I Would Like

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I would like to have a dinner party. I want to dress up in my new dress that just arrived today, even though I have nowhere to wear it to; it’s a red shift with a colourful border at the hem and a transparent billowy thing that goes on top of it and the whole thing closes with a cloth belt that you pull through two holes and cinch up tight. I’d wear heels, even though I don’t normally, don’t ever wear heels. I’d wear one of my teetering pairs, the ones that always make me feel like my ankles are going to bend sideways. The house would be clean, and sweet smelling, and I’d light some of the incense I bought at the Aurobindo ashram shop, the stuff that smells like cinammon and richness, that I associate with PCO, this bar I used to go to a lot. The food would already be cooked, so I wouldn’t need to do anything, just put some lipstick on, maybe Ruby Woo, which I love or Diva, which also I love, and since I’d have a little time before my guests arrived, I’d do my eyes really well, gold eyeshadow that my friend gave me several years ago and that still has a lot in the tiny pot it comes in brushed across my lids, eyeliner swooshed into cat’s lines towards my temples. I’d invite about ten people, and us, so twelve people in all. I’d have some fancy wine chilling in the fridge, and I wouldn’t be able to wait for everyone to come in, so I’d pour myself a glass and select a good Spotify playlist, maybe Dave Brubeck, since he always reminds me of dinner parties. Everyone would come in around the same time, and we’d hug and kiss and exclaim how nice everyone looked, and the house would be warm and well-lit, the air conditioning blasting on naked shoulders and everyone would be holding a drink and there’d be loud laughter, as the party drifted in and out of the balcony where the smokers go, and the inside where we’d gather in knots and eat food standing up.

studio party by florine stettheimer

I would like to be looking forward to a holiday. Not on the actual holiday, though I love that as well, but in the right before. I’d have my tickets all booked, and my hotels sorted out. I’d have a list of things I want to do in a Telegram message, that’s how my partner and I organise holidays, on Telegram, lists from Lonely Planet or one of the newspaper’s travel section: 10 Things To Do For Free in X Destination! I’d be going abroad on this holiday, so my passport would be with the visa office, and as always, I’d be a little scared that this time maybe I wouldn’t get a visa, but it would be okay in the end, I’d absolutely get it. I’d update my Facebook, say, “We’re travelling to X on these dates!” and my friends and acquaintances in that country would message me and say, “Well then we must meet” and I’d say, “Absolutely!” and we would.

travelers awaiting a ferry by philips wouwerman

I would like to write about these things without thinking of worse losses than missing holidays and dinner parties. I would like to stop thinking about death and poverty and lost jobs and rising counts for just FIVE FUCKING SECONDS please.

I would like to meet you for brunch. Maybe we’d be slightly rushed for time and we’d go to Coast Cafe, where we’d get Bloody Marys and calamari rings or maybe we’d have a little longer and we’re celebrating something so we go to Olive and have their bottomless brunch, and we sit there for hours, drinking all the wine we can hold in our bellies, eating shanks of meat. You might get eggs, you like eggs, but I’d only be there for the big ticket stuff, the paisa vasool as they say. At the end of it, squint eyed with drink and the coffee we drank rapidly to sober ourselves up for the taxi home, we’d take a selfie, cheeks pressed together, grinning madly at the camera.

private meal by Jan Baptiste Lambrecht

I would like to go to a doctor’s office. Okay, no, no one actually wants to go to the doctor’s office, but I’d like to know that tomorrow if I woke up with a sudden desire to get my teeth cleaned or to have a quick check up that I can just go, no phoning in advance except to make an appointment. The same with salons. I’m growing my hair out so I don’t need a salon right now, but I want to know that I can go to one when I want to go to one.

I’d like to talk to someone I dislike again, do you know what I mean? I want to go to a gathering, and meet someone there that I realise I truly cannot stand after five minutes of their conversation and I’d like to duck away awkwardly and bitch about them on the ride home, like, “Can you believe they said that? What a douche!” and we’ll laugh and it’ll be a story I can text my friends about with lots of eye rolling emojis.

I would like to go everywhere and do everything. I would like for months not to roll into each other, for my planner to be full again, for me to roll my eyes and say, “Wow, I can’t believe this month is over already” because I’ve been so busy, not because each day melts into the last one and on and on till I can predict the days I am up and the days I am down, with the same predictability that I get my period or that we run out of groceries.

I would like to sleep for a year and a day, to wake up on the other side, be all, “What did I miss?” but also I want to stay awake and alert and watch everything with my beady eyes, take stock of your life and my life and all of our lives, but also wishing that Parallel Universe Me is doing something fun this year. Parallel Universe Me has also finished the edits of both the first drafts she wrote, she’s been sending out the manuscript, she’s organised and efficient and ahead of the game. I do not think we could get along, not when she is in her dress with the cinched waist and her heavy earrings shaped like beetles that she bought at H&M and I am sitting here without a bra, my whole body slooping downwards, feeling like even though I just woke up this morning, it’s already nighttime and time for me to go to sleep.

a sleeping bather by henri gervex

I would like to have faith in the system, to believe in the government must be as much an act of faith as believing in god, and how nice to just put your problems in someone else’s hands, let them deal with it, you just follow orders like a little mindless drone. “They’re doing all they can,” I would say, waspishly, to anyone who challenged my thinking. I would like to believe in a magic vaccine, one shot to cure us all, that will come out by the 15th of August, because they promised. They promised. I would settle for believing in one that comes in November, because I would like, oh, I would like, to celebrate my December birthday in a manner that is both social and minus any distancing whatsoever.

I would like to rejoin the world. I would like for us to emerge better people, and if not that, I’d like us to be the same garbage people we always were, the world a different kind of hellfire, but our world, our world, right? So vast, so peopled, not just narrow corridors and low ceilings and “what’re we watching with dinner tonight?”

Yeah, well.

Newsletter: What if we all spoke the same language?

I have just returned from Trivandrum--which has not changed much in many ways. The air, the buildings still smell the same. People still say, "Oh, we know your father" to me and ask if I speak Malayalam and when I say I don't, they turn to each other and let out strings of unintelligible words. At first I resisted, I tuned out whenever this happened to me--and it happened to me a lot, at the first of my panel discussions, the two male authors talked to each other and the audience only in Malayalam. I protested weakly, they turned to me, and said, "Yes, wait a minute, we will translate" but in the end, the language pulled them under and in, and there was a photo of the session the next day with my body neatly cropped out, I guess my expression was too miserable for them to use. I thought maybe if I leaned in to the language I might suddenly be able to understand it, like those Magic Eye pictures, where you have to unfocus your eyes in order to see. I forgot I was never any good at Magic Eye.

Sitting up there on that stage though--and then later, on a different panel, with only one Malayali author who nevertheless spoke only in Malayalam, with a few tossed asides to me and the other panelist--I started thinking about language chauvinism. Language is like a club, you admit people if they know your codes. In English, it's far more egalitarian, anyone can speak English regardless of where they are born, and so the rules of the club are much more varied. You'd be admitted to one set if you had the right vocabulary and the right accent, another set if you knew the right slang. But still we build these walls up around ourselves--we will only let you sit with us if you can speak this in this way. I know not all Hindi speakers find each other with such camaraderie--the Bihari accents won't be as comfortable with, say, the UP accents, as they are with each other. In many ways, it is a good thing that these clubs exist--in a city like Delhi, you can immediately find your tribe just by slipping into Tamil or Bengali or whatever, a signal, here I am, I am one of you, I am safe to know, because of these familiar words I am using. But it's also a way of exclusion, the audience and my fellow authors were so far away from me, locked behind walls I couldn't climb.

