"A mesmerizing account of the well-known story of Matsyagandha
... and her transformation from
fisherman’s daughter to Satyavati, Santanu’s royal consort and the
Mother/Progenitor of the Kuru clan." - Hindustan Times
"Themes of fate, morality and power overlay a subtle and essential feminism to make this lyrical book a must-read. If this is Madhavan’s first book in the Girls from the Mahabharata series, there is much to look forward to in the months to come." - Open Magazine
"A gleeful dollop of Blytonian magic ... Reddy Madhavan is also able to tackle some fairly sensitive subjects such as identity, the love of and karmic ties with parents, adoption, the first sexual encounter, loneliness, and my favourite, feminist rage." - Scroll
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Popping in to share that my new newsletter is out! Link in bio etc etc. It is my LAST Delhi newsletter, I am frantic with things to do and yet at the same time have enough time to watch TV because all these things take other people and everyone is so slooooow. Bah. Also Bruno continues to be sick and exporting cats is a pain in the ass but of course they are our family and coming with us on all of our new adventure. #newsletter #theinternetpersonified #goodbyetoallthat
Well, my nicely sharpened number two pencils, this is it.
Okay, not it-it. I still have another week and a bit to go before we leave this city and more crucially for me: before I leave this neighbourhood behind. I love our colony, it’s green and okay, over the years, it’s gotten much more noisy with construction and neighbours on top of neighbours and literally nowhere to park your car, but this neighbourhood is small, and there’s only so many builder’s flats you can put in. At some point, it’s going to reach its limit, even if it’s ALL builder’s flats. They can only go in this small splodge. I’ll miss it though—I know everyone, the vegetable seller and the cigarette shop man and the three grocery stores and the chemist and my tailor who does my dresses and my tailor who just repairs seams and who to message if my garbage isn’t picked up and the guard next door and the ones at the gate and the garbage collectors and everyone who lives in our building and everyone who used to live in the building next door and the man who runs a print shop, a photostat, a cyber cafe, a mobile phone screen guard shop and a pet store from the same tiny room in the market and my fancy dentist who is only two lanes down and has a framed signed photograph of Milkha Singh in his waiting room. We moved in in March of 2016 and now we leave it for a long time. The next time I return to Delhi (March. Visa.) I’ll be staying with my mum, in another part of the city entirely. So, maybe I won’t miss Delhi but I will miss our neighbourhood. And what is a city but the very small part of it that you call home?
Apart from all this, our cat Bruno has chronic kidney disease. There is no cure, only management of it. He’s pretty bad: stage 4, so at this point we’re just making him as comfortable as we can with daily sub cutaneous drips & a host of vitamins and phosphorous binders to make sure he doesn’t crash. He’s eating (but has become very picky about his food) so we’re currently trying all sorts of wet food to tempt him. All three cats are, as you know, coming with us to Berlin. We have to go get their export paperwork done and then Olga da Polga and Squishy will fly in cargo and Bruno will be in the cabin with us. (Not our original idea: we wanted all three of them in cargo for comfort—bigger cages, no people—but Germany in all its infinite wisdom will allow three pets to come in internationally but not domestically and we have a layover in Frankfurt before Berlin which turns our flight into a domestic one. *eye roll emoji*) Anyway, I’ve been trying not to think very much about Bruno apart from keeping him comfortable. Not thinking ahead, I guess you could say. I don’t want him to die. But that line from that Mary Oliver poem keeps going round in my head:
Doesn’t everything die at last
And too soon?
Funny, I contributed to a cat anthology (out in December) and I wrote about cats and death and my life as a writer, and at the time I had three healthy cats so I thought I had a while to prepare but doesn’t everything die at last and too soon?
Bruno himself cheated death several times as a kitten. Once he fell from our second floor house. Once he contracted an infection from another kitten we adopted who died of it (RIP Agni). When we came back from Berlin he had such high creatinine he may as well have been dead. Look at him now, his persuasive face asking for more food. How can he be dying? Aren’t we all dying?
Aren’t my thirties over and the life I lived in Delhi for a little over a decade and aren’t I starting something new?
