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
Sunday, 20 June 2010
Wednesday, 16 June 2010
older madder angrier
Angry email from years ago.
---
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.
---
---
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.
---
Thursday, 13 May 2010
the xx
Really? you'd arrest me for being naked infront of the window?
what is it about the XX? Instant sex alert. my sickness and sleepiness and an insubstantial shoulder massage
Beasts to tackle and beasts to play against each other. Sunburns and jellyfish drove into each other and you think of summers away from me and I think of thinking of you and the XX plays filling us, running over
what is it about the XX? Instant sex alert. my sickness and sleepiness and an insubstantial shoulder massage
Beasts to tackle and beasts to play against each other. Sunburns and jellyfish drove into each other and you think of summers away from me and I think of thinking of you and the XX plays filling us, running over
Sunday, 20 December 2009
They will eat us alive
Curiouser and curiouser! Will you be witness to a fluctuation between selfrighteous despair and self-effacing elation?
--
You forgot to turn on the light when you walked through the door. It's not that I watched you come in, it's just that I smell you and you smell the same: even though I just met you. You're the type I can't ignore.
---
I'm writhing and contorting,flexing to retain these lifegiving fluids leaking out of me, and I am sapped. I left your house with you trickling down my thighs. A month later I cried into your disembodied voice. Caught a train to the grim surbubia of this island. The heart of This Fashion, a deserted mall with K-pop and shop girls who speak no english. Then a cold room that plays 80's power ballads. Lined with motherhood and gadget magazines, soothing arranegements of smooth rocks. I spell out my name to a mechanically pleasant cake-faced woman in pink overalls. Her painted-on eyebrows are motionless and I look back at an evocative poster for Botox. This is our dystopian future, stiff-upper lips curled back in tight smiles. Show your teeth and betray no emotion. She laughs at an anguished, tired couple.
--
A weepy faced tiny Malay boy in a sarong is being led off by his proud extended family. He's clutching a bag of toys and a "I survived my cicumcision" certificate.
--
A tube appears to suck out a chunk of me and you, and takes with it a chunk of time. "I'm waking up? Is that ok?" and a surrogate sister tells me its over. I align myself to a curious reversal of roles. I held Preeti's hand, now she holds mine. I am as old as her sister. She mistakes my tears for regret. Talks fast and brightly: her Scottish husband who cheats on her, her beautiful 4 year old daughter who she loves to the power of three. The lunch she's going to have. She leaves me sniffling on a damp pillow, woozy headed and clutching her business card.
--
Your voice crackles, you break off and speak in tongues I don't understand. Your world is a world I do not share, and you bridge the gap with smatterings of I-love-you's. I forget how my world too is a world you do not share, and lose myself in hyperimaginative insecurities. A supposedly euro-philic/phobic worldview? In truth it's an innate dissatisfaction, just looking from the outside as the grass gets greener, electrically cyan and teal. I run crooked and I'm bitter about losing the race.
--
But I train myself. For the first time I watch in the mirror as leg muscles contract and thigh fat shudders. The music in my ears is tinny and cacophonic. The flush on my face rushes neck upwards, and I watch the digital numbers moving, agonizingly slow. I notice how my right leg curves outwards. I watch it over and over: awkward duck footed impact as it rises and falls back, always crooked. I tighten thigh muscles and control it.
---
Control, like over tongues. Replacing my hard z of assume. Assyuming I cant control what to others comes effortlessly. It divides us, this fork of tongues. I frequently turn back in crowded places, expecting to see a semi-familiar face in this sea of faces I don't look at. My ears hurt and I lose balance.
--
Father and daughter playing a balancing game on the MRT. They are a universe unto themselves. Insular white people?
--
Awkward acne-ridden indian family. The girl cakes it with white make up. The boy picks at his, and open sores line his nose.
--
Another acne faced lanky indian boy hovers on the outside of an insular group of his chinese class mates. They speak amongst themselves and he looks on, a foot above the rest, an unbridgable gap away. A small girl with oily hair, thick rimmed glasses and gym shorts steals glances at him, and they sway awkwardly to the jerks of the train. How was your exam? Serious nod, small smile. She looks at her group, and back at him. Did you find it easy? He nods. His brain is whizzing, he can't meet her eyes. Her ears are twitching. She looks at her shoes. When do the results come out? She can't hear him, and his face spilts open into another awkward smile. He looks away- she says something in chinese to her friends. They look through him. He waits until she glances back and he asks again, louder with his characteristic hard t's and d's: when Do the results come ouT? In the morning I think. they nod gravely at each other. Are you tired? Flash of teeth, yes woke up at seven, Got six hours of sleep though. Going to be a late night again. Another grave nod.
--
The girls from Seng huat smile at me, and I smile back as widely as I can without being creepy. Almost stop but there's nothing more we can communicate to each other. I saw the one with the dark gums wheeling her bicycle home. She'd stopped to peer at the frothy display window of a jewelery shop.
.
They will eat us alive these display windows will.
--
You forgot to turn on the light when you walked through the door. It's not that I watched you come in, it's just that I smell you and you smell the same: even though I just met you. You're the type I can't ignore.