Besides mulling on the significance of the words we use, I had a marvelous time. I made some new friends, ate excellent food (if there's one part of me that is forever tied to Kerala and to Andhra Pradesh, it is my taste buds. The food there just tastes better than the food anywhere else. It unlocks some secret code in my brain, telling me yes, this is what you are meant to eat!) hung out with my mother, who was also a panelist (and did not have the same experience as I did at all, her panel only spoke in English). There were also some great parties, and we were all extremely well taken care of, and feted in the way you can only do at a smaller lit fest. I saw Sujatha Gidla's session, which I loved and also Ambarish Satwik's monologue on the medical nude which was great fun. Spoke to some interesting people as well--so all in all, it's one for the success column.

I will be going back to Kerala next week (!) for that half of our wedding reception, and from there, I fly to Bombay for the Gateway Lit Fest, which looks hugely exciting. Please come if you're around, this edition is all women writers, so there should be lots of inspiration to be had.

This week in books and reading: Started reading N.K Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy, recommended on Goodreads as a "fantasy series that is already finished" which is always great because then you don't have to keep waiting and waiting and WAITING and finally losing interest. (Yeah, you know who I'm talking about.) Anyway, The Fifth Season  is FANTASTIC, especially if you loved Korra or The Last Airbender, because there's a lot of earth bending going on, and that's not a spoiler, it happens on the first few pages. I loved it, despite its slow start, and am about to begin on book two. I totally meant to document all the books I read on Instagram this year, but I keep forgetting, so eventually there will be one post with a zillion photos.

This week in travel hacks: The secret to light packing for a two or three day trip? A day pack. By which I mean a backpack that you carry along as your cabin baggage in which you cleverly pack your regular purse. This saved my life--so easy to carry around the airport, AND also the extra stuff from Trivandrum fit neatly into it. I may never NOT travel like this again.

Link list!

The writerly apartment in this fantasy is bare and minimal; the walls are unpainted plaster, or the wallpaper is peeling; the heat is faulty or not there; there are books stacked on the floor. It looks this way because it’s Paris struggling out of the deprivation and destruction of a world war, or New York soldiering on through the Depression, living in the wreckage of 1920s glamor. The writer spends hours in cafes, working and drinking, because the cafes are heated and the apartment is not. The aesthetic of this fantasy is permanently frozen in the first half of the 20th century, in the cities (and occasionally the beach resorts near cities) of Europe and the United States. The reason the fantasy writer lifestyle is set in such a particular time and place is that the interwar and postwar American writers who went to Europe for cheap rents have exerted a massive influence on the American idea of what literature is. Who casts a longer shadow across American fiction and curricula than Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Baldwin?

 - The fantasy of the writer's life.

Tariq straddles the divide between the Pakistan that was and the Pakistan that may come to be, between the way society used to be—how women were seen, how kitchens were run—and a brave new world in which elderly figures like Tariq are open targets for mockery. She is a member of the elite and an idol for the middle-class; an elderly figure people can confide in, a stand-in for the mother who no longer lives next door. She is constantly in the background of urban Pakistani life, along with the constant litany of political crises that is the news. With her dyed hair and perfectly ironed sari, she really is Pakistan’s older sister, disapproving of a consumerist culture as she oversees her nation’s awkward struggle toward modernity.

 - On Pakistan's Martha Stewart

In his memoir about running, Murakami wrote, “What exactly do I think about when I'm running? I don't have a clue.” I, on the other hand, know exactly what I think about when I’m running: I think about how great it’d be if I stopped running. Still, I forced myself to complete the ten kilometers, which felt pretty good. Sadly, this elevated mood was only temporary. When I returned home, I reviewed the fruits of my work from earlier in the morning. It wasn’t much.

 - Copying the routines of famous writers isn't actually a great way of getting shit done.

The weekly newsletter helps discover new music through themes such as Songs for a Monday After a Sunday, Some Funks To Give, or Dancing Around the Kitchen with a Frying Pan as a Partner. “I associate songs with memories and places and since I was cooking on a Sunday, I made a playlist,” Bhatia says.

- It was a grave omission, not putting The Internet Personified on this list, but we'll forgive them because we like the rest.

Travel has always had a sinister side. The Romans really got about. You’d think taking baths and running around on mosaic floors in Rome to the chimes of your tintinnabuli, with the occasional trek south for an orgy in Pompeii, would be enough for anybody. But no, those legions were always on the move, subduing, usurping, exploiting, and enslaving people; transporting wheat, papyrus, and gossip; and building walls to make Rome great again. But the thing is, when you’re away from home too much, things go to pot. If you’re not careful, you come back to find your colosseum’s cracking, and your civilization too.

 - An argument for staying put

This leads me to think of two distinct ways to look at Indo-Anglians. One is to see them as casteless, or even as an example of a post-caste community, where the traditional caste identity is subsumed under the new Indo-Anglian identity. The alternate approach, which I prefer, is to look at them as a distinct ‘caste’ parallel to the upper castes, with its own unique cultural norms and practices. The key criteria for caste inclusion and endogamy being advanced English language skills.

- That Indo Anglian article everyone's talking about.

 

 

Newsletter: Bad dates, dive bars

I'm assuming you've all seen the Aziz Ansari story yesterday about what a shitty date he is. I've been rewatching Parks And Recreation on Amazon Prime recently, and he comes up a lot--almost every single episode, and it's hard to watch scenes with him now without thinking back on his behaviour. Worse still was the set of episodes also guest starring Louis CK, because then you look at all these men who are known for being great actors and comics, and winning awards and what not, AND Parks And Recreation is also Amy Poehler's baby, and she's always seemed like an amazing woman to me, so how do you separate in your head the art someone creates with the way they are in real life? I find myself to be a lot more unforgiving of the men, even Aziz, who is this little brown guy winning awards and generally being charming, someone you WANT to root for, and when you learn about him being basically like everyone else, it's a little bit of a betrayal. Whereas with Margaret Atwood--a way more articulate person than Aziz or Louis--her saying that #MeToo was:

The #MeToo moment is a symptom of a broken legal system. All too frequently, women and other sexual-abuse complainants couldn't get a fair hearing through institutions – including corporate structures – so they used a new tool: the internet. Stars fell from the skies. This has been very effective, and has been seen as a massive wake-up call. But what next? The legal system can be fixed, or our society could dispose of it. Institutions, corporations and workplaces can houseclean, or they can expect more stars to fall, and also a lot of asteroids.

