rant.

What about this is nauseating?

The extended sighs in between sentences curled lip and contrived word placement the discomfiting secretive grin the eye rolling and quivering lip you are throttling and you are choking because you are like a lungful of mercury flooding through me, gushing into my veins and thoughts. You remind me of another smell I could no longer bear to be around. Even now if I happen to share space with this I must hold my breath -- as inconspicuously as I can-- to keep the bile rising through my throat. Because we must be civil mustn't we.

No I want nothing to do with you or the ghosts that you battle with thank you very much. All in all it's like I walked into a shop with yellow clothes and a big SALE sign on the door and its obviously much less than the life I thought I could have had at bargain prices at that.

converting vegetarians

I remember battling with this.

For animals, for suffering? Ma (for I am her most obedient sheep) would suck her breath through her teeth, muttering across the table from me as I guiltily nibbled on unctuous keema-mattar. Blood! Stinking rotten carcass. While wandering through the village she'd up a lamb, clasping the wriggling, baying creature to her chest and smile at me. Look, your lovely leg of mutton! But even the smallest sheep can stray. I finally learnt to shrug, to become immune to the graphic imagery. How can you draw this line for animals? Closest to human beings? What about heads of carrots and heads of lettuce and eyes of potatoes? Tomatoes you'd watch growing, and pick to squish between your teeth.

For my insides? I could feel better, cleaner. But I could also collapse of anemia, going out to inky blackness and head buzzing in grand swooning spells. I was pieced together by lamp chops and steak, pork soup and sliced fish noodles. My stomach liked the animals swimming around it in, more than the nauseating iron pills. Another stop.

And then there's J, newest acquaintance. (For you can never really be friends with a Buddhist right? Just hope to be slot into brief pockets of time)

For sustainability. Every meal is a series of questions: fish skin? (maybe) Roe? (possibly) Salmon (never, especially not norwegian). My leftover chicken dumpling? Yes. Because otherwise I would throw it away.

As simple as that.

Nothing violently shoved in your face, no discomfiting thoughts of suffering livestock or pools of blood or heart attacks, as important as those all are. Just a belief in a sustainable way of life, and a real move to support it.

When my cousin was five his well meaning, and in my opinion idiotic public school teacher asked his class what their "family motto" was. His cherubic face absorbed all the idiotic answers that the question befitted, and when it was his turn he said, lisping through his esses, We only kill what we can eat.

Love and escape in times of communist tyranny.

When writing for the The Economist in the 1990's, J.M. Ledgard chanced upon a brutal and surreal sequence of events which gave him fodder for his book, Giraffe. Described as Radiohead's Idioteque meets Haruki Murakami, Ledgard captures with paranoia and absurdities of a totalitarian government. Set in the darkness of 1970's Communist Czechoslovakia, the narrative centers around the historical events that led to the the capture and extermination of the largest captive herd of giraffes that ever existed.

The giraffe is an animal so fantastic the Romans thought it came from the improbable coupling of a camel and a leopard. The book begins with the birth of the white bellied giraffe Snehurka: "I entered the world, kicking and writhing, not of my own volition". Through the book Snehurka remains the only character that sees the world as it is, without the need for the lenses of metaphorical devices.

Her human captors and other people who come into contact with her are by contrast all sleepwalkers, hovering in some middle ground between their chemical ridden factories and the mythical creatures that lurk in their rivers. Benumbed by the constant bombardment of bland communist propaganda, each character furtively views the world through their private lens, unable to recognize that the blankness of their comrades mirrors similar coping mechanisms. The underlying assumption is a constant yearning for a different way of life.

When they first see the towering animal, their only response is “Giraffe!” They are – briefly – awoken. The camelopard for them is a metaphor for escape. Even the thick skin on its neck and the complex network of veins enables it to transcend the bonds of gravity.

Ledgard sketches the dissatisfaction of his characters with a bitterness which betrays his preferred side of the iron curtain: even his chief somnambulist Ana dreams of “escaping to a world without lines, where the customer is always right”.

The end is a tragic expose on the mindlessness of captivity: the captive captors carry out the motions of their grisly task, carrying out the extermination of the giraffes they have known and loved, with mechanically numb precision.

