Deepanjana Pal's Blog, page 4

Project Unbelonging

While the foundation stone was being laid in Ayodhya for a temple in the name of the Hindu lord Ram, rain and wind lashed Mumbai, ripping off pieces of buildings’ facades, pulling out trees by their very roots, bending metallic bones to their snapping point. For those of us who have been wondering what hellish parallel reality we’ve been stuck in since BJP came to power in 2014, it felt as though the weather was something that we’d manifested. Windows rattled, doors shuddered, walls and floors wept while the wind howled and the rain raged. It was as though our broken hearts had pushed out of our slumped, lockdown bodies and taken possession of the outside world for a few hours.

In the days and weeks leading up to August 5, the portents — those critically important details in every mythmaking project — weren’t encouraging. One seer, Shankaracharya Swaroopanand Saraswati, said the timing was inauspicious. Two priests (part of a “team” that’s been conducting daily rituals at the site where Babri Masjid had once stood and where the temple for Ram will be built) tested positive for Covid-19 as did one of the temple’s most fervent champions, the Union Home minister. But you know how it is. The show must go on.

And so it did.

Because it is a show. The temple in Ayodhya is not about faith or religion. It’s about politics, muscle-flexing and the machismo of facial hair. (Of course the whole business of Hindutva leader Sambhaji Bhide demanding moustaches for the Ram and Laxman idols becomes less ridiculous and more nauseating when you remember ours is a country where Dalit men are killed for ‘daring’ to sport moustaches, those twirly signifiers of glorious Kshatriya masculinity.) It’s a spectacle and depending upon your perspective and perceptions, it’s either a distraction or a pointer.

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This temple, the Ram Mandir, has been the pot of gold at the end of Hindutva’s rainbow for decades now, but the ceremony had to happen on August 5 to make sure the official record for the day shows stories of triumph, rather than reminders of the unholy mess that is India’s Kashmir ‘policy’.

On August 5, 2019, Kashmir was stripped of its special status while under a brutal lockdown. On that day, India re-established itself as a coloniser and took control of Kashmir by first increasing Army presence and then arresting democratically-elected leaders (later, civilians including children would be held in custody, according to reports).

(I say “re-established” because coloniser is the only word that accurately sums up mainland India’s relationship with the North Eastern states. India, a postcolonial and a coloniser. Take that Cat of Schroedinger.)

To make sure news from Kashmir didn’t get out easily, a communications blackout was imposed before August 5 and while it has since been officially relaxed, in reality all this means is that Kashmir now has access to 2G internet. Be still my beating heart. If you’re the sort who likes records, this is probably the longest-running electronic curfew in modern history.

A year later, that anniversary is buried under the yammering about the Ram temple at Ayodhya. Earlier in the day, some news anchors sang bhajans on air. Journalists who pride themselves on being liberal found Muslims who are apparently suffused with joy that this temple is being built. Keeping a straight face, it was reported that the prime minister of a secular democracy was being given a coronation (it’s another matter that the mukut looked every bit like a prop from a mythological show). The Hindu rashtra is here. Namaste, pranaam and please drink up your cow pee, sorry, gaumutra.

It’s not just Kashmir that has been determinedly written out of the narrative of this saffron-tinted nation (ironically, Kashmir is the only place in India that cultivates saffron, and the recent months have been rough for saffron farmers). Almost no one is talking about how till 1992, there had been a 16th century mosque standing at that precise spot in Ayodhya where the temple will be built. Neither is there any discussion about the minor detail that the mosque had been razed by a mob. Not by bulldozers or earth-moving machines, but by regular people who demolished a three-domed structure to rubble (despite police presence), using implements like shovels and pickaxes, and their frenzied hands. Many kept bricks from the demolished structure as trophies. Yes, Right-wing, Muslim-hating Hindus have proudly preserved remnants of a mosque in their homes because they see it as proof of their Hindu pride. While a few remember that time as a period of madness, too many are proud of that horrible moment in our history, which is probably why we are where we are now.

No one has talked about the riots that followed the demolition of Babri Masjid, in which thousands were killed all over the country. There’s been nothing on the Supreme Court verdict from last November that details how Babri Masjid was repeatedly vandalised by Hindus and notes the absence of any evidence of a temple at the spot, before going on to say the Hindus get dibs on the disputed site anyway.

August 5 is the day on which we remember how our institutions have failed us. Let the record show that the record has erased more than it has preserved.

So it’s a bit of a shock to find myself searching for photos from this unholy event and zooming in on them. Because boss, the devil is in the cosmetic details. First of all, can we take a moment to examine the Prime Minister’s beard? A friend of mine is convinced that it’s supposed to make everyone who sees him think of Chhatrapati Shivaji, but my friend is Maharashtrian and tends to forget that the rest of the country doesn’t have Shivaji emblazoned upon their subconscious. All I know is that the beard looks simultaneously fluffy and square, which is definitely supposed to make you think of kingly regalia (rather than the shaggy length of sages and ascetics). Also, whoever is in charge of grooming that beard should get a toffee — or laddoo? — for their efforts because making sure the beard retains shape and fullness is not easy to do. I have seen many lockdown beards and feel confident in declaring they do not naturally take on such geometric proportions.

And then there’s the hair. What is going on with the follicular flourish at the Prime Minister’s nape? It’s not like he can’t get hold of someone to trim his hair, so obviously that is the intended look. Is it supposed to look like the hairstyle sported by the cast of Ramanand Sagar’s Ramayana? Are those hair extensions? Is the hair at the nape supposed to distract us from the receding hairline? Is the wave-like lift supposed to signify the rise of Hindutva?