Which is kind of true, in one way: #MeToo would not exist if the legal system was perfect. But to dismiss it is unfair, because it is exactly what was needed. Maybe the legal system needs to change and embrace the way we can--each of us--go to the internet and say something each time something or someone has wronged us. I know from personal opinion that when you tweet at a company, they are more likely to fix something than when you just call them and sit for hours with a customer service representative. I've tried both. And the way women are taking down powerful men using their words goes to show that if you hold someone accountable in a public forum, they are far more likely to offer apologies for their actions, rather than just lame explanations. And hopefully, some man somewhere is reading all the testimonies and thinking, "Oh hmm, maybe it's a bad idea to put my hand inside my intern's shirt as she bends over." I think that's a win, anyway.

As for the people turning this into a "humiliation" thing, I'm not sure what their reasoning is, despite reading loads of tweets around the same argument, and this one long Atlantic piece I've linked to above. Is it just because the idea of a "bad date" doesn't gel with the idea of a sexual harasser? I have been on bad dates, and I have been on dates where a person doesn't listen to your body language (OR YOUR WORDS), and I can tell you that despite that, I still said goodbye to them with a semblance of a smile. Teeth gritted, face in an "I want to get out of here" expression, but still a smile, because politeness is drilled into us way more than saying no in a hard situation. So there's that.

This week in further meditations: I am still in Goa--leaving today for Hyderabad for a family wedding and then back to Delhi--and I have fallen into a comfortable routine. I write during the day, stopping for lunch and then a brief rest before writing again, and then go out to join friends. Which means my favourite part about Goa, its dive bars. Yes, you can keep your beach shacks and your fancy restaurants, for me, nothing says Goa more than rolling up to Siolim crossing and jumping into one red-walled bar where a man called Rock knows my drink order and always keeps the same table for us.

If there's one thing Delhi lacks, it is the character filled dive bar. I think it's also because of Delhi's attitude to women, most dive bars there have a faint attitude of seed. Like if you sat there alone too long you would inevitably become newspaper headlines on page three the next day. There are a few that I loved in Delhi but then 4S became too popular (the idea is you can dress how you like to go to a dive bar), Saki bar in Connaught Place is too far (Hotel Alka, I wonder if it's still a thing) and while I like Road Romeo, it doesn't really begin to compare to Rock or Paulo's in Goa in terms of sheer atmosphere.

A true dive has all of the following: a) cheap drinks, b) small, too-close-to-each-other tables, c) a regular clientele so you always run into the same people, d) something to distinguish it from all the other dive bars next to it, so you're justified in picking your favourite. In the case of Rock, I actually like the food, and I like how friendly the owner is, and I like almost sitting in the street as I drink. In the case of Paulo's, it's full of leathery old hippies who sit there, one imagines, from morning to night, and who are almost as much a part of the decor as the old prints of famous musicians on the wall. Paulo's has gotten a little trendy now though, they even gave me a laptop decal the last time I was there, and one Iranian lady will come around selling sandwiches off the back of her scooter. That's Goa for you. I return to Delhi drawing rooms soon enough.

This week in endorsements: Lots of love for Before, And Then After on the interwebs this week, and here is a screenshot from one reader on Twitter who loved it.



Then, to my complete surprise, I see Confessions of a Listmaniac/The Life And Times of Layla the Ordinary is on this list of the 121 best Indian books in English OF ALL TIME. So that's very flattering and nice, especially for one of my young adult books which I always feel get a little lost in the shuffle. Just the sort of motivation I need to finish up my next book. (Here's a link to buy my books in case you're curious now.)

Monday morning link list:

When Nathalia brought two new poems to her father a few days after her mother’s faux pas, he was very impressed, as he told it, but wanted a more expert view. He suggested she send them to an editor at the Brooklyn Daily Times whom he knew vaguely from his short stints at various copy desks before reenlisting when the United States entered the First World War. There was a flurry of attention at the Times, and Nelda started sending out more of Nathalia’s work, some of which was apparently published without further fuss. So a year later, when Edmund Leamy, the poetry editor of the New York Sun, accepted a poem that Nathalia was said to have sent on her own, he had never heard of her. He assumed the author was an adult. After all, in his experience, no “child would ever submit any work from his or her pen without adding the words ‘Aged __ years.’” And “The History of Honey,” rhythmical and ingeniously rhymed, bore no obvious literary mark of immaturity. Nor was there girlish handwriting to supply a clue. When Leamy invited this new contributor named Nathalia Crane to drop by to confer about another poem and have lunch, he mistook her mother for the poet. Flustered to learn that “Miss” Crane was the “little, long-legged, bright-eyed child,” he forgot about the promised meal, as Nathalia noted years later.

- This story about a child-poet genius (including her rather excellent poetry) is a fun and sad read.

 

But online, we inhabit an unrelenting present, where artificially spatialized time appears severed and successive. The present is announced by the externalized whims — notifications, replies, mentions — we swipe at, scroll past, click through to. On Twitter, for example, each tweet’s timestamp — 17 min, 42 min, 3 hr — announces time since. Time, rather than passing, continuously refreshes. The latest is, of course, predicated by news, or by whatever resembles news. The unrelenting present is continuously under threat of assault from the caprice of one man’s sleepless whims. A new sense of dread accompanies checking one’s phone in the morning. It can feel like waking up and tuning in to the apocalypse.

 

- The more I stay off the internet, the more sense life makes to me.
 

Also, remember if something is making you miserable, you do have the power to change it - in work or love or whatever it may be. Have the guts to change. You don’t know how much time you’ve got on this earth so don’t waste it being miserable. I know that is said all the time but it couldn’t be more true.

- Before she died, Holly Butcher wrote a letter to the world.
 

On Thirteen Reasons Why, the show & the book, and why we still need our really good teen suicide book

(A version of this appeared in Scroll.)

Do you remember where you were when your life hit a crossroads? I do.

For a brief period, which felt like eternity at the time, I was bullied. It wasn't even the dramatic stuff you see on TV or hear about, it was mostly just occasional put downs (“you're so ugly”) or exclusions (not being invited to a party everyone else was.) It wasn't a big deal, and yet, it was the only deal. My life was consumed by this—I was about thirteen, a difficult age anyway—and I did so badly at school that I had to repeat the year. This was when the crossroads happened: I begged to go somewhere else for school, my parents agreed, and I was sent off to boarding school, where I made the first tentative steps at becoming happy with being myself again. I guess some inner reserve of mental strength I didn't know I had was keeping me afloat—I was deeply unhappy, in the depths of despair and yet, I still welcomed each new day as the gift it was.

Reading (and watching) Thirteen Reasons Why reminded me a little of that time. Every year, around this time of the year—CBSE results, exam time—I read about teen suicides. In this age of live streaming, we can even watch suicides, people broadcasting till the very end. Though Thirteen Reasons Why (the book) was published in 2007, way before live streaming was even dreamt of, the victim, the girl, the second narrator in the book, Hannah Baker, broadcasts her own death on thirteen tapes, naming and shaming the people who drove her to this decision. 