The startlingly beautiful evocation of helplessness under totalitarian regimes is echoed in Joan Chen's directorial debut, Xiu Xiu: The Sent Down Girl. Set in the PRC of the 60's and 70's the film opens with young Xiu Xiu, daughter of a tailor, signing up to join the ranks of educated youth sent to the rural interior regions as cogs in Mao's dying cultural revolution. Her youthful enthusiasm only dips for the moment that she peers through a hole in the canvas of the truck she's being driven off in, to catch one last glimpse of her woebegone family. Her dimpled smile framed between her patchwork shirts and two plaits, is squeaky clean and cheery, revealing her innocence and girl-scout ambitions. After a few months at the camp she is told that she’s been picked to learn horse-herding, a step leading her to better prospects. Her training would be in the remote steppes of Sichuan, where's she'd spend 6 months in complete isolation. She's assured that Lao Jin the reticent, expressionless Tibetan under whose care she is placed had been castrated by enemy soldiers, and therefore posed no threat to her virginal innocence.

Her new home is a threadbare tent in the middle of an immense stretch of grasslands, completely isolated but for the horses. Her first sign of homesickness is washing herself with a sponge cloth furtively in the tent she shares with the Lao Jin. He politely turns the other way, grunting his acknowledgement of her need for privacy. Through the first half her blithe commands evince unquestioning acquiescence from him, and her invasion of his solitary life melts a way through his stoic exterior.

Joan Chen treats the audience to breathtaking panoramic shots of the steppes, the characters disappearing to minuscule dots in the foreground.

Once Xiu-Xiu's six months are over she packs her things and sits in readiness for the workers to take her back to the main camp: but no one come to get her. The revolution was dead and in her abject despair she falls into listless inactivity, homesick for her life the city. She is chanced upon by a wandering merchant dressed in uniform grey fatigues. He tells her that the regiment she is to command has long been disbanded – but assures her that he had the necessary influence to get her back to the city. All she needs to do, mirroring the individuals relationship with a totalitarian state, is for her to win his favour.

Word gets around soon enough and she barters her body for promises, bending over to a constant stream of men of self-purported 'influence', itinerant merchants, soldiers and workers. She's cheerful through the abuse, believing she is using the only commodity she has to better her stead.

Lao Jin is a silent observer through this grisly burlesque. His emasculation confers on him a state of helplessness. He is shed of all rights to manhood, and the men think nothing of using her body in full sight of him. He shows his love for her the only way he can, holding her mirror for her, or drawing her bath for her.

The denouement has Lao Jin deliriously taking her through a bloody abortion where, abandoned by the state, Xiu Xiu is ostracized and raped by soldiers.

The last scene has Xiu Xiu persuading Lao Jin to shoot her in the foot, so she can be excused from her duties to the state. She plaits her hair, symbols of fresh faced hope and innocence, knots the red chiffon scarf around her neck and stands at attention, unflinching in the face of the gun Lao Jin holds against her head. The scene cuts to a panoramic view of the river snaking along the immense grasslands, and ends with two shots ringing clear in the background.

The film remains a story of love, growing and crushed, amidst the detritus of a failing system. The state, far from Ledgard's panicked and crazed Dr.-Evil-lookalike, is portrayed as an absentee parent, unwilling to deal with the consequences that its mindless decisions confer upon its children.

run

adversity to change makes you bitch and hate. but easy forgetting means it easily forgot.
homesickness at home made me believe I hate it here but I forget how fucking easy life is.
to run alone, under neon lights with some approximation of breeze from the toxic seas. past indonesian maids and their little unthinking dogs, past old men with their plastic bags of dinner peering at your through their glasses. past girls and boys holding hands and cooing at each other and their iphones, hairless and gangly legs emerging from their fbts. past shirtless white men, glistening pectorals thudding with each step. the jangling of gonjasufi and some obscure french dance music impels you forward, your legs are crooked and yet you try, even though occasionally feet collide with one another. stomach cramps remind you all you need to live is this rush of endorphins from this glorious whooosh in your gut.

this is now

smoky dinner with a most beautiful banker
too much in my opinion of a dreamer to be slicing and dicing numbers all day. she shrugs but thinks the same my spirit disappears into ether. leaves you wondering why you do anything that you do when at the end of the day you just do it you could like anything and dislike even more like life could just be giant facebook trawling through people's lives which will always seem more interesting than they are and your life will always seem like you wasted time watching other people but that's what you have to do, right? watch. listen. think about think with and feel, even through alien cities and crackly phone lines you must contort your gut to ache with them and exult with them but you're just sleepy really and you just don't want your sentences interrupted and unsolicited advice and the smell of other people on your clothes. but it happens.

