Tag Archives: the venus flytrap

The Venus Flytrap: Decolonising Language

In the 19th century, a woman named Uvavnuk was struck by a meteor, lost consciousness after experiencing a vision of the bear-human spirit of the meteor, and came to with a song on her lips that has fascinated scholars of spiritual experience ever since. The language she sang, spoke and lived in (we inhabit languages, as they inhabit us) was Inuktitut. The legend about her mystical encounter is longer than her song; Europeans collecting what they called folklore documented and translated both. Until colonial contact, the Inuit languages were oral, and at least nine scripts were developed across the vastness of Canada for functional purposes after this contact began. Now, a new script that will consolidate and replace the others has been formally accepted. Called Inuit Qaliujaaqpait, it uses the 26 Roman alphabets. Natan Obed, president of the cultural non-profit Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, was quoted as saying, “It’s the first time we’re exercising our own self-determination to implement our own writing system.”

Several Canadian press outlets carried the same story, verbatim, and I was intrigued by one particular line. Devoid of quotation marks, the exact words – “Inuit have decolonised the alphabet” – are not attributed to Obed, but are implied as being the summary of his opinions. The term used recalls the 1986 manifesto Decolonising The Mind by the Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, in which he declared that with that text he was bidding a final farewell to writing in English, having already ceased to produce creative (as opposed to non-fiction) work in that language some years prior. His political assertion was instrumental in expanding the body of work originally created in African languages, including Gikuyu and Kiswahili.

Ngũgĩ wrote of how schoolchildren were faced with two Gikuyu orthographies – rival ones, developed by different missionaries. Imagine having nine, as Inuit peoples do. The Gikuyu scripts were eventually integrated, and like Inuit Qaliujaaqpait, shares the alphabet with English (without certain letters). The use of the coloniser’s alphabet, while rejecting the coloniser’s language, is a striking way of accepting history but charting the future anew. There are others: they may require learning or eliminating, but always imagining.

“Decolonising” is a buzzword now, lending itself enjoyably to hashtags and T-shirts. Someone gave me a set of stickers recently which say “Decolonise this place!”. I accepted them with glee, but realised they’d be best used in an act of protest vandalism. I’m not opposed to such gestures, but what would their context be? If I stuck them on, say, railway signage, hostel gates or temple undials without deconstructing that big word, would their intent still be conveyed? Or would nothing happen but self-congratulatory wokeness? I think I’ll pass them along, to inspire someone else. Perhaps they’ll know how to incorporate them into their activism meaningfully, while I’m unable to.

The same 26 letters can be assembled in a hundred million ways, after all. And the same words have different effects, depending on the recipient as much as the presenter. I believe we can have the courage to request translation, and to love without guilt the complicated privilege of many tongues, whether sinuous or rusty. Those are powerful decolonisations too.

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

The Venus Flytrap: The 37% Rule

Since I’m house-hunting yet again, a friend who has a head for these things told me about the 37% rule. She said that if I fixed the mindset that I would only check out 100 flats, right around the 37th one was when I would say “Yes”. Or, more honestly, “Okay”. Statistically, that’s when people cave and decide the search is over. As I have no such mathematical sense at all, my only immediate deduction was “Oh god, I have to see 37 flats?!” The scary part was whether it’s even possible to find 37 landlords in this city who don’t mind single women, non-vegetarians and people who refuse to live in spaces painted in lurid “vaastu colours”. 37 chill, tasteful landlords? May their numbers flourish, whether I can keep count or not.

My friend went on to say something that I couldn’t shrug off, however: the 37% rule also works in romantic relationships. If one decides when they start dating that they will see ten people, the third or fourth suitor will be the one they decide to settle down with. I could see how this might apply to someone with a goalpost in mind. For instance, someone entering the arranged marriage market could, based on hearsay and practicality, decide that they’d choose or stop trying after ten birth chart appraisals. They’d arrive at their tipping point motivated by the need to close the deal.

Except, those kinds of numbers had long vanished into the distant past for both my friend and I, and if someone had told us right at the start that we needed to set a target, we would have said – with all our hearts – just one, please.