 

The TV show is a bit more disturbing. While in the book, the boy listening to the tapes; Clay; thinks to himself several times that Hannah could have asked for help, in the show, the shades of grey are less defined. Hannah is hounded with relentless bullying that would make anyone break down, painted in TV screen colours, lingering lovingly on each slap, on each sexual assault. In the book, Hannah's parents are a little absent, all-absorbed in their business, but in the show, her parents are frequently present, talking to her, eating together and yet, she never turns to them. In the book, Hannah takes some pills, the narrative doesn't go deeply into how she dies, but the show has the camera pause on her scared face, her trembling fingers, the lift of the razor as she slashes at her wrists and the blood pumping out of them. (That's not a spoiler, you already know that she dies in the end, don't you?)

A while ago, Instagram banned the use of hashtags that promoted anorexia, like #thinspiration or #proana. It didn't work the way the social media site might have wanted it to: people began to modify their hashtags, like for example, #thinspooo instead of the banned #thinspo. At least they have a dedicated section in their help centre where they address what you can do if you see someone posting threats of suicide or self harm. (You can report the post and also share links they've provided of suicide helplines.) But after reading (and watching) Thirteen Reasons Why, I saw it as a sort of glorified suicide video, except it was pretending it was not. At least in the book, the common markers of a suicidal individual are spelt out (they change their appearance, they start giving away their things), but at the end of the show, you are left feeling as despairing as one imagines the characters must be after listening to the tapes.

In a survey done by the WHO in 2015, India is one of the top 25 most suicidal countries in the world. 17% of all world-wide suicides are Indian, and our rate of suicide for women is the sixth highest in the world. Hindustan Times carried a story with an alarming statistic: every hour, one student commits suicide in India. For not quite the same reasons as Hannah: these suicides are usually related to academics and failing exams.

But books about teen suicide (few and far between) usually deal with love or bullying or some such trouble, starting all the way from Romeo and Juliet, the original suicidal teens. Maybe that's why I'm somewhat disappointed with Thirteen Reasons Why. I wanted it to be more... something. More inner thoughts and less “this is why it happened.” More about the numbness that hits people with depression, teens more than others. I wanted it to address the big black bird of despair that settles over their entire lives. I wanted it to talk about how it feels like an effort to just wake up and face the day. The book makes it too neat—there was a girl, people bullied her, she killed herself. Bullying is awful, a lot of people are driven to suicide through bullying alone, but there is a step three in the middle where your brain says, “Anything would be better than this. Death would be better than this.” Thirteen Reasons Why touches on that just briefly and towards the end, not going much into how a person who was upbeat and cheerful just three chapters ago could become so hopeless.

That's the teen suicide book—and show—I'd like to see.

FOMO? More like HAMO!* (on social menopause in this busy age)

(* that's... errr... happy about missing out.)

(This piece was first published in Scroll at the end of 2016 and since then, the symptoms described have become even stronger.)

It's a surreal sort of feeling when you realise that one of your favourite sensations is when a plan that has been laid out and is waiting for you has been cancelled the afternoon of the event. There's a sense of liberation, an “ahh, now I can stay indoors,” a cozy, pit-of-your-stomach warming that comes with the anticipation of an evening spent in your pajamas, doing nothing but surfing the internet or reading a book or binge-watching a TV show. It's almost as if this plan cancellation has created time out of thin air, a pocket of free hours to do with as you wish.

Long ago, in a book of fairy tales by Alison Uttley, I read a story about a man who was selling time. He offered a free hour to anyone who wanted it, and the story went on to follow a busy housewife who wanted to dance, a painter who wanted an extra hour to paint and so on. The children in the story followed behind the vendor jeering, “Who needs time? We have all we need!” and since I was those children then, I too wondered at a world where adults would need to “buy” an extra hour. It was never my favourite story in that book, but if a time man came by today, shaking his golden hourglasses, I'd buy one. I might even buy two, if he'd let me. And what would I do with this spare time? I suspect I would do what I usually do—spend it reading or thinking or talking to someone one-on-one, close activities that conjure up nothing more exciting than a cup of tea or a purring cat.

And yet, I used to be one of Those People in the early 2000s and the beginning of my twenties. You know “those people”: they're always on the go, their Sundays require a Monday because Sundays are full on, restless activity, from a boozy brunch to late dinner, phone constantly buzzing with texts and messages. A weekend that isn't complete with at least three house parties, preferably all on the same night so you could prove your social credentials by hopping from one to another, never putting your handbag down, because you could never settle. I took pride in my ability to socialise, relentlessly, without getting bored of having the same three conversations over and over again, pride in my throbbing head the next few days, because I knew what FOMO meant before the acronym was even invented. I went to parties and I blogged about them later; not because someone was paying me for it, but because by then my audience expected to see what I had done that weekend by Monday night, they waited for it, fingers poised above the comments button. What had I worn? Who had I kissed? What was Delhi like? And I delivered—spilling out insecurities and nausea, a little banter which I wished I could have actually said instead of only writing out on my blog, and so on and so forth. And, yet, I never realised that my favourite bit was actually the sitting at home and writing about all of my activities later.

I only came across “social menopause” as a term when this article was commissioned and I went looking for it. But it's so perfect! The feeling of slowing down in your late twenties and early thirties, when you'd rather go to a quiet restaurant than a heaving nightclub, when your best social evenings can be summed up with three friends and a bottle of wine on your coffee table, and you try and not schedule more than one engagement per weekend, because it takes you the rest of the week to recover. Everything is slowing down, and unless your friends keep pace with the extent of your ageing, sometimes it's quite lonely. They're all “WHEE CLUBS!” and the most exciting thing on your calendar is finishing watching Stranger Things on Netflix finally.

Especially now with the end of December upon us. Is there any other month in the whole year so full of anticipation and dread as this month? For me, in particular, this is also the month of my birth, so there's always that great expectation. As far back as I can remember, I've spent the week running up to my birthday wishing that birthdays were never invented, but also really looking forward to it at the same time. The day of my actual party, I'd be the one probably having a nervous breakdown from all the emotions, and so was fairly casual about the rest of the year. (Happy to report that this year, as always, I had a super time.) Anyway, for those of us not born in December, and there's the whole New Year's Thing. Oh god, the New Year's Thing. Anxious emails start going out in August, your social media feed gets filled with people running away, and finally there's only about a handful of you left in the same city, and what do you know? Each of those people is having their own individual New Year's Eve party. This is where you can either ride out your ageing (“I'd rather stay home and celebrate with one other person and a nice whiskey”) or be rebellious and rage against the dying of the light.

I found my friends in general falling into two camps: the ones that had achieved social menopause (SoMe) before me and the ones who were still ready to put on their high heels at the slightest bell of a Whatsapp group message.

The older SoMes usually had some sort of extenuating reason: some had married, and as marrieds, you were more excused from the usual carousel of social stuff than single people, the reason being that people with husbands or wives had to answer to one more person at home. Some had embraced their SoMes way before any of us did, and you knew not to ask those people out on Saturday night. They were your Thursday evening coffee friends, or your Tuesday impromptu early dinner friends, they could usually cook pretty well, and because they spent so much time at home, their homes, unlike yours, would be tidy and perfect, no plastic dishes, no need to BYOB either. You judged them a little bit before you went over, but there'd be a moment, when you'd be standing by their bookshelves, and it was only about 10.30 pm but the night was obviously, clearly over, and you'd envy them their surety. How nice to be so certain about your place in the world.

