was raped.

Returning to her room, injured and terrified, she called her father. The next morning, she was found dead in a tank. Police then took her body to the hospital in a municipal garbage tractor. The autopsy showed that there was no water in her lungs. She did not drown herself.

Pause. You didn’t know. Now – do you care?

Delta Meghwal was an artist. A painting she made of a camel in Class 4 was hung in Rajasthan CM Vasundhara Raje’s office. Is it still there – reproaching the politicians who haven’t spoken a word about her murder?

She is not the first woman – artist or otherwise – to meet a tragic end because her talent stood at odds with what was expected of her. I don’t see Buzzfeed articles, neatly packaging tragedy for public consumption, with images of her paintings. I don’t see a government agency being set up in her name to provide arts scholarships for underprivileged girls. When her devastated father tells a reporter, “I shouldn’t have educated her… maybe she’d still be alive”, all I see is the story of Delta’s murder being used to frighten disenfranchised parents into wanting less for their children.

Most of all, I don’t see your 140 characters of hashtagged outrage. And that is what makes me sickest of all.

When Jyoti Singh Pandey – valorised as Nirbhaya – was raped and murdered, the entire nation grieved publicly. We observed candlelight marches. We claimed her as sister and daughter. We demanded that laws be changed. If that solidarity is reserved only for those whose backgrounds don’t discomfit our smug lightweight activism, it is no solidarity at all. It is ugly hypocrisy. There is zero meaning to your still angrily shuddering at the words “Delhi gangrape” if you ignore Delta Meghwal today.

The mainstream media is silent. In Barmer, Pali, Jodhpur, Bangalore, Delhi and Bikaner, photos of small demonstrations show mostly men, protesting caste violence. Where are the women, the ones who cried for Nirbhaya?

Talking about Delta’s death means talking about caste, and our complicity when we ignore aspects of any power system that serve us, but not others. It means being uncomfortable.

Now, when I hear the words “the Delhi gangrape”, I want to correct the grammar. That was a gangrape that took place in Delhi in December of 2012: in that same month, in that same city, there were others, mostly with fewer perpetrators involved.

That year, 24,923 rapes were reported in India (more – more than we know or want to imagine – were not). 98% of those perpetrators were known to the victim. We chose to focus on one case in the 2%, conveniently othering the rapists on the basis of class.

What about Delta Meghwal – has she been othered too?

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

The Venus Flytrap: On The Sexism Of The Iconic Marriage Proposal

Borrowed largely from Hollywood, thoroughly supported by the wedding industry complex, and encouraged by the pressure and appeal of social media (“She said yes!”), the proposal has gained popularity as a nuptial rite of its own. Both in love marriages and modern arranged marriages with their tinny gloss of long engagements and staged meet-cutes, this gesture – often described as romantic – signifies a certain threshold in a relationship. Given the highly public nature of most marriage rituals, that a private novelty has gradually come to be included among Indian customs is a nice thing. Only, as we move away – as we must, if we believe in a better world – from traditional circumscriptions on marriage, it’s worth thinking about which notions of romance are worth preserving and appropriating.

The thing about the iconic wedding proposal – a ring, a bended knee, four scripted words – is that it is almost without exception, in heteroromantic contexts, performed by the man.

This would be okay if a proposal was just a loving gesture, and not a watershed moment which advances the status of a romantic relationship. Neither is it a request, because what comes after the famed question is an equally scripted reaction: surprise, excitement, and invariably, acceptance. The words “will you marry me?” sound like they are asking for permission, but in practice they are giving it. The surprise element is a decoy, unless the supplicant is truly clueless as to what the response will be (in which case, I hope there’s a sympathetic refund available for that bling). In the version of the script that we have all subconsciously downloaded, the woman has waited for it, and the man has decided on its timing. It was her waiting that was the true petition; he simply offers his agreement through the enactment of asking.

Marriage is patriarchal – but surely love is not so pathetic?

Sometimes a woman must say no, because that is her true answer. Sometimes a woman must pose the question herself, because she must pursue what she desires, and she need not wait for anyone’s validation of the same.

But more than either of those subversions, I like the idea of the decision to marry being a matter of consultation, a series of increasingly confident discussions. I fail to understand how one person asking a life-altering question and the other shifting quickly from astonishment to certainty inspires any trust in that couple’s ability to articulate, negotiate, and make choices together.

We haven’t evolved marriage out of our worldviews yet, and perhaps we don’t need to. But we do need to keep evolving its workings, questioning it as an institution and contextualising it in ways that emphasise individual wholeness and challenge structural inequalities, as expressed in misogyny, casteism, colourism, homophobia and other chauvinisms.

Let’s begin by falling in love. Let’s begin by being honest. Let’s do boring things like talking about whether or not to get married and radical things like changing the problematic verses and actions in the ceremonies. Indian marriage has so far been about social legitimacy, not about togetherness. Let’s begin by rewriting that script. Or better yet, let’s begin with no script at all.

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

The Venus Flytrap: It Takes A Long Time To Grow An Old Friend

Once upon a time, I was in a little coterie with B and C (let’s call me A, then). There was also D, but D – well – was eventually a complete D to all of us, if you know what I mean. I became, separately, very close to both B and C. Adult life meant we all saw less of one another than we had when we first met. But I stayed in regular contact with them both, and they would each ask me about the other. “I miss B,” C would emoji me now and then, and because I missed B too I’d concur. But I didn’t know that where I only meant I would like to see B more frequently, C meant something else altogether.

No, this isn’t a case of B – C = exam (love)failure. That’s a topic for another set of initial-based pseudonyms! So one weekend, I suggested something logical. Given that B and I meet often, and C and I meet often, why didn’t we all just meet together?

Except that the day came and I flaked out. Sunday-slumped, I told B I wasn’t going to make it. I didn’t bother to tell C, thinking that they’d enjoy being together after such a long time and my absence might help them reconnect. But when C asked me where I was and I flippantly said, “oh yeah, didn’t B tell you I’m not coming?” I wasn’t prepared for the earful I received.

“I thought you’d like hanging out, considering how you’re always telling me you miss B,” I defended myself. “I had no idea that some other dynamic existed.”

I insisted that they meet, and C reported back to me. It turned out that B + C – A equalled shallow conversation, inability to share, and a total lack of meaningful exchange. “We talked about work,” shrugged C. “Office stuff.”

“Why didn’t you talk about the H situation or the O revelation or the X confession?”

“You weren’t there, na,” came the reply. “So how?”

How had I wound up being the proxy through whom two good friends conducted a non-friendship with one another? One devoid of acrimony or issues, but equally devoid of value?

In adult life, we often create ties knowing that they are water-soluble. Part of this no doubt comes from the heartbreak of watching seemingly close friendships dissolve like confectionery in the palm. But another part comes from sheer self-involvement, which can reflect as much in busyness as in laziness.

Not every relationship will weather everything. But those that do have one thing in common: investment. This is why I have what I have, separately, with B and C. In our respective friendships, we chose and keep choosing to put in the work of love.

It takes a long time to grow an old friend. Fleeting connections may be water-soluble, but friendships are like plants. They need to be watered. They thrive on things like dialogue, time, vulnerability, support, laughter and secrets. They cannot rest on proxies like alcohol, location, alumni reunions, or even a common companion. One doesn’t need a garden, just a windowsill of soothing, well-rooted green.

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