Finally, why does Ayodhya look like it’s part of a breast cancer awareness campaign?

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On top: Belvedere Castle in Austria, illuminated by Estée Lauder in 2008, as part of a breast cancer awareness campaign. Below: Ayodhya on August 5, 2020. Also, just FYI, there were more than 900 deaths from Covid-19 reported in India today, making it the highest single-day toll so far. Who would guess from this photo that it’s been taken during a lockdown that requires people to maintain six feet of distance from one another and wear masks?

I’m trying to dull the sharp edge of how completely wrong all of today has felt. It’s hardly the first time — every few months, I seem to tell myself that I will remember this day as the one in which I realised the country I thought was mine has no place for me; that I unbelong here but I will stand my ground and watch it burn, without shedding a tear — and yet, it packs as strong a punch each time. Disappointment and despair have no generation loss.

It is a relief to think this can’t last. Sooner rather than later, this terrifying toxic mess of a culture will consume itself and leave behind nothing but bloodstained fragments and barely-comprehensible traces. At some point in the distant future, there will be historians and chroniclers who will read and study our documents and narratives. They will wonder what happened to us and they will ask, like we did of Nazi-era Christians, “Did they really not know?”

Let the record show we knew. We knew of the lynchings, the rapes, the beatings, the abuses. We knew there were homes being set ablaze and monsters being put on pedestals. We knew we were becoming a nation of puppets. We knew the mosques were torn down and the godmen were liars. We knew that fiction was replacing fact and we knew it was being done in our name. Let the record also show that despite knowing it could only end in failure, some of us spoke up. We took to the streets even though we knew it was a dead end. We protested, only to realise we have no agency.

Let the record show we have hearts that break and spines that crumble. We have the burning rage of the powerless and the undying dreams of the disillusioned. We collect stories and squander chances. We are the ones who don’t belong and our voices are only heard when the monsoon wind howls and screams.

Locked/ Unlocked

On June 29, with what I like to imagine was carelessly elegant insouciance, I throw my phone into the trash. In my planner — which has few plans and more diary notes — I’ve clarified that this was a mistake; just in case I forget that the phone is not the issue. 

This is around the time that it sinks its claws into me. I know because of the blank pages and the doodles. Before going to bed each night, I doodle one word. Any word. Whatever word feels in some way to signify the day that’s just passed. Words like “retreat”, “inadequate”, “crawl”, “grapple”, “almost”, “gloom”, “unravel” and “patience”. 

The lockdown was supposed to be less debilitating for introverts because we’re comfortable in isolation and used to the white noise in our heads. For at least three months, this was true. Even now, it isn’t the solitude that’s chafing at me. But there are other demons that find their way in through the silence. The last month has been hard, and it doesn’t feel like catharsis to admit as much.  

In the eerie, elegant novel Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi, inside the protagonist are many spirits. They often jostle for power over the protagonist’s flesh and bones because the way to the mind is through the skin. I sometimes feel like that, only the voices in my head are far less storied. Mine are mundane, tired, monotonous voices, like the exasperated one that points out there is no discernible reason for me to feel low. My near and dear are all Covid-free; I have my health and my job; a short walk takes me to the sea; I have a streak of bright pink in my hair — so really, why am I moping?    

There doesn’t need to be a ‘why’, of course. But I have to consciously remind myself that, if we really want to go there, there are many reasons why. Because even though we have settled into the modified normal of the lockdown and superficially, life is mundane again for those with the privilege of feeling either bored by or acclimatised into the new everyday, death is still in the air. 

The cocoon sometimes feels like a bubble that won’t pop, with the air inside running out. Despite the shoutiness of social media, it feels like silence is everywhere as we tiptoe and posture our way through days on end. I type a message to a friend: “I’m running out of things to say. No words.” And then I backspace back to blankness, removing every single letter with growing speed, until there is just white space. I don’t want to spread this dark silence. 

*

It looks like an onion. Until, that is, someone takes a knife to it and reveals a sponge and chocolate ganache interior. 

[image error]Natalie Sideserf’s onion cake

The onion cake was one of the many cake-flavoured optical illusions that popped up on my Twitter timeline earlier this month when the “Everything is Cake” meme took over the internet briefly. In these videos, you see an everyday object which is sliced to reveal that it was actually a cake. These cakes are apparently known as hyperreal cakes, as though the regular cake is somehow less real (which is a bit unfair, if you ask me). Then again, this idea of authenticity is precisely what the “Everything is Cake” meme is messing with in these videos. Reality, they point out, is what you make of it.   

Soon after, another set of videos took over the internet. These didn’t have cakes, but they were also about one thing becoming another. This time, it involved cats. People — mostly women — picked up pet kittens and cats, and held them to their ears as though the animals were telephone receivers. The cats looked wide-eyed as they were lifted by their humans and literally objectified.

Both these memes were nonsensical and chances are we’ll have forgotten about them by the end of the month. They may already have waned out of public memory, but they linger in mine because these memes strike a chord with our pandemic-struck lives. In them, nothing is as it seems, and this is true of the world that we’re trying to negotiate today. Simple, basic functions like breathing are fraught with danger. We approach the everyday with a mix of anxiety, suspicion and fear as we sanitise vegetables, isolate received packages and avoid brushing against someone else’s skin. Everything in our world could be sliced to reveal Covid-19, it seems. 