The ones not yet in SoMe desperately clung on to the last of the partying like they knew what was coming. Every time you messaged, “Not tonight, I'm tired” it was a betrayal. They were an army poised against ageing, and you were the person down, leaving them with fewer and fewer to fight. They took to new friends sometimes, and you'd see them smiling out at you from Facebook or Instagram photos, each captioned “best night ever!!!!” with duck face and glitter shoulders. Some, you'd lose track of entirely: there they were at a music festival in Berlin! There they were on a beach! There they were anywhere but home where things grew old, trying to recreate Neverland. They were the Lost Boys and Girls, and sometimes you run into them at parties, but often you take in the feather headpieces, the carefully faded t-shirt with an aspirational slogan and you hide behind the kitchen cabinets so they won't see you, and anyway they're not at the party long enough to notice you were there. Others come limping back to you once they're done, and now it's them who message you, “Can't make tonight, have had a hectic day at work.” And you message back a sad face, but secretly you're sort of glad that the guilt of cancelling isn't on you.

But I recently hit my mid-thirties. And I can see a glimmer—the very faintest little Tinkerbell light—in the distance. Now that it's okay for me to stay home for three weeks in a row, I'm suddenly up for being social again. I've accepted my SoMe, made peace with it, and as a result, my calendar is filling up. My blog is a thirty something's musings now, people don't engage with me on it, but occasionally there's the fun of taking the perfect picture, writing the perfect caption, composing the perfect tweet storm. Interestingly, my older SoMe friends are feeling more and more that way too—a few are hunting for the perfect New Year's Eve bash, while my friends who had not yet achieved SoMe-ness, are talking of quiet evenings at home. Maybe this is how the world is going to whirl now with all of us and longer life expectancies, maybe it will ebb and flow, like the end of Gatsby: “and so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

Newsletter: Year end recap edition

December 31st, and tomorrow is both a Monday and the beginning of a new year. It seems a bit silly to set so much store by a calendar date, but I'm sort of swept up in the global excitement. It seems like a new year is like a blank page in a brand new notebook: anything could happen. Anything could also happen on the first of September for example, but you know what I mean. It's also the day when you look back on the year that passed and do a report card for yourself. Ends of years are useful for taking stock, especially on a cold morning like this one, when the sun is weakly pushing through the fog, and your hot water bottle is warm against your belly.

I had a pretty good year. Some self-doubt crept in re: my writing, but I hope to conquer the little critical voices in my head and move on in 2018. After all, as a writer of fiction, you should exist only to please yourself and not the sales figures or literary festivals or what have you. Maybe there will always be self doubt, because there's always someone you compare yourself to, and we all, ultimately, want to be JK Rowling or Neil Gaiman, or failing that, Margaret Atwood. I'm grateful to my readers though, and everyone who has sent me a message or an email saying that they liked my books and what I do, it's very heartening, especially when you think you're going it alone. A few things will be recalibrated for me in 2018, but they are all baby, nascent ideas, and I'll tell you all about them when they are actually in practice. I will be finishing the next book of my Girls Of The Mahabharata series early next year and I have an essay out in a Penguin anthology which will be released in February, so I'm still writing, and writing makes me happy. (It's only post publishing that all the doubts start to creep in.)

Anyway, that's the bitterness of the pill, here's the sweet!

This year in life events: We got married! We were never very marriage-y people, but we came to the decision with the same certainity we've approached most things in our relationship: it's the right thing for us to do at this point. The boring reason: we wanted it to be easier to live and work in each other's countries. The romantic reason: love and all those other things. Our wedding was almost exactly how I wanted it to be (the only thing I would change was not being so tired after three days of partying--despite the fact that we had a "low key" wedding, we wound up having three parties anyway. Small intimate parties, but parties nonetheless.) Life has... not changed a bit. Most often, we forget we're married, except when we're using wedding presents around the house.


This year in bucket lists: I loved my month in Europe, even though now, five months later, it's taken on the dreamy quality in my memory of someone else's life. We went from Germany to Spain, from Spain to France, from France to Luxembourg, from Luxembourg to the Netherlands (via Belgium.) I got to see Europe by road, by train and by plane. I got to have expensive meals (at the beginning of my trip) and two euro steak and wine (at the end) and I loved all of it, even being broke, a little bit. Through my entire trip, I had this vague feeling of standing outside my body watching myself: pinch me, this is real, this is happening.

This year in writing: Many MANY freelance assignments. A few of my favourites: fancy book launches in Mint, how The Handmaid's Tale is relevant in modern India for Scroll, re-examining Marilla Cuthbert for Indian Express, on children's literature for Mint again, on reading the childhood memoirs of your favourite authors for Open, on why myth-lit is so popular for Deccan Chronicle. This plus several columns made my year one of heavy reading.

I also had a new book (The One Who Swam With The Fishes) out last summer, and read a lot more about the Mahabharata than I ever expected I would, and now I can rattle off back stories and sub-plots and literary analyses like a pro.

This year in little luxuries: My favourite money spend this year was hiring someone to do our garden for us. It was a bit expensive setting up, all the pots and soil and what not, but Ram Lal is a genius and I love that we barely ever buy veg anymore, since we have a steady crop of things to eat around the year. It has really changed the way I live my life, just the simple fact that we're growing FOOD. I now know the colours of the aubergine flower (purple, like the fruit), how pretty the lauki flower is in the hot sunshine, and how everything tastes so much better when you can just reach out and pluck it.

This year in habits: Getting K a compost bin for his birthday was changing the way we process trash in this house. We still put out a lot of paper and plastic (I blame Amazon and their easy next-day deliveries), but no wet waste at all, it all goes into our bin. He liked it so much, he bought a second one, and while I still find it somewhat icky, it doesn't smell, and the gardener uses it in our plants so it's all very circle of life.

This year in life lessons: A project that seemed super definite and like it was going to be a Thing, did not, finally wind up happening the way I expected it to, so I have learned to, um, curb my enthusiasm, so to speak. This is the year my optimism started to fade, just a little bit, and become tempered with realism. I think I'll always be a rose tinted glasses kind of person, but every now and then you have to take your glasses off and really look at the world.

And that's my report card! Let me know how the year worked out for you in the comments at the bottom of this. Happy New Year, and I'll see you all on the other side.

Booze, Bihar and the middle of the country

(Written in  April 2016 just after the Bihar liquor ban)

Our yoga teacher, who hails from Bihar, always has an item of the news he'd like to discuss with us during class. Often, he gets so carried away, that he winds up talking animatedly about it, and I have to provide rejoinders from huffing and puffing on the floor. This is how I heard about the whole JNU anti-nationalist incident, how I realised what odd-even meant to most folks, and most recently, how I heard about the effect of the liquor ban was having in Bihar.

It's quite nice for someone like me, who doesn't really keep up that much with the news, to have this Talking Head, so to speak, in my living room thrice a week. His political views are almost diametrically opposed to ours, so there's often a lively debate during the stretches, while we all argue about whose way is the best.

My house help is also from Bihar, and when the yoga teacher said the liquor ban was making everyone in Bihar “dizzy,” she came out of the kitchen, clutching a dustcloth, looking anxious. “What's happened in Bihar?” she asked, and he said, “Why, they've banned alcohol,” and she looked relieved and left, but not before he had engaged her in a Whose District Is Best conversation. (I'm tempted to side with her, only because she's from Madhubani, and I've always been partial to their art.)