Here is the stuff I have done in Delhi that I will forever associate with Delhi.
I have sat on the bonnet of a car and eaten egg parathas at two o’clock in the morning. Someone always knew where to go, it was never me driving. It was never even someone I knew very well. Why was I in this car, where had we been? A farmhouse party perhaps--there you go, my Delhi Things stacking up like nesting dolls. A Farmhouse Party. An invitation arrives, often a hard copy, stiff paper thing, oh we were proper in those days, it was a way of keeping out gatecrashers, and carrying a map, printed on the other side. Someone someone someone’s friend. Long narrow roads with one weak streetlight making it look even more dark because it was so dim. Rich people who lived there slumbered as we made our way through the maze of the roads. We were already drinking, I was expert at making what we called a “Party Pack,” a large bottle of Coca Cola, a quarter bottle of vodka. You empty out half the Coke on the road, it fizzes as it pools in the dust. You pour in the bottle of vodka. You screw the cap on tightly and turn the bottle awkwardly in your hands, around and around, like a rock tumbler. By the time it passes around the car and reaches you again it is warm and sweet, and burns your throat as it goes down.
I was always on the outside for these Farmhouse Parties, it was never my friend’s friend’s friend who was throwing it. I arrived in a clutch, in a gaggle, much after 11 pm, de rigeur. Those were the years where it felt like I had two identities: one that loved books and staying home and sometimes didn’t have a bath till 6 pm and the other that camoflaged herself perfectly among all the other girls who looked the same. The second me grinned, teeth full of shiny braces. I could not control my curly hair, so I wore it up, trying to hide that it wasn’t the smooth sleekness of everyone else’s. If I could have changed one thing about myself in those days, it would be to have glossy straight hair, so perfect that I could shake it to emphasise a point and it would fall like a curtain from cheek to shoulder instead of staying in exactly whatever position it chose. My hair represented everything I was trying to hide about my secret inner life. In those long ago days, we didn’t know better, so I brushed my hair with a regular brush (this makes me cringe) all the time (my poor hair) till I looked like a horse with an electrified mane. Because, of course, my own hair didn’t hang straight down and neat when I brushed it. It gleamed and it stood up around my face. No matter how much I tried to coax the ends of it to curl under, the very texture of it protested and became ringlets as soon as I stopped paying attention. For very special occasions, of course, I went to a beauty parlour and had them use heat and a blow dryer and three different attendants pulling and tugging at my hair—at the time it was very long, and straightened it hung halfway to my elbows—and I’d sit through all that because in the end, there I was, neat and tidy and beautiful I believed, my real face I believed, just because my hair looked so amazing.
I laugh about this now, but even now, even leaning into my new haircut which takes my curls and makes them 10x, I wondered just the other day, since I have a little extra money whether I should just have my hair permanently straightened as I’ve been longing to do since I was a teenager. I wouldn’t do it, I like my curls, really I do, but still. I wonder.
Delhi is that. Pool parties and a young woman who likes to read old children’s books at home clutching a cup of vodka and cranberry juice, wondering if she will ever be one of the shiny gleaming women who seem to belong. Wondering if everyone can tell she’s an imposter. Not realising everyone is an imposter.
I like to call myself a complete deshbhakt. A Made In India person from head to toe. I’ve never lived anywhere else. I was born here, I was educated here, I worked here, I lived here. I feel so international in my head: where did that come from? Books and movies and television? Maybe it’s also because I’m mostly monolingual with Hindi as a second language (and now some German!) I wrote a little bit about my Indian identity before, but mostly, I remember when people were trying to tell me that I wasn’t properly “Indian woman” enough, that I was too “Westernised” and I wanted to laugh, and I wanted to tell them, “Hey, I’m actually probably more Indian than you.” (A lot of these trolls were NRIs.)
Being from a country and living in that country, it’s a special sort of privilege. I get a confidence from my roots being right there visible for all to see, and I can use these as a foundation to break away from. But the problem with roots is that sometimes, like the banyan tree, they can completely take over, and after a while, it’s all anyone can see.