The cats and the cakes take this weird condition of feeling alienated from and unsettled by the world around us, and turn it on its head. The revelation is not death or illness, but laughter, befuddled felines and the comfort of cake. They’re a reminder that unlike the virus, we have an imagination and we can distract ourselves.    

*

In a pandemic, every month is the cruellest. Across the country, we are all Schroedinger’s cat — we’re simultaneously locked and unlocked as restrictions are relaxed and reimposed, depending upon the numbers. India is now second only to the United States of America in terms of the number of recorded cases of Covid-19. The outbreak has flared up again in Kerala, where more than 1,000 new cases are being reported daily. In Maharashtra, each day brings with it a record number — sometimes of deaths; at other times, of cases; sometimes, both. Mumbai is triumphant that there are “only” 1,000-odd new cases and 50-odd deaths reported daily, while other cities are seeing alarming spikes in their numbers. Day before yesterday, India recorded 757 deaths and more than 49,000 new cases, the highest daily spike in both categories. Altogether, there are more than 454,000 active cases of Covid-19 in the country and including the asymptomatic cases, we have more than 1.3 million cases in India. So far, 31,425 have died of the infection. In case you were wondering, the government of India would have you know that there is no community transmission in India.  

Every evening, my phone lights up with an alert that details the number of new cases and deaths recorded in Maharashtra and Mumbai. Every evening, the message leaves me frozen for a few seconds. It has been four months and I still have no idea how we’re supposed to cope with the weight of hundreds of people dying of Covid-19 every single day. Every day, I wonder how many of these deaths were preventable, how many are unrecorded. I think of the acquaintance who travelled across the country because her parents were hospitalised with Covid-19, only to be trapped in home quarantine. Her parents died, their bodies were cremated; all while she remained in quarantine. I think of people I don’t know being forced to go through their beloved’s belongings and throw them out as hazardous bio-waste. I remember a doctor talking about the terrible cruelty of a death in isolation, where patients are denied the comfort of human touch or anything familiar in their final moments. What do we do with the anxiety, guilt, helplessness and despair that comes from being survivors? 

Most of the time, I turn these phantom feelings into food and eat them up. I’m not sure exactly when or what shifts, but I realise I’m processing the daily updates differently — better? — when I stop foraging for midnight snacks. It takes me a few days to realise I’ve stopped snacking because I’ve lost my appetite.  

*

There must be countries where the only reason for a stomach to knot with anxiety is that Covid-19 is slinking around like a neighbourhood peeping Tom. India is not one of them and I know this because my work email is full of updates that confirm my suspicion that most of this country is an unholy mess.  

Since June 5, we’ve seen a “skirmish” which just happens to be the bloodiest Indo-Chinese clash in 40-odd years. Twenty Indian soldiers were killed and there are Chinese troops at Pangong Tso even though apparently there was no infiltration or encroachment upon Indian territory. We lost a legend, choreographer Saroj Khan, and one of the brightest actors of his generation, Sushant Singh Rajput. Indian journalism has suffered a bloodbath, with more than 150 journalists losing their jobs. They’re called cuts — a simple, neat word for messy, painful and life-changing decisions. Delhi Police filed seven chargesheets in connection with the riots that savaged north Delhi in February. According to them, the riots were “revenge” and “retaliation” by Hindus who were apparently provoked by (mostly) Muslims. Among those who allegedly instigated violence is activist Harsh Mander, which is among the most outlandish things I’ve ever heard. Also, BJP leader Kapil Mishra is apparently a victim of Muslim mobs. At some point in the near future, the official record of these riots will be pitted against the memories of survivors and the informal archive on social media. Maybe the truth of what happened in February will survive only in stories, the way the injustice of the ancients is recorded and remembered in our myths and legends. 

My notes to self have multiple underlines (to show outrage? Joy? A combination of both) where I’ve written that the courts have granted bail to Jamia student Safoora Zargar and ordered poet Varavara Rao should be taken out of Taloja Jail and hospitalised. This should have been due process rather than a battle won in an ongoing war. Zargar may well have been granted bail because she’s pregnant when in fact, she should have been released because peaceful protest is not terrorism. Other equally peaceful protesters remain in jail, with no prospect of bail so far. Rao was so unwell that he was delirious and couldn’t stand on his own, but as far as government agencies are concerned, he’s ‘using’ Covid-19 to get out of Taloja. He has tested positive for Covid-19 and despite being declared asymptomatic, is being given the treatment that is for symptomatic patients. In the first hospital that he was taken to, his family found him in “a pool of urine”. He was transferred to a second hospital and then a third, where he has suffered a head injury. 

Note to self on July 5: “Which wall would I like beat my head against today?” 

It’s been months since I took a day off. When you’re working from home, it feels odd to take leave even though it’s actually more necessary because in no time, days loop and we become hamsters on wheels. I have friends who have been working seven days a week, partly because they need to and partly because they’d rather work than, as one friend put it, “feel as empty as my walls”. I send my friend a link to a photographer I know, who is selling prints at reduced rates every Monday. Like so many of his tribe, he’s been without work for months. My friend writes back, “You should sell your sunset photos. I won’t buy them. As in, I want them for free. But you should sell them.” 

[image error]Sometimes, the clouds are the silver lining. (Photo: mine)

Some time later, Mumbai’s skies transform into something magical. For days in a row, for a few minutes at sunset, the light thickens to golden and then some strange alchemy transforms it to jewel tones. If someone had painted these skies on a canvas, we’d applaud their imagination but point out that you can’t have a sky that’s blue and amber and fuchsia and magenta and ochre and pink simultaneously. Now we know you can. 