The 37% rule, despite being percentage-based, does also yield a dramatic number. The age of 26 is the optimal age to marry, according to this rule. As a Business Insider article put it: “[It’s] the point at which we can stop looking and start taking those big leaps of faith.” I had to concede that I’d already known this about myself: had the opportunity been available to me at 26, that’s absolutely when I would have entered my (first, anyway) marriage. How had this seemingly arbitrary theory so accurately deduced when I’d been most earnest, most in alignment, most adequately-experienced-but-not-yet-cynical and most set to benefit? If it was true for me, it was surely true for many.

I did take a leap of faith at that age, on the smouldering comet-tail of two messily overlapping relationships. I gave everything I had to a creative project instead, lost myself somewhere in the plummet, and surfaced a few years later strong and with something substantial to show. Some of my friends who married at the time experienced parallel trajectories of passion-collapse-growth, and after vastly different journeys we now find ourselves back on similar quests. For partners, for places to live, for something to call home. No equation is going to tell us when, or where or how. But at least we recognise now who needs to be #1 – after all this time, its ourselves we must trust again to be enough to come home to.

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

The Venus Flytrap: Token Seats At Token Tables

Her name is Chanel Miller, and she wants everyone to know it. She has revealed it in conjunction with the release of a memoir; her 2015 assault at Stanford University became a notorious case in which everyone from the media to the legal system tried to absolve her attacker. A preview of the book reveals that the university tried to coax her into creating a statement of forgiveness on a plaque for the memorial garden they instated at the site of the crime. She refused.

Somewhat relatedly, the author Kamila Shamsie was stripped of her Nellie Sachs Prize due to her support of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel’s human rights violations. Ironically, the German award is given for “outstanding literary contributions to the promotion of understanding between peoples”, something reflected in Shamsie’s pro-Palestine activism. There are plenty of such honours, which appear to encourage anti-establishment thought, but only if it falls within certain parameters.

It’s profoundly frustrating when the work one does is co-opted by those it actually challenges. You can see this frustration all over Greta Thurnberg’s face in her widely-publicised speech at the UN. Right at the start, someone in the audience actually laughs, revealing how little seriousness the environmental activist is really given. Every person who cheers on this new hero but refuses to take personal steps to lessen their effect on climate change is letting her down. Our retweets don’t mean a thing if that plastic cup still goes into a landfill.

Powerful people and institutions allow interlopers in, indulge them, lionise and most crucially distract them, and continue to not incorporate the messages they carry. They are given a seat at the table as a means of placation, and a way to convince them that their work is finished or can be redirected. The indulgence also has its limits. As long as Thurnberg doesn’t do anything that crosses some major player’s invisible line, she will be entertained – and used as entertainment. If you’ve ever found yourself at a gathering and had the distinct feeling that you were on display, with the awareness sinking in that you’d be the topic of conversation once you left the table, you get the picture. Depedestalisation was recently discussed in this column, and some of the same ideas apply.

Can we say No to having that seat at the table at all? It’s a brave but not always viable choice. The choice between two outcomes – utilising the platform as a critical space, or making a statement by withdrawing – is not an obvious one. The latter can sometimes do little more than boost one’s own street cred, while the uncomfortable on-stage squirming of the former can add dimension to an event or the ensuing discourse. In some cases, agreeing to participate is to be cahoots with the problem, whereas in others, the participation brings challenge or at least nuance. But whether we fight for that seat, take it, or reject it, we have to treat the experience as window shopping. It isn’t the destination. We just need to know what’s available before we set about building a bigger, more honest, more effective table.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on September 26th 2019. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: When Misogynists Fantasise About Feminist Revenge

Is it alright to comment on something one has not seen? It’s a risky choice in this era of fake news, when we are all in danger of forming opinions not only borne of ignorance but from actively being manipulated. When I read that a sequence from a TV serial – described as being horrifying and which had since received a slap on the wrist from a regulatory body – was still available for viewing online, I toyed momentarily with whether I should watch it in the interest of journalistic duty. Then I chose not to. Surely, when it comes to depictions of gratuitous violence or injustice, the answer to that question can sometimes be Yes.

