Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan's Blog, page 42

What I'm Reading

Just finished this, becrumbed with flakes from the chicken patty I got for tea, what an indulgent Saturday. This book was recommended to me by an algorithm, the "new better Goodreads" a website called The Story Graph, which takes what you're in the mood for, and your reading history and tosses up recommendations. Kintu was on top of the list and I bought it because I love long sprawling tales that make the historical personal. And also what I knew about Uganda could fit on the head of a pin, and now I know so much more, so easily. The names took a while for my Eurocentric brain to be able to tell apart and the author doesn't offer translations for words so you have to use context clues but it was an incredible book, spanning decades and madness and history and all these offshoots of one family and their own personal stories before it ties up in one knot at the end again. I loved it and now I'm already looking for more African literature to read. Give suggestions? #kintu #jennifernansubugamakumbi #uganda #bookstagram #mrmbookclub #120in2020

The Fibroid Surgery Expert Edition

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 Last year, around this time, I had a bunch of fibroids taken out of my uterus. I was reminded of this because this photo popped up.

That’s me, your humble narrator, sitting up in the hospital bed, eating hospital food. I had just been told I could go home, so I changed into regular clothes, but they were taking so long with all the paperwork that I thought I may as well watch a quick episode of the BBC Pride and Prejudice miniseries. I was in hospital for about three days, including the day of my surgery and then I stayed home for about a week after that, but I was able to climb all the way up to our third-and-a-half floor walk up apartment.

Anyway, I remember right before I was going in, I kept looking for information on the internet and there was surprisingly little available. Fibroid surgery is super common now, one friend of mine had already gone through it the year before and she told me what she had gone through, and there was an endometriosis forum on Reddit, but none of it was exactly what I was going to go through. So I thought, one year down, this very specific newsletter should address it, in case you or someone you know might have fibroid surgery in the future?

Firstly, about one in five women have fibroids—is that a lot? I just totally pulled that figure out of my ass—okay, let me try again: out of my vast and varied friend collection, two people are going to have to have their fibroids removed and two already have. This is not counting all the random people I have met who also had the surgery. They’re little non-cancerous tumours that cluster in and around your uterus. No one knows how they grow, she says grandly, and also probably inaccurately, but they seem to have gotten quite common.

I had a lot, but the biggest ones were all five centimetres long and sitting in a cluster, so my uterus looked like I was five months pregnant or something. (I was very interested to see if my stomach would flatten after the surgery because it stuck way out, and because that was obviously one of my main concerns, since I am a combination of extremely lazy and also extremely vain.) (It did! Not a lot—still need exercise and diet sadly—but I am much flatter around the stomachular area than I used to be, which is excellent.)

There are still a bunch of little fibroids left after all that, so eventually the gynae says I’ll need a hysterectomy, but surgery is no fun, I really did not enjoy being at a hospital, and I have greater sympathy for those that have to go in on a regular basis, so I’m letting that be Future Meenakshi’s problem. They got them out with laproscopy, which is apparently the best way to go about it, but some people will also recommend a C-section. What they didn’t tell me was that my stomach was going to be covered with all these scars, I have like five of them, and they’re quite prominent, even if they’re small, so no bikini modelling for me in the future, although I feel sort of bad-ass with my scars as well. It’s like having a set of (really ugly) tattoos.

Anyway. What can you expect? You’re best of having some sort of health insurance because this is an expensive surgery. I mean, I don’t know what a cheap surgery is, actually, but this was quite pricey as far as these things go. I think it was the whole laproscopicness of it. You’ll be purging for the entire day before, thanks to some pre-surgery powder they make you have, so prepare to be close to a loo, but they’ll tell you that. There’s a whole enema thing, which is also yucky. The nurses can be very nice or they can be bullies, so remember to stand your ground (if you can) about stuff you want or don’t. I was trying to be a good patient, then I thought fuck it, who am I trying to impress, so I complained a lot, and it was okay, because I was the one fresh out of surgery dammit! I wasn’t planning on winning any bravery awards then.