I’ve missed every single one of these gorgeous sunsets because I’ve been at my desk. I could have slipped out the way I have a couple of times before, but I didn’t because I knew there was work about to land in my inbox. Instead I saw these sunsets through the eyes of other people’s cameras. One day, a friend asks me to go through their Instagram for the sunset photos. “It was a Jana type of evening,” they tell me. I send them a heart and curse myself for not sneaking out. 

*

Earlier this week, I had a dream. I was in an apartment that doesn’t look like the one I live in, but it was mine in the dream world and it was in Bombay. My father was sitting on an armchair, reading a book. I walked up to the balcony — I know. Balcony, with a sea-view. In Bombay. LOL — and my mother joined me. Outside, it was raining hard. Suddenly, there was a loud noise and a tremor. Through the rain, I saw the Gateway of India. It was as though the square of land had broken away from Apollo Bunder, floated north, and crashed into the rocky, mangrove-stripped bay of Bandra.  

“How did the Gateway of India land up in Bandra?” I asked my mother. 

Just then, the Gateway teetered. It started to sink. Neither my mother nor I moved. We stood and watched the arch drown, inch by inch. Below, blurry-faced strangers shouted out in alarm and tried to pull the Gateway out. Some dove into the sea, as though they could drag the monument up like it was a drowning child. The divers surfaced with pieces of the Gateway — a chunk with some English lettering, a bronze angel. The Gateway continued to sink underwater.   

In truth, there is no bronze angel on the Gateway, which remains as solid as ever on the patch of Colaba that has been its home for more than a century. Nothing about that dream should feel real and yet, I woke up at least twice and in the middle of the night, reached for my phone and googled “Gateway + sinking”. I knew this was ridiculous, but I still told myself that I would ask reporters I knew if they’d heard about the Gateway drowning. Somewhere deep inside, a little part of me that was terrified that what I’d seen wasn’t a dream. 

The morning after, I went about doing the things that needed doing, all the while feeling jumpy and unsettled. What do you call an event that never happened and yet feels too real to be dismissed as imaginary?  

*

While institutions failed, society became more toxic and the online shouting matches got shoutier,  the universe picked up my little snow-globe of a world and shook it like a rumba shaker on cocaine. 

In the kitchen, the gas starts leaking. In the living room, the television conks out and the fan stops working. On the desk, my computer fades to black. In the bathroom, the toilet breaks. On the table, the router sputters and the internet blips. All this happens over three days and on day four, when the toilet explodes less than 24 hours after being fixed, I find myself standing in the middle of my flat, giggling hysterically. Outside, the sky is darkening. I still haven’t bought an umbrella, I think absently while the toilet roars like a mini Niagra Falls. I won’t get a plumber till tomorrow morning, which means thanks to me, an entire wing of this multistoreyed building will have no water in their bathrooms. “Thank you very much,” I mutter out loud, “I’ll be here all year.” Then, as quickly as I can, I put on my shoes and mask, and power walk my way out of the house. I can feel it welling up inside me, like a gathering wave. I’m going to cry. Over a broken toilet. 

Except, of course, it’s not just the toilet (though the toilet is important. Modern plumbing and the bum shower are basically why I wouldn’t want to be reborn in any other era. Seriously). It’s everything — the old wounds I’ve picked, the writing I can’t do, the weight I carry; the world in which I’m mired, whose ugliness and disappointment I see reflected in myself. I keep trying to fill my head and soul with beauty. I’ve watched brilliant plays, ballets, films, television shows and documentaries. I’ve read books and poetry, making notes, lingering over chapters and re-reading passages. I’ve sought out the silly and the smart, not only as distractions from the awfulness of the present but also in a manic hope that they will somehow fix me; make me less inept, more capable; make me better. Instead, all I’ve managed to do is reduce myself to a husk of insecurities and now I’m walking aimlessly around a neighbourhood I call home, crying into a mask. Not that anyone can tell. I’m not an amateur. I have decades worth of experience in faking calm and seeming confident.  

So I walk and I weep, without making a noise, careful to breathe so that I don’t hiccup. I am aware this effort is unnecessary. Everyone who is outside has their head stuck in their own cloud. Until a few weeks ago, these roads were empty and the pavements were lined with the destitute. Now, the cars are back (with their floodlights on so that they can blind everyone else on the road. Thanks for that) and the poor have mostly disappeared. And here I am, crying over my broken world and feeling incredibly stupid for doing so.

At some point, it occurs to me that weeping into a mask is not comfortable. It also doesn’t feel particularly hygienic. Sure, the fabric mops up the sniffly fluids, but should you really have that same fabric, damp with aforementioned fluids, pressed against your face? I change directions to reach a chemist and buy a mask. He doesn’t have small change so he gives me two toffees. If it’s a sign from the universe, I accept it and make my way to the sea, where I’ll breathe in the sea, imprint the Technicolour sky upon my soul and get chased by a disgruntled cop who’s had it with hipsters. 

For all my melodrama, I’m actually ok, despite my seesawing emotions and the universe not having the decency to at least drop menopause on me. They’re right. The lockdown is easier on introverts. We’re used to the discomfort of being locked in with only our thoughts for company. It’s just that this is an age of madness, and that is not easy on anyone. 

If you’ve read till here, take care, be kind to yourself and breathe. You’re probably doing better than you think you are at your lowest moments. And if you’re not, there’s always therapy. 