Joy. That’s what you should take from this world. If your life is filled with (mostly) happy days. (Who can be happy all the time except people who don’t think?) If you wake up in the mornings thinking, “Ooh, what wonderful thing will happen to me?” Or if you wake up in the morning thinking, “Today is the day of the Bad Thing but that means today it’s over.”
Delhi hasn’t given me joy in some time. It’s easy to miss this when you live in a city full of people you love and a beloved home, but there was no general happiness at being alive. I know this because I felt that in Berlin this summer. “Oh,” I thought, “This is what that feels like.” In Bombay sometimes I’d be in an auto and to the left of me would be the sea, and that soaring feeling in the pit of my stomach would happen: I’m so happy to be here.
I don’t feel like this about Delhi any more. If you took all those things: people I love + house and moved them to another city entirely, I’d have no sentimental attachment to this city at all. Isn’t that sad? It’s a bit sad.
This is probably my last newsletter to you from this life—so final sounding! But I’ll write again from Berlin in a few weeks. I’m turning FORTY next month, can you believe it? No wonder I’m a little maudlin.
The last line of that Mary Oliver poem, is, of course:
Tell me what it is you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?
This is it, darlings, my one wild and precious life.
If you like what you read (or have read!) would you please buy me a coffee? It’s a virtual tip jar I’ve set up (super easy to use) and greatly helps encourage me in this long strange internet email project I’ve got going on. THANK YOU!!! And thank you to everyone who’s bought me coffee/s so far, I really appreciate it.
Where am I?The Internet Personified! A mostly weekly collection of things I did/thought/read/saw that week.
Who are you?Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan, writer of internet words (and other things) author of seven books (support me by buying a book!) and general city-potter-er.
The second of my new bookish t-shirts celebrates my favourite twins in literature: Elizabeth and Jessica Wakefield, identical in every way, where Elizabeth is the Id and Jessica is the Ego and all their adventures stem from there. We used to swap our SVHs back and forth so I read them out of order, but always with the same breathless attention. One knew one was an Elizabeth somehow but how one longed to be a Jessica, just for once. Teamed here with a skirt I've had since I was 17 (which has gone from fitting loosely at my hips to a high waist) and those custom boots I was telling you about in my stories. #sweetvalleyhigh #literarytees #elizabethwakefield #jessicawakefield #whatiworetoday
Really enjoyed this, especially through the lens of how much pressure we put on women to be perfect mothers. The protagonist has a daughter she just doesn't bond with and then she has a son she adores. Is her daughter the way she is because of her mother or because there's something deeper wrong with her? Nice pacey book, RIYL complicated families, We Need To Talk About Kevin and modern motherhood. #bookstagram #mrmbookclub #121in2021
K made me a few new bookish t-shirts to take back to Berlin. If you can identify this stroppy six year old heroine, you and I are destined to be besties. #literarytshirts #whatiworetoday
I have to anticipate all I need and pack it into one 23 kg suitcase by December 7th so yes, this is #mood. #squishytheblackcat #catsofinstagram #handsomechonk #blackcatsareawesome
Really excited to announce that my new book will be published in India by @penguinindia. The title comes from a Mary Oliver poem and it's funny and sad and I had an excellent time writing it. . Can't wait for you all to read it. #bookannouncement #publishingnews #softanimal
Obligatory "you're in Squishy's house now!" photo. Father and I have just shopped for my birthday presents (extra warm heat tech underthings and a wind resistant down coat) and are taking a small cat coffee tea break before we move onwards. #catsofinstagram
Less than a month to go in this city of my life, so here are some little things. Rear windows and weird pedestrian signs and fans from the 70s. Delhi, can't say I'll miss you and all your pollution but I'll miss MY particular Delhiites for sure.(even if you don't identify as one, if I love you and you live in this city, you're always a Delhiite to me.) #goodbyetoallthat #delhidiary
I get super philosophical in my new newsletter about God, the big guy in the sky, the ultimate force etc etc who I just... Don't believe in. Read read, link in bio, swipe to see excerpts and great reviews for this post from all my subscribers so it's already pre-vetted. 😁 #newsletter #thoughtsongod
It's been a rereading week. I think it's because we're moving and I will be separated from my books for so long (my most precious ones go to my mother's house, the rest stay here for our future tenants). But I love rereading because I forget some plots except very vaguely and then I remember that I enjoyed a book but not WHY I enjoyed it. Donna Tartt is brilliant, and this, written one decade after everyone's favourite book A Secret History, is also brilliant. A nice TOOTHSOME book set in America's South, full of shady characters and an endearing heroine. You must read--or reread. #donnatartt #thelittlefriend #bookstagram #mrmbookclub
One of the biggest drawbacks about not believing in god—God, if you like—is the whole heaven thing. Such a nice comforting thing: it’s okay if someone you love dies, because you’ll see them again when you die. Heaven is like a giant cocktail party, filled with people you haven’t thought about in years, and people you miss every day. To accompany them are masses of pets, all waiting for you “under the rainbow bridge” every single dog or cat you’ve ever owned, the streams flooded with all the goldfish you briefly possessed, no poop, no feeding, just eternal pets and eternal you.