I wrote that paragraph and then I thought about the conversation we’re having about doctors and nurses now, in the middle of the pandemic. Every now and then I forget where we are and what we’re doing here. Um. Yeah. Be nice to doctors and nurses but not at the cost of your own health, okay? Don’t be afraid to say, “Ow” and “That hurts!” and “Do we have to do that?” Because you are the patient and they will listen! That’s the amazing thing. I hated the intravenous antibiotics, they made my whole arm burn and sting like fire ants were eating me from the inside and I got them to switch to oral antibiotics as soon as they could, because otherwise they would’ve kept me on the damn needle forever. That’s why it’s also nice to have supportive people next to you, people who will take your side, instead of trying to please the doctor. I had my mum and K, and they advocated for me when I couldn’t.

Prepare to be tired for a few weeks. It takes a while for the body to heal and that means you won’t be able to stand up for ages at a party (I went to a party as soon as I could, but I spent the whole time sitting down) (PARTIES! This may no longer be a problem also. Dammit, this is a very forgetful sort of day.) Just when you think you’ll never have energy again, you surprise yourself by how much energy you have. A month after my surgery, I was walking eleven-twelve kilometres a day in Italy. I was fine. I was great, in fact. (HOLIDAYS.)

Some stuff hurt like a bitch. Waking up after the surgery, they’d pumped me full of carbon dioxide so my belly would swell, and that uncomfortable bloated feeling lasted a while. (I won’t be delicate: it feels like you have to fart and you can’t.) They are obsessed with your poop, by the way, because if you can poop, it means nothing went wrong in that general area. I am a nervous pooper and find it hard to go in strange places, so finally, I was begging for a laxative so they’d let me go home. There’s a drainage tube poking out of your side, and that hurts when they pull it out and the pain is unreal. (Here’s more about the actual surgery & aftermath in an older newsletter.)

Meanwhile, I was at this really nice, really fancy maternity hospital and people kept having babies and I was feeling bad for the nurses who had to cover my room because they didn’t get to look at babies, which I imagine would be one of the perks of their job?

Oh, I completely forgot one cool thing that’s happened post-surgery. One of the drawbacks of my fibroids was that they were pressing on my bladder so I had to pee, like, constantly. (If unattended, they can make you incontinent.) And now! I can go hours just like a normal person! This is particularly great when I travel. I still have a tiny bladder, but now I can plan my tiny bladder stops and not be caught unawares.

Feel free to write to me if you’re going in for this surgery some time post lockdown, post COVID, post whatever and you have questions. I am happy to be your Resident Fibroid Surgery expert.

Today in Photo

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via Instagram https://instagr.am/p/CFQ_RkMJi_l/ [image error]

What I'm Reading

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What I'm Reading

via Instagram https://instagr.am/p/CFJIfboJyPm/

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.

Middlemarch, George Eliot and the female novelist (me)

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I don’t know what it was that drew me towards Middlemarch NOW, in the middle of writing a difficult book. Maybe because I wanted to read a difficult book to keep my brain limber, does that ever happen to you? Do you sometimes want to consume something challenging so it feels like your brain is doing jumping jacks, flexing in the far corners of your mind? If you think of your brain in a body, then what is that body doing, what is that body eating (Netflix? romances? murder mysteries?) does that body still recall how to read something one way and interpret it for you so it means something else? (This happens when you are reading poetry, for example.)

As a novelist, reading is the way I come up with new ideas. Something will set something else off: oh, this scene reminds me of that person I met five years ago. I wonder what would have happened if… Or, interesting, this book mentions five different perspectives, but this is what is still missing, I wonder what a book like that would look like. People ask me a lot, young people I mean, back when I did book tours across the country (those were fun) “how can I be a writer?” and I say, “Read more.” And they look slightly disappointed, I don’t know what they are expecting, maybe a rattled off set of tips: “1. Wake up at 6 am every morning. 2. Sit in front of [COMPUTER BRAND] and open an empty Word document. Use the Garamond font (my favourite) and type out the first sentence.” Actually, knowing our Indian education system, they are probably expecting that. My first and only art class in primary school was us copying one picture on to our blank sheets, the person who copied it best, got the best marks. Of course, this is the tenet of a lot of art schools: learn to draw realistically before you can break the rules, but I say pooh to all that. Draw the way you used to draw as a child, write the way you used to write as a child. Not thinking of who would see the picture or the poem, just doing it for the delight of it.