Not a problem anymore in Bihar!

Despite my father being posted in that state for much of my childhood and adolescence, I don't know very much about it. I have stray, scattering memories: once of a playhouse with a thatched roof, once of his collector's bungalow in Gaya which had two tortoises in the pond outside who I called Napoleon and Josephine. Of Gaya, my memories are strong—I remember being taken to see the famous Boddhisatva tree and that large garden, and a kitten we acquired for the winter holidays which died tragically of pneumonia. I had been allowed to ask a friend to stay for the holidays, and the two of us ran in and out all day, reading and bathing in the British era bathroom complete with porcelain tub, and ending the whole vacation with a play we put on for my parents.

But then, even though my father stayed on, he preferred to come to Delhi, where my mother worked and I studied, and as I grew older, the idea of a summer with nothing to occupy me except my own fantasies grew less charming. He had been back in Delhi for two years—very important two years, because this is when cable TV and the internet first came to India—and when he was posted back there again, those two things were greater than anything Patna could offer.

Anyway, so I didn't really think about Bihar beyond the occasional reminder that it existed. My father loved his time there, but I only remember it from some long ago summers, when I was too young to consider it as a whole. But the two people who I see the most often are from that state—so obviously Bihar is tied up more with my life than I think. What do I know about it now? Not a whole lot more. Thanks to these two people—I have a bit of representation—how that state votes for instance or how long it takes to travel to your far-off district from the state capital, which gives me an idea of the geography of it.

I think it may be time for me to pay Bihar another visit—this time as someone who was reluctantly linked to it her whole life—even though I may not get a good glass of wine (let alone any kind of glass of wine). If our fates are entwined—Bihar's and mine, then it's time to get to know her a little bit.

So, you're going to a book launch this evening

(I wrote this ages ago for Elle. So long ago, that I can't remember what issue it was, but it still totally holds true.)

Just five more minutes and you can leave the house. Five minutes, and you won’t be the first one there, you won’t have to make awkward small talk with the author, while both of you wait around for more important guests. Five minutes, and you’ll still be on time enough to snag a parking spot—or a seat, if you’re wearing heels—and not so early that the waiters are still setting up around you. If you give it half an hour, you might be able to miss the interminable author reading, the questions that the moderator, usually a friend, feeds them, the ha-ha-look-how-funny-we-are-in-the-inner-circle questions from a friend, and make it just in time for the bar to open. You sometimes go for the readings, for an “important” book, or an author you’ve read before, or, most likely (who are we kidding?) your friend’s. If the invite says 7.30, you aim to leave your house at 7.35, if there are cocktails after, the invite will say “Cocktails will be served after the launch.” Otherwise, it’s just “beverages.” Beware the “beverage” launch.

The “high tea” launch, too, is misleading. The first time you saw that on an invitation, you were immediately slung back to one of Enid Blyton’s books of three or four chirpy siblings on a farm, who did all the chores without complaining about child labour, and who went in for high tea every evening, with sausages and meat pie and what not. You’re not expecting a meat pie from the book launch, but a chicken patty from Wenger’s would do in a pinch. More than a pinch. Biscuits and instant coffee is what you get. You stop going to book launches for the food. Some venues will still surprise you — the British Council Library in New Delhi, for instance, has a fried fish that’s moreish, and an apparently endless supply of wine. In case of emergency, you always have your after party, your back up plan, your cheap dive bar in the neighbourhood that you’ll take people to only to have them exclaim over the authenticity, the is-that-double-whiskey-only-that-much?

You consider your outfit in the mirror — too much, and you’ll be trying too hard, too little and no one will comment at all. The other girls have a casual hand with statement jewelry, piling it on over black tops and skinny jeans, but you’ve decided to go with a simple shift dress, a deceptively loose cut, which clings to you as you walk. Casual but elegant. Giving you the air of a person who only goes to certain parties, and who probably already has another three plans this evening. You sling your bag around your shoulders, a little extra cash in case you want to buy the book and have it signed that evening, a souvenir, as it were, and the mantra: car keys, house keys, wallet, cigarettes, lighter. 

yes, well....

Your friend who told you about this evening is standing by the door when you enter. She’s in publishing, or journalism, or PR, or she’s an author herself. She’s a useful person to know on a Tuesday night, when the only thing there is to do is crash a book party. She knows the very glamorous young male author, who is probably gay, but might not be, by the way his eyes rest on her bosom, as she introduces you to him. “There might be an after party,” she tells you, typing out a message on her iPhone, and raising one cool eyebrow and the side of her mouth in a smile to someone across the room.

You are not late enough to miss the reading. Young Glamorous Male Author goes on and on. There’s a challenging question from the audience about his homosexual themes, and whether that’s from real life. A frisson goes around, and the lulled audience sits up, alert and excited for gossip. He answers diplomatically, and you’re reminded of something you read about publicity: “If someone asks you a question you don’t want to answer, answer another question.”

Finally, they announce the drinks. This is the best part. This is the only reason most people are here. You grab a glass of wine from a swamped waiter. You throw your head back and laugh.

You are having a wonderful time.

How 'The Good Wife' is also the story of my relationship (sorta)

(A version of this piece came out in May 2016 in Arre)

Alicia Florrick came into my life as a present from my partner, who I had just begun dating at the time. He told me I might like The Good Wife—he had already seen the first two seasons, but didn't mind watching them again. He had seen the previous two seasons with his previous girlfriend, a fact which was left unsaid. I wondered if he would think of her each time the show's credit came on, a pixellated close up of actor Julianna Marguiles' face, each speck of her eye revealing nothing. We have a thing with credits of all the shows we love, we sing the theme tune when we can or make gestures with our hands. “The WIFE that is GOOD!” is our Good Wife chant, as soon as the music comes on.

It became a show that bound us together—two years of long distance, with a minimised Skype window at the bottom to watch a series premiere. Or saving them all up to binge watch together in bed when we were together again. We blazed through Breaking Bad the same way, had a weekly Game Of Thrones date, but when it came to The Good Wife, it was a softer, simpler pleasure—not set in a world of violence or rape, not with terrible things happening to people all the time. And as Alicia grew into her role, so did I.

WWAD: what would Alicia do? Alicia was always classy, never compromising. I took mental notes about the way she held herself, her peplum suits, the way she had of shutting down a conversation that didn't suit her.

Let's be clear though—I am the opposite of Alicia in every single way. I recently read an article on a trick to make you feel more confident: stand in a superhero position, arms akimbo, hands on your hips. I do this a lot, even before parties, especially before phone calls I don't want to make. Alicia would never have to stand in front of the mirror like this, making eye contact with herself, feeling a bit foolish for the exercise. 