Instead, I read news about that scene, from the TV serial Kalyana Veedu. The violence described was both physical and verbal: a gangrape, ratified by dialogue that’s clearly an anti-woman fantasy. In it, a woman plots against another woman, hires a group of men to enact her instructions, and is then punished by them in exactly the same way. A further revenge sequence, involving fire and male genitalia, is something Freud (or better yet, Camille Paglia) would probably have analysed as the projection of male envy. A TV serial has more than one mind behind it. Just the thought of the kind of discussions that happened behind-the-scenes is hair-raising. I’ve been in enough work meetings with men who hallucinate that they are creative and cutting-edge to know that there was almost definitely someone there who imagined that castration by fire is what feminists want.

The Broadcasting Content Complaint Council, responding to viewers’ dismay about these sequences, fined the TV channel what seems to be a token sum, but more meaningfully has ordered a week-long apology to be played before every episode of the same serial.

To take umbrage against such content is straightforward. This is a good thing, to have internalised healthy protest so deeply, but the hope is that by now our sociocultural politics have evolved so that calling out such objectionable material isn’t enough. The Me Too movement worldwide, and the revelations it has provided into the way workplaces have functioned for so long, has made it crucial for us to no longer stop at disgust and anger but to delve into how such contraventions of integrity happen, and how they can be prevented.

The TV channel that aired this vicious sequence claims that the TV serial has family-oriented values. Perhaps our next line of enquiry should begin there. Among the public who made the complaints, was it only the visual violence that was the problem or the logic behind it as well? In other words – were they upset because rape is perceived to be a violation of chastity (a completely oppressive concept) and a taboo topic, or because rape is wrong, full stop? There are some interesting dinner table conversations ahead, if we choose to take this incident as not just a teachable, but an eminently learnable-from, moment. Those who wrote those scenes, produced them and were perplexed by the reaction to them didn’t conjure those ideas out of nowhere. Like I said – they’re not really that creative…

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on September 19th 2019. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: The Catharsis of Tears

Even those who barely followed the Chandrayaan-2 lunar exploration mission knew how ISRO’s Dr. K. Sivan broke down and wept when they lost contact with the Vikram Lander last week. This week also saw two male sportspersons weep openly on camera. Yao Ming cried, taking responsibility for China’s defeat at the Basketball World Cup. Rafael Nadal sobbed elatedly after triumphing at the US Open Tennis Championships. Public attention during such personal moments is not always tasteful, yet these events spur discussion on a strangely divisive topic: crying openly. Many still find displays of emotion weak and unprofessional. Especially in men.

Of course, some will say that as a feminist I am predisposed to enjoying men’s tears (delicious, especially with a citric twist of bitterness – haha). Funnily, this is almost true. It’s not enjoyment, per se, but an appreciation for when someone has been willing to break through their own conditioning and be vulnerable and honest in a given moment. When we understand patriarchy to be a structural problem that oppresses people of all genders, we see what toxic masculinity does. The simplest manifestation of it is that boys and men are rarely permitted the catharsis of tears.

While women are undermined as being hypersensitive by nature, crying in professional situations is viewed on similar terms. When I was growing up, I watched and internalised a clip of Oprah Winfrey (or if my memory fails me, another influential woman) saying that she would never, ever cry in front of anyone in a workplace. I started working in my mid-teens, and learned quickly how to display anger professionally but to always cloak pain until I was in a more private space. I believe this to be true for many women who work outside the home. We steel ourselves.

One of the experiences that made me begin to unlearn this conditioning was being at a presentation several years ago in which a young woman broke down midway, due to criticism. I was powerless in that situation, but neither did I feel outraged on her behalf, because she was doing something that I could not relate to. I was aware that of the two senior men there, one enjoyed demoralising her, while the other saw it as a rite of passage that would instigate better performances. In the time I continued to work there, I saw many women crying in the same seat. I knew it was why they kept leaving, while I stayed, eroding a little more each year with all the humiliation I swallowed and expressed only as anger. I often found a way to tell them that they deserved better; but it was almost too long before I gave myself the same permission.