Judith Butler: “Repair forward”

On July 23, philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler gave an online lecture titled “The Force of Nonviolence”, which is also the title of of her new book. These are my notes from that lecture and while I don’t have the writing speed I used to back in my college days, I didn’t do too badly. I’m not sure who did the illustration that I’ve used in the top image. If it’s yours and you’d like me to take it down, let me know.

Notes about the notes: most of it is a paraphrasing of what Butler said. Where there are double quotes, it’s a direct quote.

The pandemic intensifies forms of suffering faced by the poor, the frail, people of colour etc., and exposes a set of “radical social and economic inequalities”.

Between March-end to early April, there was an optimism that gave rise to the hope that we were being given a chance to remake the world.

“If the world was shutting down, it meant that capitalism was shutting down. If the world was shutting down, it meant all of its radical inequalities were shutting down as well.”

That optimism was gone by May, June and July, when the world started reopening. Or rather, the economy was restarted – as if the world couldn’t and shouldn’t be anything other than the economy in its present form. The economy came to replace the world in public discourse, as if it’s more important, urgent and more valuable than people. The economy was imagined as a human body that must be supported at all cost. The health of the economy was more important than the health of people.

This transposition of health to the economy is not just transferring a human attribute; it also drained health from the human body. The health of the economy comes from draining the body of the poor, of the worker, of minorities, of those whose health is already compromised because of inadequate access to healthcare over generations. Anthropomorphised economy takes life, expresses willingness to sacrifice these lives.

“It [the economy] is a life-taking figuration.”

False consolation of a cost-benefit model is that it allows the health and life of the body to be replaced by a number, percentage, graphic curve. These figures become a means of effacement of human life. Flattening the curve: “We are supposed to rejoice because only so many people are dying now and that is apparently good news.” The figures/ graphs/ curves provide alibi to reopen the economy, make it possible for the infection to respike and thus imperil more life and produce death. In this way, we “establish the level of illness and death that we can accept as reasonable”.

“The right number of deaths, the right extension of that horizontal line, the one that establishes the number of deaths we are willing to live with. And so it becomes the representational form that sanitises those steps or that allegorises its general sanitisation – another borrowing from the metaphorics of health in the service of a necro-political plan exemplifying, perhaps in a remarkably vivid form, the death drive at the heart of the capitalist machine.”

The figures exhibit a trajectory of a kind of violence that depends upon both transposition and disavowal for its reproduction.

If the world was replaced by the economy, it becomes our responsibility to return to work, church etc., even though this means more people run the risk of losing their health and even their lives. The lives that are considered disposable remain unspoken. Also unspoken is the fact that safety protocol does not cover everyone – eg. what if the place where you shelter is densely-populated or a site of violence?

Going to work is depicted as embracing freedom. Basic formulation: you work to earn wages, which give you the means with which to live. However, in pandemic conditions, work increases the chance of death. So the price of life is increasing the possibility of death.

There are multiple kinds of violence. Overt forms include police violence, battery, debasement, murder etc. Pandemic creates conditions ripe for a slower form of violence, “one whose pace and mechanisms become nearly identical with the rhythms of ordinary life” – like accepting conditions in which work increases chance of loss of life.

The manic celebrations of personal liberty (people not wearing masks; taking part in crowded public gatherings etc.) invariably take forms of consumer behaviour. People who do this think they’re not vulnerable. They think they have the right to do harm to themselves and to others. This “mindless sociability” inadvertently perhaps emphasises the inherently sociable nature of individualism. They’re engaging in practices that “facilitate the illness and death of others.”

“Is letting [someone] die a permutation of violence?”

Letting someone die is not a sovereign decision over who should live and who should die. Yet the decision is taken through a fugitive form of sovereignty or a biopolitics that turns out to be a necropolitics. Those who usually decide who should live/ die don’t consider themselves a factor in the equation. “Calculation saves the calculator from death, at least in the domain of fantasy”. The calculation uses “a metric of grievability”.

“Whose life, if lost, counts as a loss? Even constitute an incalculable loss? And whose death can be quietly calculated without ever naming it as such?”

The pandemic creates conditions where social inequality works with necropolitical violence. Violence against Black, trans communities in America; against the poor in India; against the indigenous in Brazil coincides with the systematic ways of letting die promoted and accepted by market enthusiasts during the pandemic.

George Floyd’s murder shifted an existing sense of peril because it was a lynching performed for the cellphone video. In America, a disproportionate number of deaths in communities of colour speaks to systemic racism in a broken and brutal healthcare system. The same communities are mourning the loss of lives that should have, could have been saved during the pandemic. Police violence “works in tandem with hell systems” that let Black people die. The two are not competing with each other, but are rather linked by systemic racism.

Butler suggests a counter to the existing system: guaranteed national income that ensures no worker has to choose between economic destitution and serious illness.

We have to understand the modalities of violence that inequality produces. Combine the call for radical equality with a call to end the violence. Whatever new beginning we imagine has to take on this systemic racism, these fast and slow forms of violence. Don’t underestimate the pull of the market that has monopolised the very idea of the ‘the world’ and perhaps even the idea of ‘health’, and worked towards normalising inequality.

“To renew and repair the world, it will be necessary to understand that the extreme form of social inequality is to be found in the explicit and insidious power over life and death.”

“Even as social structures of inequality are heightened under pandemic conditions, the pandemic exposes global vulnerability, and there’s something to be learnt from that. There is no one who has been completely immmune… To the extent that everyone is or has been vulnerable to the virus. That follows from the obvious fact that everyone is vulnerable to viral infection. So there is an everyone or anyone that can be or is now infected, and that is because the body responds to what it takes in.”