This is, of course, very Christian-leaning of me (or Islam, they also have Paradise you can reach through good deeds). In Hinduism, you shed one body to gain another, keep repeating the cycle of life until you’re enlightened enough to quit it altogether. I always found the later stories in the Mahabharata quite heartless, you know, where everyone fucks off and goes and lives in the forest or the Pandavas climb up a mountain and they keep falling and Yudhishtra (prig that he is) tells them all that they deserve their fate, they are not enlightened enough. Enlightenment sounds lonely, shedding all human connection even more so. Why can’t I love and love hard, why is that a bad thing?
I’ve been thinking about god these days. It seems a good enough time as any. It’s two days after Diwali, the air is cloudy with pollution and thick with dust. The night of Diwali I lay in bed wondering where everyone was getting their crackers from, weren’t they banned? So naive, even at almost forty. I took to Twitter, searching for “firecrackers” to see if anyone else was complaining besides like three of the people I follow, and I saw a long list of tweets from “Hindus” saying “We have to protect our culture from wokes and liberals so we will light crackers.” That’s their relationship with god, defiance against some imaginary threat.
SIDEBAR: Don’t we hate how “woke” has become a way to describe people? Don’t we hate it and also use it ourselves? Hasn’t it become somewhat derogatory? Why is being a traditional Hindu somehow not a woke thing? Why can’t you be both? (I’ll tell you why: because they associate any sort of questioning with “wokeness” and so for them, the only way that works is if you blindly follow any person they have adopted as a leader or themselves.) (I wish though that we had not all polarised ourselves so much into different camps of opinions so I could have an actual conversation with someone who identified as a super traditional Hindu and ask them all these things. But alas, all we do is yell at each other online.)
I don’t believe in god/s, rituals feel like playacting (all of them. Some are fun playacting: lighting your candles for Diwali, putting fairy lights around a potted plant and pretending it’s a Christmas tree, occasionally getting high on Holi), it’s one of the main reasons—I tell my friends—I didn’t want to have a big Indian wedding: so many little rituals, when all we wanted to do was be married. I am so anti-ritual, in fact, and I can tell you this here because wow, nothing hurts sentiments more than someone being against stuff you believe in, but remember this is about me not you, I am so anti-ritual that if someone mentions any sort of puja to me: housewarming, Diwali, random, I am off, my eyes are rolling so hard they practically fall out of my face. I wonder though why I have such a strong visceral reaction to them. It doesn’t hurt me when someone is doing something I don’t believe in, so why not just shrug and be cool about it? Because what I understand, even if I don’t get it, is that there is a comfort in rituals. People need them to feel secure, to have a sense of community, to have company. I missed believing in something through the pandemic, I miss believing that if I am good and kind, I will be rewarded, if I fold my hands and give up meat on Tuesdays, if I shave my hair off, if I wear a ring with a purple stone, if I call a fellow to come and inagurate my new house with a fire and muttered chantings in Sanskrit, if if if, all of these things, then my life will be okay. That’s all we all want: a promise that our lives will be okay. That’s why god/s were invented.