Tears have a natural place in every aspect of life – love, work, and even leisure (a great book, a thrilling game). They not only provide release, but also help us see the truth of our own emotions. An uncontrolled spate of crying tells us what we need to know, what matters to us, and what we should do next. Without that heartfelt expression, we sometimes cannot gain the momentum for the following step.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on September 12th 2019. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: Enough of Enid Blyton

The UK’s Royal Mint has heeded the caution of its advisory committee and decided against issuing a commemorative coin to coincide with the 50th death anniversary of Enid Blyton, whose books have been a part of the childhoods of several generations of readers. The caution was because a backlash was feared; it’s difficult to miss the explicit racism (some critics allege sexism and homophobia too) in those books.

Those who think the Royal Mint’s decision was excessive argue that social norms keep changing, and that it isn’t fair to judge the people of the past by what is politically correct in the present. This would be a reasonable argument, since dead people don’t have the benefit of learning and evolving their viewpoints as the living do, except that Blyton was criticised in her own time for work which was already perceived as racist, even receiving a publisher rejection for a book long after she had established her career. What’s more evident here is not Blyton’s bigotry, which may or may not have been on par with her surroundings, but the bigotry of her defenders today, who are willing to overlook the damage that honouring a prejudiced person and their work can have.

Blyton died in 1968, and as far as I’m aware is not an author whose work has been kept in circulation through its inclusion in academic syllabi. Her books continue to be purchased by parents and libraries, with over 2 million copies reportedly sold in the last 5 years. This is not in itself a problem; no one with a respect for literature knocks a reading habit, wherever it springs from. But what is worrying is the context. A 2017 study by the Arts Council England discovered that just 1% of all children’s books published in the UK that year featured a main character of a minority ethnicity, despite nearly 33% of schoolchildren being from non-white backgrounds. When the literature being produced does not sufficiently reflect modern society, the continuing popularity of older work with problematic values is a matter of concern.

As it happens, assuming the ACE statistic could have applied to the year prior too, one of my own books – released in the UK in 2016 by Lantana Publishing, which was founded to produce culturally diverse children’s books – would have counted. When it comes to situations like this, one longs to not be among the exception. But when that book, The Ammuchi Puchi, was republished in India last year, it entered a vibrant, growing world of incredibly exciting work for all ages which normalises and celebrates darker skin tones, local names and environments, splashes of mother-tongues, folklore, indigenous artforms, progressive viewpoints, unusual storylines and more. Contemporary, original children’s literature is thriving here.

Any book-buying parent or educational facilitator in India who is still exclusively reaching for Enid Blytons or even Amar Chitra Kathas (with their colourist portrayals, among other uncomfortable things) out of sentimentality is depriving the reading child of a treasure trove. Give them your old favourites too; but know that they will be far more enriched by newer books, the kind we didn’t have when we were growing up.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on September 5th 2019. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: Solastalgia

The omens on the path to hell appear to be beautiful. Last week, the sea waves swelled with light, transformed the shoreline into something out of a dream. I was too far from the coast and had too much lonesomeness in my bones – lonesomeness is the anti-venom, I am finding as the years pass, of adventure – to go and see them for myself. I envied those who did that night, envied them more than only the sight of it. Envied whatever it was – ease of companionship or with isolation, proximity, some uncomplicated impulse – that let them have it while I seethed, my eyes and feet dry while longing burned in me.

I had seen bioluminescence in sand once, when a zoologist showed it to me by digging his fingers close to the shoreline, conjuring a memory of how he had once brushed some off a nesting Olive Ridley turtle and found that it shimmered. “Sea creature on sea creature,” he had said. Magical. I hadn’t known at the time that bioluminescence in large quantities is dangerous, a sign of the apocalypse. I had known by the time the shore lit up, but the truth is that my sense of marvel would have been no less pure had I been in Thiruvanmiyur that night. “We used to see it in the water at Batu Ferringhi sometimes,” my sister told me, reaching almost twenty-five years into our childhoods. I had no memory of this, and rued this too. Awareness changes nothing of the ache of being drawn to a thing knowing it’s as good as a drowning.