Diane is an unsung hero & need her own article though

 

Similarly, it took me the better part of one year to completely relax into my relationship, to stop crossing my fingers and knocking on wood. As Alicia rose through the ranks of her law firm, so did I become more confident in my new role as a happy attached woman in an adult relationship. The men up until then had been versions of each other, emotionally unavailable in deep, hidden ways, delighting in playing guessing games where I always felt like everyone else had the script except me. I wanted to be mysterious, heavy lidded and bad-ass in a way that would make people wonder about my past, but at the same time, it felt like a fake profile I was trying on. I essentially was trying to emulate The Good Wife's other ass-kicking female character. I'm talking of the late, great Kalinda Sharma, bisexual, weapon ready, and who always answered questions about her identity with a simple, “I'm Kalinda.” Kalinda took no prisoners, Kalinda wore a leather motorcycle jacket, and Kalinda had affairs with beautiful FBI agents and Alicia's husband, both. We never knew very much about Kalinda, and before we could explore her further, she vanished—from Alicia's life and from ours. Kalinda felt like she was being held up as a role model, but it's hard work, being mysterious, and I think the show runners felt that way too, because after one tantalising glimpse of her past, she was out.

For another reason why, we need to move away from Alicia and examine the woman who played her—Marguiles. Rumoured to be a difficult person to work with, she had a falling out with actor Archie Panjabi, and as a result, Kalinda got a truncated story arc and disappeared. Do we blame Alicia for Marguiles' failings? I did. Alicia herself would have never let a “feud” whatever it was, get in the way of her professional life. Marguiles did.

By then it was season three or four, two years into my relationship with my partner and with Alicia herself. I grew intimate with both, letting my guard down and letting them in. In the case of my love life, things grew brighter, we wrapped ourselves around each other's lives and got cats. We worried about their health together. We merged two flats into one. We discovered flaws and kinks and loved each other even more for it. With The Good Wife, my relationship soured. I didn't want flaws in my television show, let alone from my beloved Female Lead Character. I began to mock them, “the only firm in the entire United States,” I'd say as I watched, rolling my eyes at the case of the week. I watched Alicia chug glasses of wine in scene after scene, watched her daughter become a fundamentalist Christian, watched her son be written off practically, all the while primming up my mouth. I did not approve. I strongly did not approve. I was ready to cut her loose, like a friendship that has run its course.

In the end, we still had a weekly The Good Wife date, but only because we had been with the show for so long. It's a bit like that friend you have on Facebook, someone you haven't actually met in years, but whose life pops up on your newsfeed—first they got married, then they had a baby, then another one, and then the children grow up—and you can unfriend them if you choose, but it's not worth the effort, besides you still have a sneaky interest in their lives, because you've been a spectator for so many years.

I sort of miss her. We grew together, Alicia and I, before we grew apart.

Newsletter: Dreams and overthinking it

This week's newsletter now on the blog! Also if you'll cast your eyes upward you'll see lots of shiny new blurbs for my new book, which you really should read if you haven't already. Subscribe here to get me on the reg in your inboxes--no spam, I promise. I'm totally going to try to post more regularly on my poor neglected blog and not just Instagram updates either, so just shout out if you're listening.  



Call it the age of the house, call it the weird light that filters through the dirty skylights in the morning or the ambient noise of the birds (and the very non-ambient knocking on our window by some other bird) but we all have vivid dreams in our Goa house, and this includes the house guest we have staying with us. Mostly, I can't remember, because my internal clock has been set to 9:39 am for the last five days, and by 9:39, I am done dreaming, and half beginning the process of waking up, which for me--like many of you--involves reaching out for my phone, scrolling through my feeds, seeing what everyone has been up to. (It's a bad habit, but it wakes me up like nothing else does.)

Anyway, I'm not going to bore you with a long description of my dreams, except for one detail: there was a machine, which you could attach to your finger and it would tell you what sort of music was inside your soul. And this ginger cat that went before me, had a jazz tune, but like in a cat sort of way: it went jazz-jazz-jazz-plink-plonk, and he was a happy cat. And mine was a classical tune, with piano, and I wanted to Shazam it, I remember, in my dream, but I couldn't find my phone, so I decided to go through classical piano playlists when I woke up to see which one it was. Alas, I can no longer remember how it went, but it was an uplifting piece of music though, poignant and happy all at the same time, so I guess that sums up my state of mind.

***

Our friends invited to us to a barbecue on the beach after hours, and I realised, sitting there, drinking red wine out of a plastic cup, that I am absolutely hopeless about camping or roughing it. I was of zero help to anyone, except for some comments made from the peanut gallery about how to position the wood so it caught fire. Watching food or the fire being prepared isn't fascinating, but what is is the muted roar of the ocean, the hulking, almost pre-historic shadows of the fishing boats parked next to you, the soft roughness of sand, the burn on your face when you lean in too close to the fire, the crackling red patterns on the wood. The food, when it was done, was delicious, but nothing compared to just being out there, on an empty beach, the sounds of partying in the distance. It's nice also that your friends accept your limitations, and know that you are a lily of the field, you don't toil or spin, but, one hopes, you make it up in other ways.

***

Goa has gotten quite chilly this past week, we've pulled out a blanket and sleep without the fan on. Which also means I'm woefully unprepared for returning to Delhi in two weeks--I have no sweater, no socks, not even a warm shirt, so I picture myself obsessively, standing outside the airport in the middle of the night, freezing and then making my way up to the flat which will also be cold and I will be too tired to pull out my winter clothes just then, so I'll just have to wait till the next day. What comforts me is that I can picture the red trunk in which our blankets are stored. I'll go into an obsessive spiral about being cold, and then I'll remember the blankets are in the red trunk and then I picture the trunk, the feel of the handle as I lift it, the heaviness of the quilts when I pull them out, the way one cat will jump inside the box, and it's almost as though I'm there already. Sometimes I live in two places at the same time: the place I actually am, and the place I visit in my imagination. If I can't picture something, I feel awfully... lost. Like I'm swimming and I can't feel the bottom with my feet. Like I'm moving towards something in the dark. Which is why when I travel to a new place, I like to look at hotel or Airbnb accomodations several times: there is where I will sleep. That is where the light will hit. That is where I will put my suitcase. Is this only me?

***

I wrote a few articles these past two weeks, which I haven't yet linked to so here's my books column for this month in Hindu BLInk, (two memoirs and a novel-memoir) and a cover story for the Deccan Chronicle which came out ages ago, but which I forgot to link on what the rise of mythological fiction means for India. (The nicest part of this story is that I struck up conversation with Karthika Nair who blurbed my book and whose book Until The Lions was one of my favourite reads for the year it came out.)

***
 

Thursday link list!

 

There were cries all around. The hard earned money of many, saved as little cash in Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes were no longer of any value. It looked like Nero’s Rome. For six months, I documented the lives of people in queues and their agony. The better part of Indians are resilient people, some helped each other, and the old and pregnant women were taken care of by people standing with them for hours.

- Gorgeous photo essay on the effects of demonitisation. #neverforget Modi began act two of his passion play with a feather-light tickle of the audience’s funny-bone. Across the country, he said, crores of people are sleeping peacefully in their beds. But the corrupt, numbering a few thousands, cannot sleep; they try to buy sleeping pills but they can’t get any because, no money.
The illusion he conjured up had the audience in splits. And an audience that is laughing is an audience that is not thinking – thus, it never wondered for a moment why those imagined insomniacs couldn’t get their fix, given that the demonetized currency remained legal tender in pharmacies.