During a pandemic, the basic act of breathing contains potential for harm, even death. The conditions of living carry the risk of dying. Covid-19 threatens asphyxiation; the police officer puts his knee on Floyd’s neck so he can’t breathe.

Pandemic requires us to redefine vulnerability. The term now emphasises the porous relation between our bodily selves and our social lives. It highlights how dependency is coextensive with live because something from the outside – air, for example – makes life possible. Life itself depends on an organisation of interdependency. Our bodies are irreversibly implicated in one another’s.

“Humans share the air with one another and other animals. They share the surfaces of the world. They speak to one another in loud tones and they sing with abandon. They touch what others have touched, and they touch one another. And they are what is touched, and they touch back. These reciprocal modes of world-sharing describe a crucial dimension of our vulnerability, but also an interdependence characteristic of our embodied social lives.”

Vulnerability is a condition of the life awkwardly and necessarily shared, the perils and passions of bodily exposure, of porosity, of existing on a threshold.

“If we seem to repair the world or the planet, then the world must be unshackled from the market economy that trafficks and profits from its distribution of life and death. A politics of life would be a reflection on the shared conditions of life for the purpose of realising a radical equality honouring a nonviolent mandate and discovering the conditions we need for a liveable life.”

Repair forward “as a new imaginary emerges from the hauntings of the present”.

Björk Ballet: Of Masks and Multitudes

The way choreographer Arthur Pita imagines it, if Icelandic singer-songwriter Björk’s music took shape, it would be as a world of jewel colours and shining shadows, with an ocean lapping at its shore and goddesses who swoop through the air to fall into the arms of their lovers. Here, gravity is weak and the ground beneath one’s feet is shiny as a mirror. Skin is veined not with blood, but quicksilver. Little is synchronised, but everything is in harmony.

I didn’t know what to expect from Björk Ballet and after watching it the first time, I wasn’t even sure what I’d watched. I just knew it was beautiful and that I wanted to remember every possible detail so that I could retreat to it in my head after San Francisco Ballet takes it offline on Friday. There’s no way words and screengrabs will properly how mesmerising Björk Ballet is, but I live in hope that all the memory really needs is a spark.

There are fragments of story flashing through the performance, which strings together nine pieces of music by Björk and the sound of the sea. The only reason to complain about the video is that it doesn’t let you appreciate the detailing that designer Marco Marante has incorporated into the costumes.

[image error] In the video, this seems like the dancers are wearing black and silver, but when you look closely, there’s so much more going on. The ‘veins’ on one costume seem to branch out onto the other. Plus, in a way, their movements are mirrored by the patterns of curves and intersections on their costume. Also, don’t miss the rose-gold tips of the ballet shoes.

Much like a dream, if I try to organise what I remember from the performance into a neat narrative, Björk Ballet slips through the fingers of my thoughts. But if I stop trying to impose my understanding of order upon it, it has a beginning, middle and end; and it makes complete sense. It begins with melancholy and loneliness, journeys through multitudes, and ends with finding yourself in solitude. In between, there are creatures with tinsel beards, nymphs with personal bouncers and dancing plankton. To be fair, this might not be exactly how Pita sees the characters he’s conceived for Björk Ballet but it’s a postmodern world — the viewer completes the work, amirite?

In the beginning, there’s just darkness and a strange constellation of suspended silver. Through the shadows emerges a chorus of colour and movement. It moves, not in unison, but as one, almost as though it’s blooming to life to the music of “Overture”.

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The chorus melts away to reveal a man wearing a mask with a painted frown. Light ripples across his body and as he moves, his feet are reflected upon the reflective surface of the stage. His movements are big and elongated, like he’s reaching out, like he’s searching… for what?

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[image error]This section is mirrored by the last section of Björk Ballet, but with a significant difference.

Suddenly, there’s a buzz and everything flickers, as though struck by lightning.

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The man melts into the blackness and there appears on stage a shimmering mound of tinsel. The silvery constellation that was fixed now falls apart to land on the stage like rain.

[image error]If a faerie and a shaman had a love child, it would be this creature of fluttering tinsel.



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They land on stage, making the sound of a loud footsteps and stand up, delicate fronds shimmering and catching light. In this phosphorescence, with the mirrored surface on stage and this glow-in-the-dark foliage, suddenly the whole place feels underwater. This sense of fluidity becomes stronger when the lead pair of dancers start moving. They’re wearing body suits in earth tones, with metallic veining all over their bodies, and the background is now glowing amber, but they move like waves. The woman, particularly, seems to float.

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While Björk sings “All is full of love”, the background shifts to blue and silhouettes gather behind the lead pair. They’re all doing the same set of movements, but at different times — and so, the bodies rise and fall like a dandelion clock coming apart. The metallic strips of their costumes glint. The tinsel on the foliage glitters. It’s such a rush of movement and yet this section also feels entirely unfrenetic, like fragments of stillness sliding into place next to one another . Every lift, every slide is so seamlessly smooth. Every angle is so elegantly held.

[image error]This is the first of three (I think) transitions in Björk Ballet, in which one pair of dancers leaves the stage using a set of moves that make it seem like they’re made of wind and silk. While the acrobats make their exit without separate, the lovers kiss and then part ways, exiting the stage in opposite directions. The kisses are very much part of the mystery of this dream — are these two couples or two aspects of one couple? Are they all a dream of the masked man? Are they the Adam and Eve of this underwater world? Your guess is as good as mine.