Rivers covered in pretty water hyacinths indicate heavy metal poisoning, and clog the flow. Scenic casuarina and aromatic eucalyptus trees drain the soil, selfishly hoarding nutrients while other flora wilt. Botanists in the UK recently announced that cycads, palm-like plants which thrive in heavy CO2, have made a comeback. A male cone, followed by a female cone, have appeared, making reproduction possible. They were common 280 million years ago when Earth had more carbon dioxide naturally. Like the bioluminescence that embroidered Chennai’s waves, all these things appear to be more beautiful and praiseworthy than they actually are.

Solastalgia is the word for emotional and mental distress over climate change. It could replace “sapiosexual” in dating app bios. There’s also a nihilistic edge to it, something that suggests you’re willing to be spontaneous with whatever time’s left. To be solastalgic says, “Kiss me before my lungs collapse”.

It’s terrible to find beauty in such devastation, isn’t it? I’m asking because I’m not sure. Studies show that the carbon footprints of tourists account for almost 10% of carbon emissions. Wanderlust is bringing the end of humanity closer, but we can’t seem to stop wanting. Rainforests burn and glaciers dissolve, and still there is this hunger – to see it all, to feel it all, even if it means we are going to be the full stop after a very long, very irresponsible sentence. I’m telling you: I’d have gone to the seaside that night and been solastalgic, but there would have been goosebumps on my skin from something other than the salt-tongued wind.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on August 29th 2019. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: Doting On, Then Dethroning

The social media world (which is a world, but not the world) recently officiated the dethroning of a celebrity who had made social justice a part of her branding. UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador and actor Priyanka Chopra was unceremoniously “cancelled” when comments she made after being called a hypocrite by an audience member at an event went viral. Chopra had expressed pro-military views, which she did not recant or explain. She was no doubt caught off-guard when asked to comment on global politics at a beauty conference, but her response was weak for someone who had been associated with activist causes for almost a decade.

But Chopra’s recent comments were consistent with her prior choices and actions. Consider her track record – promoting fairness creams, making anti-black statements both on film and to the press, slut-shaming women in a commercial for a dating app she invested in, posing on a magazine cover with an anti-refugee message on her clothing, and so on. The real question is: how can anyone be disappointed?

There are so many songs with lyrics that are variations of the idea that people will build you up just to tear you down for a reason. The backlash came largely from the same people who had pedestalised Chopra.

Could it be that the nature of the hivemind – which is ultimately conformist because a notion loses its edginess the moment it gains traction – continuously demands sacrificial lambs? It just so happened to be Chopra’s turn. If you noticed, a fresh pedestal rose simultaneously, extolling Ayesha Malik (who had called Chopra out). If Malik chooses to remain visible and outspoken, she will eventually be dethroned herself. There’s no such thing as an #unproblematicfave.

As I watched the angry posts against Chopra roll in, I found myself fighting the urge to join in more. I’d already said my two-paisa, wondering how her dubious choices had been acceptable up to that point. I’d never been a fan, although I’d really liked when she spoke about finding love as an ambitious woman. I didn’t have anything to add. So why did my fingertips itch? Holding back, I understood that all of us online that day were being provoked into expression, fueling one another. It’s a scenario that repeats itself, sometimes several times a week. Chopra fumbled when asked for her opinion in an unexpected context; meanwhile, we the online citizenry have made it our second nature to form and share opinions even when none are asked for.

The Greek god Cronus ate his children because he feared being overthrown by them. What happens here seems to be a kind of reversal, in which the devout devour their gods. They replace them with new ones, then repeat the ritual.

To install someone on a pedestal is to give our power away. When they are knocked down, its our own power they lose. Imagine what we could do if we fostered things that matter, things we didn’t feel like breaking because somewhere deep down, we are afraid of what we are capable of achieving ourselves. It’s not only the power we misattribute, but the disappointment when it appears to be misused too.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on August 22nd 2019. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: The Victors & The Vanquished

Recently, I found myself in a long, fascinatingly civil conversation with a person who said he was engaged in bringing forgotten narratives into mainstream awareness and discourse, which is exactly how I would describe my own work as a writer. However, it was clear that our intentions were diametrically opposed: his interest came from the desire to celebrate and amplify stories of past glory, while mine is about challenging glorification and complicating established storylines through a multiplicity of perspectives. As we spoke, I was intrigued by how we used the same vocabulary towards completely different purposes. We both maintained a pretence of open-endedness. I saw how easy it is to concur that history is written by the victors, while thinking of entirely different sets as the vanquished.