But what has all this got to do with Middlemarch? Plenty. For one thing, as you’re immersed in the book, and I bought a paperback copy, hefty and hard on the wrists and my stomach on which it rested, you realise that if George Eliot aka Mary Anne Evans aka Marian, darling had not written for the sheer joy of it, had not created the kind of novel that she wanted to read, we wouldn’t have this book at all. Middlemarch is, as I put in the thumbnail description of my bookish Instagram: “Pride and Prejudice but with marriages, not weddings and not just rich people, it is Anna Karenina but English pastoral, it is A Suitable Boy but with more ethical lessons tossed in.”

I did find myself thinking of Jane Austen a lot, it was inevitable, here was English provincial life, but as I said, Marian took the village of Middlemarch and explored it from all angles. We are never allowed to linger on a marriage proposal too long, or follow a happy couple during a honeymoon.

There are three marriages that occur during the course of the book (I’m not counting the two that happen in the finale) and of those, one was between a pompous old man and a very young woman who wants to do good in the world and feels the only way to do this is by marrying someone great and helping them, between two extremely attractive people who have been flirting steadily for a while, and a side-character marriage of the previously mentioned starry-eyed young woman’s sister to her rejected suitor.

Of these marriages, our main characters are all unhappy. Dorothea (who marries the old man) realises that her husband isn’t as smart as he says he is, nor as wise, her husband, in turn (and this is Marian’s gift, that she gives us all these points of view, not condemning or mocking, just holding a mirror up) realises that marriage really isn’t for him. So the two of them labour on, and it gets more and more claustrophobic to read about them, I remember one bit that stood out to me, I’ll paraphrase here: “whenever he said ‘my love’ he used his coldest tones.”

And while you start out by rolling your eyes at Dorothea, you are the reader after all, you are older and wiser and you know how marriages are, by the time you are in the middle of her unhappy marriage with her, you long to save her as well. George Eliot keeps describing her as “good,” everyone who comes in contact with her, seems to feel the same way, and yet you’re not annoyed by her as you are by other saintly characters in literature. (One day I will do a whole thing on What Katy Did and how poor Katy was forced to tamp down her rebellious hoyden nature because of that prig of a Cousin Helen who taught her to be the soul of the house and never complain about her backache or whatever. Bah.) Why does Dorothea not annoy me? I think because Marian/George gets so deeply into her psyche, you’re not just looking at a paper cut-out of a person, like saintly people in books so often are, you looking at a real young woman with ambition and drive. She really wants to change the world for the better, and she keeps tilting at it, attempting to fix things and keeps being thwarted by her well-meaning male relatives. In the beginning, sure, she’s all poses, she’s like, “Oh I like riding too much, I must give it up” but the genius of Marian is that you are invited to roll your eyes at her, as much as her younger sister does, just sitting there, wanting a necklace from their dead mother’s jewellery box and being snubbed a little in her pleasure.

Mary Anne Evans was born to loving parents, she had loving siblings also, but she was considered too unattractive to get married, and since she was pretty smart, her father decided to educate her. Which makes me think that it was probably better to be born ugly and smart than pretty and smart, even though I know vanity is strong in all of us, but imagine being pretty and smart, and you’re dying to be educated, and read and learn and your fam’s like, “Nah, we’ll just wait for a good man to take you off our hands.” INFURIATING. Luckily, for Marian, which is what her family and loved ones called her and which is what I will as well, she was a homely child, and she made the most of her intelligence by continuing to read and teaching herself the classics when she was forced to leave school and look after her father.

After that, she took the German she had taught herself to read and translated a controversial text for that time: The Life of Jesus, which brought her to the attention of the London crowd, and pretty soon, she was the assistant editor of a magazine, and quickly moved up to the editor’s role, UNHEARD of for women at that time, especially since it was a political journal not just household tips or whatever. In fact, if Marian could be said to have a Fatal Flaw, I think she didn’t like women very much. I’m basing this on her essay, largely quoted on the internet in articles about Middlemarch. It was called Silly Novels by Lady Novelists and I’m putting some excerpts here:

[On their heroines] Her eyes and her wit are both dazzling; her nose and her morals are alike free from any tendency to irregularity; she has a superb contralto and a superb intellect; she is perfectly well dressed and perfectly religious; she dances like a sylph, and reads the Bible in the original tongues. 