Briefly, the stage is empty, with just the shimmering foliage on view. Then two faceless men bring in a woman who reminded me of an injured bird to “You’ve Been Flirting Again” (but in Icelandic, I think. Definitely not English). She’s in pink and from her arms hang fuchsia and silver tassels. There’s something delicate about these movements, enhanced by the contrast in the bodies of the two men and the woman.

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Although she was carried in, she leaves the stage on her own, a flurry of pink and silver and teal, doing movements similar to that of the woman during the transition.

There’s a sharp change in tempo, tone and colour. Shadows rush in to push the foliage to one corner, creating a silvery, spiky clump in one corner. Streaks of red spark to life on stage. The lead woman dancer is in a nude body suit veined with glittery red strips and she moves like a flickering flame that’s growing fierier with her perfect extensions. Dancers in red and black hover around her, all of them dancing different choreographies. They almost fly across the stage like crackling embers. Which rather adds up since Bjork is singing “Bachelorette”, which has lyrics line, “I’m a path of cinders, burning under your feet.”

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This is one of the most energetic parts of Björk Ballet and my least favourite movement. It’s not just that it feels a little chaotic, with everyone doing very different moves (the eye and the mind can’t figure out where to look, what to read; and also why on earth is there a dude spinning while the lovers canoodle acrobatic in the clump of silver bushes?). Although the lead woman is magnificent, her partner seems a bit…creaky. By the end of it, he seems exhausted by all the leaping and pirouetting and lifting; and not even a fiery red woman kissing the daylights out of him is enough to revive him.

He pulls away from the kiss and they move apart, their bodies curving and unfolding to repeat the moves made by the first pair of lovers when they separated in the first transition.

As the lovers leave, the man with the sad-faced mask returns with a fishing rod on his shoulder. The music gives way to the sound of crashing waves and the tinsel fronds are once again arranged all over the stage. A masked creature with long tinsel beard flutters in, all shine and fluttering fabric. To the sound of the waves, he dances, restlessness rising from his movements like steam from a thawing ice. As he flutters and swoops and spans the width of the stage effortlessly, it’s as though he’s agonising over something. This is no old man of the sea but rather a prince of tides. Meanwhile, the masked man, sits calmly at the edge of the stage, his fishing line thrown into the dark of the limbo between audience and stage.

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Suddenly, “Vokuro” falls like a blanket over the sound of the sea and there is only the man at the edge of the stage and a solitary nymph-like figure standing on the mirrored ground. Wavy arcs of light glint along her body as though she’s underwater. Some of her movements are reminiscent of the masked man’s own dance from the beginning, when everything was dark. (Now, the background is an inky purple.) But in addition to his gestures, she has her own patterns — strong, decisive movements; feminine and contemporary. Her body is clean lines and ripples of light as it mirrors the swoop and fall of the song’s melody. Sometimes, it feels awkward, like some contemporary choreography has been shoehorned into the practice of a ballet dancer, but mostly, it seems she’s trying to say something to him.

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There is also an odd tension between her and the arc of the fishing line that the masked man holds. There’s a stunning moment when she pirouettes across the width of the stage and for a second, you think the masked man is reeling her in. He isn’t. She isn’t even going towards him, really. She’s just going towards the centre.

She leaves ultimately like the pink-winged bird, reclined with one leg crossed over the other, raised high above by two masked men who come out of the shadows expressly to give her the exit of goddesses.

The stage fills with a group of dancers dressed in black and silver that for some reason remind of plankton while the tinkling music box tune of “Frosti” . This is perhaps the most playful bit in Björk Ballet and as this group scuttles — with grace — the masked man feels a tug on his fishing line.

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It’s another mask. He stares at it. Behind him, everything clears. Against the backdrop are three figures. The one in the middle is doing the movements that the male lead dancers have done in past transitions as they left the stage.

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The other two dancers — in shining black and glittering white — are both women (I think). Their faces are masked and spangled body suits make them look vaguely alien, or like fantastic anime characters come to life. They dance to the intro of “The Gate” and their undulating movements are reminiscent of the choreography for first pair, but while that first couple had a stillness to them, this pair shimmers with constant motion. Their arms intertwine, their bodies sway, their costumes twinkle and at certain moments, they seem fused together (not just when they’re kissing). Unlike the other two couples, this one leaves together, hand in hand, as the masked man comes into the light and puts on the second mask. It’s like the face he has on; only this one is smiling. Something flutters through his body.

And then the drums of “Hyperballad” start beating.

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This might be my favourite part of Björk Ballet even though I have absolutely no idea what’s going on. The reclining nymphs are gone and instead, there stands a warrior goddess who watches the fluttering, flickering movements of those below her; who leaps off and into the arms of her beloveds; who glides over the surface of the stage as though gravity is a joke.

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This section is pure euphoria and somewhere along the way, this sequence coalesces into a ballet rave, with the stage filled with perfectly-held bodies on their tippy-toes, executing neat extensions and precise pirouettes — all while bopping to “Hyperballad”. As the beat grows louder, its thuds stop feeling synthetic and it’s as though we’re hearing the pounding pulse of all those on stage, each of them doing their own thing and yet in moving to the same rhythm.

Is this the happiness of the masked man? Are these the multitudes he contains? As the music builds up to its crescendo, the stage is filled with dancers. The pink-winged creature joins the delighted melee, but this time, she stands on the raised platform and she wears the the tinsel-bearded mask of the prince of tides. A flurry of shining tassels and windmilling arms, she’s now both the restless man and the calm woman. She and the others who are pulsing with movement are all on the fringe. In the centre, surrounded by the rush of dance, is the stillness of the lead pair, grounded by each other and perfectly balanced. They repeat the moves they had during their first sequence together (to “All is Full of Love”). This time, they’re different from the crowd, set apart both spatially and by choreography.