It was clear we knew this mutual respect for the sparring partner would dissolve if we came to subjects of real stakes. As long as we spoke only about the very distant, we could differ pleasantly. For example, we agreed that Rani Padmini was probably fictional, a character from a medieval poem, although the wartime practice of jauhar that inspired her tale was probably real. He felt the symbolic figurehead was meaningful as a representative of actual events which he saw as heroic. My view was that this symbolism lends itself to dangerous uses, and flattens the motivations of individuals involved.

I had brought up the topic because what was really on my mind was how the bodies and minds of women are sites on which battles are inscribed, both viscerally and theoretically. I see a similarity in the unrecorded thoughts of those self-immolating women and silenced voices everywhere, now and long ago. In the writing of history, the fact of experience rests under layers of observation, interpretation, erasure and appropriation. In Behold, I Shine: Narratives of Kashmir’s Women and Children by Freny Manecksha, the author writes of how she was spurred into embarking on her book because of two incongruent accounts she encountered about the death of one woman: “I will never know who the real Haneefa was or why she was on the streets. Was she indeed a protestor… or was she a [single] mother whose love for her daughter made her break curfew orders and seek medical help?”

 One of the ways that the ongoing situation in Kashmir is being celebrated is through blithely misogynistic statements about how Indian men can now lay claim to “fair Kashmiri girls”. Women are being spoken about as chattel, in the same breath as the purchase and settling of their lands. What do they think of all this? Due to a communication blockade, even those without harmful intentions can only imagine on their behalf. Hopefully, some day soon we will know, and listen to, what they are really feeling as these events unfold. But it’s likely that centuries from now, people will discuss a film character, a Kashmiri woman who was rumoured to be based on a true story, and even deified. They’ll use her legend as a way to tiptoe around pressing realities as they sip tea from some contested territory, and agree to disagree. Politely, and pointlessly.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on August 19th 2019. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: Tacking The Tsundoku Pile

Between the beginning of May and the end of July, I finished reading 37 books. These comprised of: 18 novels, 3 graphic novels, 5 books of poetry, 3 short story collections, 4 picture-books for all ages, and 4 works of non-fiction.

I hadn’t been held hostage in a library. I hadn’t become unemployed; in fact, my overall workload had increased during this period. I hadn’t had a windfall and splurged it; with few exceptions, most of the books were from my splendid tsundoku collection (the Japanese term for purchasing books and not reading them, allowing the to-be-read pile to become a heap, then several).

The having of books – or if one cannot own them, the solace of wandering the stacks at a library or a good bookstore – is one kind of pleasure and self-care activity. Reading them is a completely separate kind. My book binge was deliberate. It was to limit my social media usage, both so I would spend my time better and because I was increasingly noticing how it drained more than just my phone battery. Studies show how social media usage can negatively affect mental health, as well as physical components like sleep, something most users know from experience.

Many wonder how to rekindle (pun intended) their earlier interest in reading. Innumerable suggestions exist: take public transport and read on your commute, carry literature at all times so you can read during waiting periods through the day, commit to an hour before bedtime or wake earlier and do it before even brushing your teeth. Notice how every one of these suggestions ultimately requires the same thing: a shift in unrelated habits. The thing you need to tweak to bring reading back doesn’t have to do with books at all. Rather than deactivate my apps, I simply decided to do more of something else, and this made me see how little I actually need them.

These days, I work at a desk beside a well-earned wall of books, and I hope I’ll always remember being giddy with joy and surprise on the night I finally set it all up, when it was like I was staring at my childhood ambitions come true. “Now I am a Lady of Letters,” I thought, grandly. “An L. O. L.”