---
I'm writhing and contorting,flexing to retain these lifegiving fluids leaking out of me, and I am sapped. I left your house with you trickling down my thighs. A month later I cried into your disembodied voice. Caught a train to the grim surbubia of this island. The heart of This Fashion, a deserted mall with K-pop and shop girls who speak no english. Then a cold room that plays 80's power ballads. Lined with motherhood and gadget magazines, soothing arranegements of smooth rocks. I spell out my name to a mechanically pleasant cake-faced woman in pink overalls. Her painted-on eyebrows are motionless and I look back at an evocative poster for Botox. This is our dystopian future, stiff-upper lips curled back in tight smiles. Show your teeth and betray no emotion. She laughs at an anguished, tired couple.
--
A weepy faced tiny Malay boy in a sarong is being led off by his proud extended family. He's clutching a bag of toys and a "I survived my cicumcision" certificate.
--
A tube appears to suck out a chunk of me and you, and takes with it a chunk of time. "I'm waking up? Is that ok?" and a surrogate sister tells me its over. I align myself to a curious reversal of roles. I held Preeti's hand, now she holds mine. I am as old as her sister. She mistakes my tears for regret. Talks fast and brightly: her Scottish husband who cheats on her, her beautiful 4 year old daughter who she loves to the power of three. The lunch she's going to have. She leaves me sniffling on a damp pillow, woozy headed and clutching her business card.
--
Your voice crackles, you break off and speak in tongues I don't understand. Your world is a world I do not share, and you bridge the gap with smatterings of I-love-you's. I forget how my world too is a world you do not share, and lose myself in hyperimaginative insecurities. A supposedly euro-philic/phobic worldview? In truth it's an innate dissatisfaction, just looking from the outside as the grass gets greener, electrically cyan and teal. I run crooked and I'm bitter about losing the race.
--
But I train myself. For the first time I watch in the mirror as leg muscles contract and thigh fat shudders. The music in my ears is tinny and cacophonic. The flush on my face rushes neck upwards, and I watch the digital numbers moving, agonizingly slow. I notice how my right leg curves outwards. I watch it over and over: awkward duck footed impact as it rises and falls back, always crooked. I tighten thigh muscles and control it.
---
Control, like over tongues. Replacing my hard z of assume. Assyuming I cant control what to others comes effortlessly. It divides us, this fork of tongues. I frequently turn back in crowded places, expecting to see a semi-familiar face in this sea of faces I don't look at. My ears hurt and I lose balance.
--
Father and daughter playing a balancing game on the MRT. They are a universe unto themselves. Insular white people?
--
Awkward acne-ridden indian family. The girl cakes it with white make up. The boy picks at his, and open sores line his nose.
--
Another acne faced lanky indian boy hovers on the outside of an insular group of his chinese class mates. They speak amongst themselves and he looks on, a foot above the rest, an unbridgable gap away. A small girl with oily hair, thick rimmed glasses and gym shorts steals glances at him, and they sway awkwardly to the jerks of the train. How was your exam? Serious nod, small smile. She looks at her group, and back at him. Did you find it easy? He nods. His brain is whizzing, he can't meet her eyes. Her ears are twitching. She looks at her shoes. When do the results come out? She can't hear him, and his face spilts open into another awkward smile. He looks away- she says something in chinese to her friends. They look through him. He waits until she glances back and he asks again, louder with his characteristic hard t's and d's: when Do the results come ouT? In the morning I think. they nod gravely at each other. Are you tired? Flash of teeth, yes woke up at seven, Got six hours of sleep though. Going to be a late night again. Another grave nod.
--
The girls from Seng huat smile at me, and I smile back as widely as I can without being creepy. Almost stop but there's nothing more we can communicate to each other. I saw the one with the dark gums wheeling her bicycle home. She'd stopped to peer at the frothy display window of a jewelery shop.
.
They will eat us alive these display windows will.
Monday, 3 August 2009
trawling through
"...And someone you love enters the roomand says wouldn't
you like the eggs a little
different today?
And when they arrive they are
just plain scrambled eggs and the warm weather
is holding."
Thursday, 30 July 2009
A wooden ship escapes.
where are we now? Beginning over again, sorting clearing cleaning.
I am in a new room, battling an alien set of keys.
Older keyrings have been lost and the old room has been painted over. I heard them ask for a certain shade of cream.
The bathroom is dismantled and disembowelled and now sits waiting for new occupants- rangeen pot et al. My angry disenchanted words fade and will be broken up, not washed out. The careful rubbing out of words too will be forgotten maybe to be remembered in a pneumatic bus ride but that will be somewhere else, at another time.
The cigarette burn on the inside of my arm? Scars are poor reminders.
The music here is as borrowed and garbled as it was. The churn in the stomach too is familiar. But the floor here is orange and now I have forgotten what it means to be churning out my entrails, black letter spiralling out in quick release.
The thought of a new life is exciting, as nerve-wracking as negotiating a whirring machine. I attempt the studied nonchalance of an old timer. Fail miserably and angry toads honk at my incompetance.
sy lies, the escape.
Too much watching-over, those pinpricks of pupils floating in brown. Nothing escapes them. But fear slips out as they watch a wooden ship leaving.
A wooden ship means silver people but I do not see them.
I dream instead of angry men
attacking.
And a submissive, pliant ghost of myself
Or just myself.
Friday, 19 June 2009
Forget
because superstition is in my bones. Painless playing with fire makes for a small round scar on the whiteness of my inner arm. My skin burns in the sun and this uncomfortable aligning to alien skkin is in my head. I relinquish my fire eater alter ego- if it ever did exist- squirm in the ugliness of this writing (remind myself of therapy, bile and vomit). And then! release re-release into the lightness of another getaway. We just won't let on that we knew about the hunger and the great escape.
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