We had imagined that destitute women turned novelists, as they turned governesses, because they had no other “ladylike” means of getting their bread.  […] Under these impressions we shrank from criticising a lady’s novel: her English might be faulty, but we said to ourselves her motives are irreproachable; her imagination may be uninventive, but her patience is untiring.  Empty writing was excused by an empty stomach, and twaddle was consecrated by tears. 

To judge from their writings, there are certain ladies who think that an amazing ignorance, both of science and of life, is the best possible qualification for forming an opinion on the knottiest moral and speculative questions.

Okay, but then we’re sort of side-eyeing Marian, like, come on Marian, why let the sisterhood down and so on, and then she says:

The foolish vanity of wishing to appear in print, instead of being counterbalanced by any consciousness of the intellectual or moral derogation implied in futile authorship, seems to be encouraged by the extremely false impression that to write at all is a proof of superiority in a woman. On this ground we believe that the average intellect of women is unfairly represented by the mass of feminine literature, and that while the few women who write well are very far above the ordinary intellectual level of their sex, the many women who write ill are very far below it. 

No sooner does a woman show that she has genius or effective talent, than she receives the tribute of being moderately praised and severely criticised. By a peculiar thermometric adjustment, when a woman’s talent is at zero, journalistic approbation is at the boiling pitch; when she attains mediocrity, it is already at no more than summer heat; and if ever she reaches excellence, critical enthusiasm drops to the freezing point. Harriet Martineau, Currer Bell, and Mrs. Gaskell have been treated as cavalierly as if they had been men.

So, you see, she really was on our side after all. And the arguments she makes her about “silly novels” can be applied to us right now in the twenty first century, and also to all sexes. Silly novels are a phenomenon that never actually dies. Today, looking at Indian romance novels (written primarily by men, how the world has changed) we can see that the hero is always well-meaning, dashing but emotionally foolish, the woman is always a peculiar mixture of weak and fragile and yet preternaturally wise, and the romance is always ill-advised but one we’re supposed to root for anyway. Meanwhile, I can’t remember the last Big Debut Fiction Darling that was written by a man. I think it was Amitabh Bagchi? But that wasn’t debut, no? And women soar ahead.

The other bad marriage in Middlemarch is that of Rosamund, the mayoral candidate’s daughter with the new doctor in town, Lydgate. Rosamund is extremely attractive, we’re told about her flaxen hair and her blue eyes, and we’re also told that she longs to better herself, get good company round her own table, her father’s friends are too low brow for her. She’s aware of her beauty and fixates on Lydgate, the new guy, to rescue her from a lifetime of being a provincial wife. And Lydgate, by the same measure, although he doesn’t actually want to get married, falls prey to her blue eyes and helpless face. And then, of course, they realise that they didn’t really know each other at all before the wedding. Rosamund is obstinate and sly, Lydgate is in debt and harsh and easily manipulated. I hated Rosamund as I read her and yet, I loved the fact that I hated her, if that makes sense. She breathed, she moved, she thought, this little china doll! I was in her head! To make a character like that alive like that, what skill.

Of course, as I write my own book side-by-side, I begin to think of the lessons I’ve learned from Marian. How to examine a character from a distance, for example. How to work in thoughts and beliefs, but not in a preachy way, but as a way to both keep the story going and provide some context. After all, we do not exist in black holes, so neither should our books. How to, also, make sure that all your characters have ambition and heart and complex psychologies of their own, even the supporting ones, so that they all feel like real people, not just painted extras on a background. I don’t want to write like Marian, because well, I worked very hard to develop my own voice, my own style, so I write like MYSELF and no one else, but I want to take away some lessons from her, the same way I do with other great writers.

George was always very popular, by the way, no artistic struggle there to hold up as inspiration. Her first book was an instant bestseller, and she found love with a man named George something, whose first name she adopted as her pseudonym because she loved it so much. (‘Eliot’ because it was a nice round mouthful of a name.) He was married, so they lived together for about twenty years before he died, and for a while, everyone was scandalised, but Queen Victoria was a great fan of Marian’s work so after a royal visit with the Princess, everyone was like, “Well, ok, if royalty is fine with it then why not?”