And that’s exactly why I plan to read fewer books this month. The downside to reading so voraciously was that I’d left myself little time to write. After three months of gobbling through pages like a silverfish, I confronted the fact that my book binge was also an exercise in procrastination.

Still, I understood this only through the reset I experienced thanks to it. I had gained greater clarity on my goals, and become more mindful about how I utilise or fritter my time. I didn’t have as many low moods. My sense of self was richer, less reactive to the vagaries of the fickle hive mind. Not least, I experienced the sheer pleasure that comes from immersion, when you don’t shift your attention just because of one slow-moving passage. Ultimately, I found that the many worlds of fiction held far less artifice than the online world.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on August 8th 2019. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: The Selves Others Remember

A long time ago, a woman who worked with two children whom we both loved told me how much she dreaded the end of her tenure as their caregiver, even though that end was far away. I had thought my own claim to those children was stronger, bonded by blood. I empathised, but did not imagine that the loss she feared would soon be mine. It was only a short while afterwards when those bonds became collateral damage in an ongoing conflict between grown-ups. I was a young adult then. Enough years have passed now that when I recently met one of those children, he was already the age I’d been when we had loved and known each other best.

His childhood self is vivid in my memory in ways that have faded in his; I hold dear versions of him that he can’t remember. And among many younger selves of mine who have emerged in reflections and revelations lately, some painful but all healing, is the young woman he knew when he was that child. Do these selves of ours exist not only as I remember them, but also because I remember them?

Is there a way to speak of a separation to someone who does not recall or perhaps even know that it happened, and is it not unfair to burden them with the choices other people made? I treaded carefully around the tender edges of my sadness, still treating him as a young one to be protected. I had prepared myself for the possibility that despite not quite remembering me, somewhere deep in him would be a small scar of perceived abandonment or betrayal, which would affect his present response to me.

Meeting him again, anew, I noticed how in some moments, he moved like he had when he was a child, belly first, shoulders swaying. I could see no jagged edges anywhere; I could almost trace him through that decade of distance as if I’d always watched him from afar (I had not). He had none of the swagger and bristle of his peers. He was thoughtful, a listener. Pride is a peculiar emotion, an appropriation of another’s effort, but I knew the field of study he’d chosen owed something to me, and I wanted but could not share my recollection of when he first turned towards it. It fell into that heart-shaped box of anecdotes either too precious or potentially embarrassing to share in that limited, not private space. One day, I would like to give him that memory, and with it the assurance that he has always been who he aspires to become.

Perhaps he does have that small scar somewhere, from our separation, but he also has the imprints of having been loved by me, and having been taught by me.

Finally, I could no longer not ask, plainly – “Do you remember me?” “Of course,” he said, but I did not push further.

I cannot say with certainty if our unremembered selves exist or cease to, but I know that love travels a long way, a vessel that vanishes over the horizon but journeys onwards beyond our sight.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on August 1st 2019. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: Fig Tree Tales

Some things call to you, and other things call to many, but not you. Firmly in the latter category for me is the excitement around the ascension of the statue of Athi Varadar of Kanchipuram. Except for one precious detail: the statue, immersed in a water tank and displayed for public worship only once every forty years, is made of the wood of the athimaram, the ficus racemosa. This tree is both the mythical udumbara of the Pali texts, and the humble cluster fig (I believe we mostly eat the ficus carica, the common fig).

The many species of the fig tree have a cherished place in the stories of myriad traditions. The wood in which this avatar of Vishnu takes embodiment is connected to the sacred Bodhi beneath which Siddhartha Gautama attained enlightenment, the heart-shaped leaf of the pipal through which the Kutia Kondh goddess Nirantali created the first human tongue, the wild fig tree in whose roots was found the cradle containing the wolf-suckled babies Romulus and Remus (one of whom, having killed his brother, would establish Rome), the sycamore fig which was the abode of the Egyptian goddess Hathor, and numerous ‘world trees’ across cultures. The banyan too, that vast and intricately thriving repository of mystery and comfort, is a kind of ficus. Fig trees are special – givers of shade, stories, statues and, not least, sweetness.