- And while we're on this subject, I loved this story about Modi as a master magician, showing you one thing to distract from another.

I think she would be shocked. If the client never reveals the truth, I must continue the role indefinitely. If the daughter gets married, I have to act as a father in that wedding, and then I have to be the grandfather. So, I always ask every client, “Are you prepared to sustain this lie?” It’s the most significant problem our company has.

- What if your father was a man hired by your mother to make you feel better about yourself?

In truth, in the years since its peak in the mid‑2000s, Second Life has become something more like a magnet for mockery. When I told friends that I was working on a story about it, their faces almost always followed the same trajectory of reactions: a blank expression, a brief flash of recognition, and then a mildly bemused look. Is that still around? Second Life is no longer the thing you joke about; it’s the thing you haven’t bothered to joke about for years.

- On how people are using the platform Second Life, for just that, a second life. Yes, still.

Curious how this cliché influenced real women, I conducted a poll on Instagram that asked women whether they’d ever worn a man’s button-down pre- or post-romantic encounter. I wasn’t surprised when 81% said no. I also received hundreds of direct messages from women weighing in on the topic, a significant number of which pointed out that it reinforces problematic body standards wherein women are assumed to be more petite than men. One woman confessed that she purchases large dress shirts to keep in her closet because she often hooks up with men who are smaller or shorter than she is. “I have large shirts awaiting me so I still feel small,” she wrote.

- Literally some of K's shirts fit me as well as mine do, except for being super long. On the women-wearing-their-lover's-button-down-shirts trope in film and TV.

In October 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a national campaign called Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, meaning “Clean India Mission.” While it sounds well-intentioned, the announcement came one week after the announcement for a campaign called “Make In India,” which encourages international corporations to bring their manufacturing jobs to India—a goal many see as contradictory to promoting a cleaner environment.

- Another photo essay on the people who live by the Yamuna.


‘World class’ is a term Shammi frequently uses while giving a tour of the building. Physical education classes are underway for senior girls in the new covered courtyard. Some pause to wish the principal. Shammi points to the panelled false ceiling, diffused lights, clean and tiled washrooms, large cans of handwash, water coolers — all newly added at the school. All classrooms have new blue desks and seats. The fans and lights work. But the school’s overarching pride is the 25m swimming pool still under construction. “Can you imagine a government school with a swimming pool?” asks Birender Gupta, the school’s estate manager, who recently moved his children to this school from the private institution they were attending in Bihar. Parents like him are on the rise, says Shammi. “This year we’ve received more enquiries from parents whose children are in private schools,” she says. Education is free in government schools up to Std VIII and the fee is ₹20 a month thereafter.

- In the good news, a lot of Delhi's government schools are getting a full on makeover.

These houses are now being named ‘Portuguese Houses’ perhaps because of the influence of tourism since ‘Portuguese’ is a more exotic denomination than Goan…There is no need to point out that houses such as those in Goa exist nowhere in any town or village in Portugal, Brazil, or Portuguese-influenced Africa. They are solely Goan.”

- This article is why I no longer call our Assagao house a "Portugese home" but it's also about so much more.

Drawing Vaginas In The Museum Of Goa

(This appeared as my F Word column in September 2016)

“You missed the best part,” my friend whispered to me as I slid into the seat next to her, “We all had to write our fantasies down.” All the fantasies were now in a tote bag with a rainbow motif, and people in the audience were taking in turns to read them aloud—anonymously.

This was The Pleasure Project (tagline: putting the sexy into safe sex), an “educational resource promoting safer sex to women and men.” They work mainly with NGOs and, surprise, surprise, the porn industry. And that weekend in the Museum of Goa, they were doing a talk for anyone who wanted to attend. I did. Of course I did.

After the bag had been handed back to her, sexual rights advocate, Arushi Singh took a moment to chat about the fantasies as they were read out. Some were out there (“in space!”) some relatively tamer (“in an aunty's room while she cooks for a traditional festival.”) most, though were about doing it in public. In the woods, on a beach, in the sea, people watching you, you all alone, in an elevator, it seemed the wildest thing most of that audience could dream up was being outside, away from the bedroom.

***

I wondered why that was. It's a popular choice to call out during a game of Never Have I Ever, never have I ever had sex in public. But then, you think back to your teen years, or your twenties, or however old you were when you lost your virginity, it was all in, technically, “public” if you didn't have the luxury of your own room. In Bombay, you see lovers gathered on the rocks by the sea, shielded from view by umbrellas, the spokes quivering just a little when the embraces grow more fervent. In Delhi, there are parks full of people touching, spooning, groping, the only place they can be—anonymous in a city full of strangers, you almost feel like you're in private. And for many people, their first glimpse of sexual activity could have actually been their parents, all of them in that one single room, a bedsheet thrown back before it was hastily drawn up again. Maybe the fantasy wasn't really “in public,” but “alone in public” because where in this country are you ever truly alone?

***

I watched the audience in the Museum of Goa's small auditorium get drawn out of themselves. Mostly middle aged women and men with a smattering of truly young teen boys sitting at the back looking nervous, peppered here and there with people like my friends and I, sexually liberated twenty and thirty somethings, for whom talking about sex in public was a bit risque, but not really.

The conversation turned, as conversation about sex often does, to consent. I think someone made a joke about a willing dog being good enough, and Singh gently corrected them. “Animals can't give consent,” she said, reminding us neither can children, neither can someone who is drunk.

***

There were no “tie me down and control me” fantasies in the rainbow bag, which stayed pretty much in safe zones. I wondered if, with sexual violence on the rise, whether fantasies involving sexual violence had become too real, too in your face to be expressed anymore. There's nothing wrong with liking to be controlled, as long as you agree to it.

Or have a safe word.

***

One man got very angry. I think he was drunk. “What is your message,” he kept shouting, until my partner sitting next to me shouted back, “Whatever you want it to be!”

Later, he accosted us outside. “It's not good to talk about sex in public,” he said. “It's important,” said my partner, “For instance, there are so many sexually transmitted diseases around, maybe discussions about sex would help to educate people.”

“I'm a doctor,” the shouty man assured us, between swigs of his beer, “I'm a doctor, and that's nonsense.”

***

Later we were handed paper and crayons and told to draw a vagina. All of us, even men, to contribute to a vagina wall. My friends reached for the pinks and the purples, yonis emerging in all shades of a rainbow. I was uninspired so I made mine out of words, but I wrote the words too big so my “clitoris” dwarfed the purple “vulva” I drew on either side of it. I added bright orange pubic hair and two green hands. Now it looked friendly, waving, removed of mystique. One beautifully artistic rendering in blue and yellow looked like a lamp post. “A temple,” insisted my friend, but all I could see was a lamp post. The teen boys at the back sent forward lovingly drawn pictures of the fallopian tube, ovaries &co., one each, marked “the female vagina” and signed. It may not have been them, but I've given them ownership anyway. I wondered if they'd come up and look at the rest, maybe take photos to pore over later.

The one that stayed with me the longest was a long lashed eye in the middle of two legs scribbled over with angry red. At least three were heart shaped, one was a flower, another was a butterfly.