After her George’s death, she married a man twenty years younger than herself (go Marian!) and went off to Venice on a honeymoon, where this young fellow jumped out of a window and into a canal (he survived), some speculate because he didn’t want to have sex with her, but you know, who knows why he did? Marian was no beauty, sure, but she was a great woman, and any man would be lucky to have her, and men should stop being such delicate darlings about these kind of things, and remember that very young women have been having sex with very old men for centuries and no one jumps out of windows dramatically.

Anyway, one last story about Marian: at the height of her fame, she had to have her living room in London extended, because of the crowds of people who came to visit her every Sunday evening, when she hosted an apparently open-to-all party.

I wish you all great success in your writing careers (or okay, other careers also), and hope at some time in the future we must all have our living rooms extended to accommodate all our loving fans.

PS: More Middlemarch? This is a great essay by Rebecca Mead, who turned it into a book.

 

 

How often must we confront ourselves in our past?

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They announced that the exams would be cancelled for classes X and XII, I think? One of those X standards anyway. Exams were the fucking bane of my life, man. I am not academically inclined, perhaps you’re surprised, perhaps you’re thinking, “Oh M, you read so much! You have random information about random things! You KNOW ALL THE FONTS!” To which I say, yes, but they never taught that shit in school. School was… oof, even writing the words “school was” is bringing back all these memories of how much I hated it. I’ll try to articulate it a bit more: school was a lot of focusing on the stuff you couldn’t do, without enough leisure to explore what you could. They didn’t know how to teach maths at my school, which was Sardar Patel Vidyalaya, SPV to those who know it well, and the reason I say this is not because I think I would’ve been great at maths or whatever, I don’t think I’m that-way inclined, generally, and also I think I am slightly dyslexic when it comes to numbers, when there are a lot of them they all swim up in front of my eyes and become interchangeable. (I am never the person calculating the tab at a table, unless it’s a straight splitting-it.) But before SPV, classes 1 to 5, I was okay at maths. I was never a Young Genius, but I was fine, you know? No one ever said, “My god, she sucks” even when I reversed all my digits when I wrote them down. And I did okay enough on the entrance exam to get into the school and then I did okay enough for the first year—they were too busy tut-tutting over my terrible Hindi and Sanskrit, see, they had Hindi-medium classes until class 6, so I was catching up to all that also—and then stuff just started to go downhill.

There should be more to school than mathematics and there were plenty of extra-curricular activities, but those were neglected by my teachers. All they cared about was the damn mathematics, and I grew more and more unhappy, I didn’t even really have FRIENDS, I just had people I hung out with which is very different as you know, and my teachers let me slip through the cracks, because as a non-star-student I was not very important to them, and everything was falling that year, like dominoes, because I spent so much time gazing at those maths textbooks, I neglected everything else, and I got worse and worse at everything. (Except English, I loved my English teacher, she was the only one who seemed to see me as a person.) I was never any good at sports, and the only compulsory extra-curricular we had was sewing, which also I was terrible at. They must’ve had a school magazine or a drama club or something, but I never joined, I was too busy playing catch-up with my friends, who all seemed older than me even though we were all the same age, they just knew things that I didn’t, and I was too busy trying to stay in remedial maths, and do okay on my tests, and try not to feel ashamed when I had to leave the regular class and join my own class of stupids.

I don’t think a lot of Indian teachers know how to teach. They didn’t in my time, I hope they’ve gotten better now, but what it was for me and my peers growing up was: the people who had a natural ability got taught, the ones who didn’t, got told that they’d fail a class, that was the big threat, you’ll fail, you’ll fail, you’ll fail. Which I did, by the way. SPV was concerned about their board exam scores the next year, so, because I did pretty terribly in maths and physics, they made me repeat class 9. And that is when my life changed.