a fellow misanthrope wants me to die drowning in commas because I'm clearly saving them for a grander purpose

cardboard living

I'm trying it out: life in a cardboard house.
Lines of shoes, clusters of joss sticks and your cold faces with paint-on eyebrows separate us from each other. Just light, no warmth, if I can take that startlingly beautiful thought out of context. I stand at the window naked and wonder which one of you will pick up phone to tell the police men that you saw my small breasts. Would they come to get me, line up below my window in their ill fitting blue flannel and their awkward hats?
I can't see you, my vision is blurry. But I am told you have gilded doors and that you eroticize your machines. But to inferior ends, I like to think. Not like the furtive love I make to mine: to produce this, our ugly love child.
The walls are paper thin but I don't hear you, just you me and then complain. But not to me. Insidiously. Into the orange light of the nights. Into the smells of the bathroom, which are all stacked one over another, leaking smells and visions of soap running off wrinkled skin. No purifying mud to wash off. Into the vomit-stained lift doors which creak accusingly and heave open. Into the mosaic benches with old men who look through me, through my invisible brown skin.
My hair goes wilder and wilder. The shop lights call to me they make my bones ache. It's the smells more than the sounds, the smell and the blinding light and stacks and stacks of everything you could want to have, like the man-your-man-could-smell-like.
The gloomy days lift my spirit. Rain always exhilarates me, I can't help it it's in my bones and nipples and teeth to hurt with happiness when that smell fills you of water on dust. I even washed my bathroom in Delhi to smell that smell.

phone sex

As I walk in past a guard called V Baby my phone rings and I pick up to hear a muffled voice. I stand in line watching other people stand in other lines headed to distant places looking uncomfortable while they complain and plot their away-lives
hello? hello? R, he says, meh teri chooth chatna chahta hoon
and I choke what the fuck who are you? and just like that I'm suffocated and choked irrationally panicked and scared jump away from the small guy in a pink t-shirt standing infront of me in line. he knows my name. he calls and calls and calls and I cancel and ignore pick up to yell and his smug voice sickens me he knows he's got me terrifies I'm fucking angry now.
100 dial karo? it rings and rings and rings until finally somehow I'm talking to a thana and a drunk cop whose cursing at me and telling me to look for the airport police and I'm yelling in the airport but he won't listen to me

older madder angrier

Angry email from years ago.
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I cannot imagine what it's like to be able to walk around at night without worrying about every car that drives by too close. About what you're wearing and where you're standing and how you look at people and who is looking at you. This paranoid wariness has become so internalized that we do not even realise it, it's like traffic noise that turns you deaf slowly and truly over the years, until you wake up one morning drowning in white noise.

What is our deafness then? I think it is apathy, not worrying about your fellow being because you are always worried about yourself and your own safety.

These constraints make me mad, like they make you mad, it's true. But then I cannot seem to sustain this, this madness. I smoke a joint and forget. I read a book and forget. I have a luxurious hot bath, and forget. But then hopefully what makes me different from the average Delhi yuppie is that there is an underlying uneasiness under this state of inertia I keep myself in.

I have been helping V with her PhD thesis on Migrant Construction Workers, at a site in D School, and so we've been interviewing the workers at the site. It's an interesting experience. The ones who have been here for a while are more cynical and hardened by the city, and this is true, they have been exploited and have a reason to be so hardened. The ones who are straight off the boat, so to speak, are more like who we;ve met in the villages. People who stop their days work to talk to you, to look at you, to let you sleep in their aangan. V and I stayed and ate dinner with Preeti last night. Preeti is this young mother of three from Bilaspur in chhatisgarh. She and I are friends, somehow. I'm very awkward with people so I usually just sit in her room and play with her children while she finishes the backbreaking amount of housework she has to do after she finishes her 9 to 6 shift. It got really late so she and this other woman, Mamta were telling me and Val to stay the night there... I had to get home but V said she would. But then the women got nervous and changed their minds- she later explained to me in hushed undertones that she was worried about V's safety in the settlement, because "anything can happen at night". Just like that- through the happy estrogen bonding and woodsmoke there was this unsettling underside- I shivered and remembered something I'd read about the rape statistics in urban slums being ridiculously high, (I don't remember the exact figure now) but this is just what life here seems to be. It's enough to make you want to just curl up and go to sleep in your soft comfortable beds, the air con turned down and your music turned up.

Also I don't know how much of what they say to us is just being rude and cynical, whether asking someone to spend the night somewhere is just a way to call them "loose women" - do you know what I mean? I remember in one village in MP they thought that since I was a Delhi urban college going girl I would be, pardon my language, an easy fuck.

It drives me mad.
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