Having tasted the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge, Adam and Eve sewed fig leaves into girdles to cover their bodies – the first undergarments (the Persian god Mithra too dressed himself with them). This Biblical parable gave rise to the literal use of the fig leaf motif in plaster casts commissioned by some museums to hide the genitals of sculptures when dignitaries visited, such as when Queen Victoria viewed a replica of Michelangelo’s David in London. Certain Popes also had fig leaf coverings made for works in the Vatican. Coincidentally, or not, the Greek god of debauchery, Dionysus, was also associated with fig trees, and one of his myths involves him making a phallus of fig wood for a secret rite.

It wasn’t until this contemplation that I realised why there’s something about the fig fruit that has always confused and seduced me. It’s because it plays a trick on the eye: green-skinned in the hue of a guava or pear, yet tender-fleshed in a way neither of those fruits are. I’m surprised every time by the lusciousness that’s inside that lacklustre rind. Perhaps this was that forbidden fruit, ripe with revelation.

Who knows who or what will still be standing in another forty years, in time for Athi Varadar’s next scheduled rise from his silver-casketed immersion. But fig trees have long lifespans – the fruit-bearing common ones can live up to two centuries, and folklore contends that banyans survive to a venerable ancientness. The elation around the idol’s current advent will lead to at least one lasting good: the Kanchipuram administration has committed to planting 40,000 fig saplings across the district in honour of the occasion. May those trees live to watch many tales, and keep safe many tellings under the aegis of their canopies.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on July 25th 2019. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.

The Venus Flytrap: The Meaning of “Life”

Among the enshrined principles of the United Nations Population Fund is the concept that “Human rights are universal and inalienable; indivisible; interdependent and interrelated.” Among these, the belief in the inalienability of a right – in other words, the certainty that it cannot be taken away or given up – gives those who possess it a sense of resting easy. Something hard-won (even if also intrinsic) should be permanent, after all. But once in a while, an enquiring vigilance provides necessary maintenance of the right in question. When I came across news that India’s Supreme Court had admitted a petition to “decriminalise abortion”, I wondered what on earth they were talking about. It turns out that what is up for legal appraisal is the right to terminate a foetus beyond 20 weeks, which has so far been permitted only in case of abnormality or a danger to the mother’s life.

In a beautiful exposition, the petition asks about what the meaning of the word “life” in this context can be – whether it can go beyond physical survival to be “liberally construed so as to comprehend not only physical existence but also quality of life as is understood in its richness and fullness consistent with human dignity?”. Should this petition work, it may help to affirm a more progressive way of looking at the issue of abortion in India, expanding technical legality to make room for rights, freedoms and choices.

Why is (some) abortion here legal to begin with? It’s a let down to consider that this fundamental human right may be available not for sound ethical reasons, but due to an underside of female foeticide and even eugenics. As some experts like climate change specialist Fred Peace say, the use of the word “overpopulation” can be racist – for example, where the reputed Smithsonian Magazine described Mumbai’s Dharavi as “a vision of urban hell”, he saw it as thriving. When mass sterilisation and other draconian measures can’t apply, supremacists can still rely on the idea that people themselves (particularly the poverty-stricken) will choose termination. Every gynaecologist’s office in the country has a poster about not disclosing sex for a reason. Western conservatives’ “sacredness of life” argument, which is currently systematically challenging the right to abortion in state after state in the USA, is irrelevant in a place where certain lives are already devalued over others.

Here, the loss of virginity is more taboo than the elimination of offspring. Which is why the expansion of the legal provisions around abortion is important. By posing that crucial musing on the quality of life, the conversation broadens meaningfully. Just because a person won’t die in childbirth doesn’t mean that other aspects of her – creative, financial, professional, mental, among others – aren’t extinguished or debilitated. This isn’t an abstract consideration. Its tangibility lies in how we define the answers for ourselves.

Perhaps it isn’t enough to feel assured about the inalienability of rights, be they about bodily autonomy or any other subject. Perhaps by thinking about the potential of losing them, we find ways to both protect and to expand them – in spirit and practice, and for as many more people as possible.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express on July 18th 2019. “The Venus Flytrap” appears  in Chennai’s City Express supplement.