A lot of the literature I read: early 19th century mostly, is obsessed with god. Anne of Green Gables learns to pray straight off, a lot of their scandals are minister and church related. And see, if you look at it in context, it makes a lot of sense. You live in a small village in Canada. CANADA. Freezing cold, remote, only your neighbours for company Canada. What else is there to do but hold on to hope and say your prayers? While Anthony Trollope had the luxury of making fun of the church in his Barchestershire (that may not be spelt right but I’m in the zone so I won’t Google it) Chronicles, it was all right for him because he was in England, which even in those days was pretty crowded. More modern: in Donna Tartt’s A Little Friend, a road preacher, someone who uses snakes to prove miracles, is a central character. Erich Segal’s Acts of Faith is about a Jewish family entangled with a Catholic priest. I am listening to a (terrific) podcast called Astray about foreigners who come to India for spiritual enlightenment and wind up disappearing into the world of sadhus. If you think of Osho and all the other Oshos, what do we want, we want someone to give us answers.
And no one is as confused as our generation. We swing from astrology to meditation to crystals to Goop to yoga to homeopathy, anything, anything that will take away from our ordinary lives, we were promised so much and yet our lives have unfolded any old way. We thought we could control the future but we can’t. We turned away from the religion of our parents and grandparents thinking it old fashioned and now we are stuck with no life vest at all. “Just tell me my future,” we whisper to tarot cards, to our birth charts, “Just tell me it’s going to be fine.”
I don’t even believe in the paranormal (because you can’t, logically, if you don’t believe in god. When we’re dead, we’re dead, so no ghosts, nothing to haunt you) which makes it sad for all the ghost stories I love. I have wrapped myself up in a cold hard cloak of science, which makes me a little cold and hard too—unwilling to listen, ready to dismiss. I will indulge anyone who says anything re: belief to me as I would a child talking about the Tooth Fairy: “it’s sweet that you still believe in magic.” I am obsessed with my own horoscope, but also I want to fall between the cracks in my own head, suspend my own disbelief for like five seconds so I can enjoy it. With great force of will, sometimes I manage. People tell me what I’m like with a Sagittarius sun and a Cancer moon and a Libra rising, and they are accurate, but would they not be just as accurate if I said I was a Leo sun and a Scorpio moon and a Taurus rising? Isn’t all astrology like a personality quiz, you take what you want from the vagueness and leave the rest? I love things and I hate things. You love things and you hate things. Some of our things intersect and maybe our birthdays do too. How much of it is the stars (none, none says my head) and how much of it is just plain old human experience?
Anyway. Just some short, swift stream-of-conciousness ideas about the Great Beyond. Not many life updates recently (plus a new idea for a new book which is occupying a lot of my head space while I try and figure it out) so this is slow news week. Let’s discuss god! Tell me your thoughts.
I wanted to talk about how Indians are so reluctant to share praise or a platform with anyone else unless they’re besties, so I tweeted about it. (Thread: click through to read.)
Speaking of my own work, haaaaave you considered leaving me a tip on Buy Me A Coffee? It is immensely validating and makes me super happy when you do! Here is a link.
That’s all I’ve got—slow week, but I had to write to you, it’s been too long.
Have a great week, speak soon!
xx
m
Where am I?The Internet Personified! A mostly weekly collection of things I did/thought/read/saw that week.
Who are you?Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan, writer of internet words (and other things) author of seven books (support me by buying a book!) and general city-potter-er.
Every now and then I put aside the super skeptical side of my brain and read my own tarot cards, especially when I'm feeling overwhelmed. I mean, I don't BELIEVE-believe but my cards are worn with use (they were a gift from when I was 14 and apparently tarot cards work best if they are given to you, not bought) and they always seem to be reflecting my life and they always have soothing things to say. It may be my form of deep breaths. Everything will be OK. (it IS kind of uncanny how spot on some of the predictions are, but this is probably confirmation bias so pay no attention.) #tarotcards #witchcraft #queserasera