I was so humiliated at having to go back to class nine, with the babies one year junior to me, while all my friends went to a different wing entirely for their more serious class 10 stuff. that I begged my parents to send me to boarding school. I wanted to get away from Delhi, start anew somewhere where no one knew who I was, the Remedial Maths girl, the one falling behind. They listened, I went off to The Lawrence School, Lovedale, where I realised I was smart again, thanks to repeating the year, I already knew all the theories of the maths stuff, and though I had to work after hours with the maths teacher at Lovedale as well, he was so nice about it, he even sent a letter to my parents saying how hard I was working, and how much I was trying. God, what a difference from the maths teacher at SPV, who everyone called Cobra, because of his sudden and violent temper! And because my teachers encouraged me, it was a small class, and the teachers got a chance to know the students, I tried out for everything, and made it into most things: choir, debate, drama, the school paper. (Sports were still my bete noir, but I gave them all a go before giving up.)

 

Two years of this and I was ready to come back to Delhi and finish school there, which I did. I went to DPS, a school I have literally zero feelings about. People call it the Factory School, because it’s so big, so I went from being one of twenty girls in my batch, to being in section R (the classes were sectioned from A all the way to S, so you can imagine), because there were so many students. It was an anonymous school, I made a few friends, I hung around with them, went to one or two parties and I was happy because I had finally finally finally managed to shake mathematics off my feet and I was ready for a career in humanities.

It’s funny, failing class 9 felt like the End of the World, it was my first trouble, one of the biggest ones I’ve had, so stressful, but would I go back in time and fix it, fix myself? (How though? I still suck at maths) If I fixed that, I’d probably stay in SPV, never go to boarding school, if I didn’t go to boarding school, I probably wouldn’t have the confidence I got from being on stage, from writing for the paper, from writing for myself, if I didn’t do all that, I wouldn’t have enough in my extra-curricular portfolio to apply to a good college on the Extra Curricular Activities quota, I wouldn’t have gone to the college I went to, wouldn’t have made the friends I did, because they wouldn’t have been in my batch anyway, I don’t know if all paths would have led me right here, to writing, I assume they would, but the other way would have taken a lot longer. If I ever mastered up the courage to be something more than a “failure” which I’m sure SPV would have found a way to brand me with, no matter what. This is not an indictment against SPV. Many people thrived there, many people loved it. I am not one of the kids that school was made for though. I think that’s important to know.

There’s something flawed about the Indian educational system, that’s for sure. When they can take so many smart children and make them feel so stupid—and I’m not the only one this has happened to—when they can tie up your entire self-worth in one subject? My god, I really hope things are different now. I don’t have any friends who have pre-teen kids struggling with school, but if you do, if you are one of those parents, I want you to know that it only seems like it’s the end of the world. It’s not really. In the end, things have a way of working out. I spent too much time of my short youth thinking about exams—worrying about them, studying for them, stressing about the results etc etc etc—if I could time travel, I’d change all that, I’d visit myself and I’d say, “Listen to this weird adult who has accosted you out of nowhere! Fuck the exams! You’re never going to be a 100% type of student! Go do something fun!” Ahhh, I probably wouldn’t have listened back then, but I like to think I would, I like to think all things being equal, that I’d go back and make myself have more fun doing the stuff I liked to do. I’m very happy for all the students right now who feel as I did then. I’m glad their exams were cancelled. I strongly believe that unless you’re desperate to be a doctor or an engineer or something, you don’t need exams at all. Fuck them. Exams-schmexams. Let children enjoy their LIVES.

 

Today in Photo

Fake smile, fake face, fake... Breasts? No, but M&S shifted their annual lingerie sale online this year and I DESPERATELY needed new bras for the future where I will hopefully have occasion to wear said bras. One of the garments I bought was a minimiser because the first place I gain weight is on my chest so I keep going up cup sizes while everything else stays the same for a few years but with the middle aged thickening. (as someone who resents exercise i am resigned to my belly). Anyway so a bunch of my clothes only zipped up two cup sizes ago like this dress which I wore only to see if the bra worked. It did! In celebration, I also put on some Just Because make up and took a selfie because it's always nice to go backwards in time. I really should work out though, everything is giving way. I probably shouldn't be talking about my bra in public, not if I want to be seen as a Serious Writer, but hello, this Serious Writer wears a bra, what can I do? I don't write with my tits but. #whatiworetoday #curves

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Today in Photo

This poem could also be called Lines Inspired By My Infected Cut but this title is so much more DRAMATIQUE #poetry #poem

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