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This last transition is pure magic. When they leave, they don’t kiss. They float across the mirrored surface, somewhat joined at the hip and yet distinct.

From the other end, the man with the smiling mask walks in. As he dances to “Anchor Song”, his movements seem happier — is it just the mask or is there really something lighter to his movements? There’s something strong and playful in his movement that feels like it’s been drawn out of Björk’s lyrics:

I live by the ocean
And during the night
I dive into it
Down to the bottom
Underneath all currents
And drop my anchor
As this is where I’m staying
This is my home…

And while he frolics on his own, the black background that had lifted to about 30 minutes ago to reveal this weird world with its spiky, silvery foliage and fantastical, tinsel-bright creatures, once again comes down. He’s back home.

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In the darkness, you can just about glimpse the silvery fronds that twinkle dully like distant starlight (remember they were up in the sky at the beginning of the ballet). He moves, repeating movements from his first solo. With the smiling face on, they seem much less melancholy.

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As Björk sings “This is my home”, a group of dancers come to stand around him, each of them holding one of the silvery trees/ bushes/ things. They stand around the masked man, a protective circle of warm colours that contrast with the black and white of his person.

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“This is my home,” Björk declares, her voice suddenly plaintive. The stage is emptied of colour. There is only the glow-in-the-dark foliage and the man who wears two masks. He lifts the smiling face and moves it around to the back of his head. Underneath is still the sad face. But when he turns around and walks off into the darkness, all you see is him smiling.

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Weekends in Lockdown

The last thing I expected for my contraband sunsets was for one of them to get printed in Hindustan Times. But there it is, my first photo byline in a major newspaper. Thank you iPhone.

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An edited version of the essay is here and the unedited version, in all its glory is below. Incidentally, that particular conversation with the cop actually happened right after taking precisely the picture that’s been carried with the essay.

Sweat is streaming down my face. This is partly because of the unbearable pre-monsoon humidity of Mumbai, but also because I’m trying to run from a policeman. This could be a scene from an Anurag Kashyap film, barring the minor detail that the chase is happening, not in a grungy, labyrinthine Mumbai slum, but on sea-facing Carter Road, illuminated by the amber light of a summer sunset. Since this is not a movie and I am about as fit as a generously-stuffed dumpling, the cop catches up with me in no time.

“You’re not allowed here, madam. Please go,” he tells me sternly. “Bandstand is closed. You know this. I told you so last time also.”

While feeling faintly accomplished at having made enough of an impression on a cop to be remembered — is it because I’ve jazzed up my standard-issue face mask with glitter? — I plead for mercy. “Please sir, I’ll go in five minutes. I just want to see the sunset.”

He shakes his head. “No sunset in lockdown.”

“Please sir, I work six days a week, so Sunday is the only day I can catch the sunset.”

“Today isn’t Sunday.”

“It’s Sunday, sir.”

The cop shakes his head again. “Tuesday, madam.”

“No, sir, it’s Sunday.”

“Tuesday.” He sounds a little unsure.

“Sunday…” I sound like I’m asking him rather than stating a fact.

We blink at each other. It’s a stand-off. This, dear reader, is what the lockdown has reduced us to — fully-grown adults who don’t know what day of the week it is.

Sixty minutes in an hour; 24 hours in a day; seven days in a week — this is the structure we’ve imposed upon time. Different cultures have tried other formulae. The ancient Egyptians had 10-day long weeks. The Soviets tried five- and six-day weeks. The seven-day week, originally developed by the Babylonians before the Common Era, is the one that stuck — until the lockdown, imposed on March 25 to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, killed the weekend.

It happened slowly, like murder by poisoning in an Agatha Christie mystery. First, came the anxiety of contracting Covid-19 and the possibility of being in a containment zone. Then came working from home, the household chores and time lost to queuing outside shops for groceries. Within a few weeks, Mondays felt like Thursday, Thursday felt like Sunday and Sunday felt like Tuesday. Punctuated by blank dread, the hours in a day stretched like chewing gum while a month seemed to pass in a flash. We had entered what writer Helen Rosner has described as an “infinite present”.

As Khushali Jariwala, who works at a production house in Mumbai, put it, “I’m usually only about 80% sure of what day it is.”

Rumour has it that a weekend — two consecutive days of rest and recreation — is normal for much of the salaried workforce. It is a fantasy for many, particularly those in freelance careers. Remembering her pre-pandemic life, actor Rasika Dugal said, “More often than not, I found myself working on weekends and having to explain to friends and family that I can’t turn up for that celebration that was pushed to the weekend so ‘everyone’ can make it.” Yet even when their work life doesn’t acknowledge weekends, people appreciate the idea for the respite it signifies. Dugal, for instance, is attached to Sundays. “A day off on any other day just doesn’t match up. The world is just calmer on a Sunday,” she said.

Despite the Holy Bible making a case for the weekend when the Lord declared Sunday His day of rest, the idea of being off-duty on Saturday and Sunday is relatively recent. The weekend as we know it was first implemented in America, by Henry Ford in 1926. It became the norm in the 1930s, in the United Kingdom and was quickly embraced by employers around the world because it reduced absenteeism and improved productivity. (In the informal sector, which includes domestic help, the weekend remains a privilege that few workers enjoy.) As the weekend gained popularity, it breathed new life to businesses that broke the weekday routine, like dining out and live entertainment. As both prologue and epilogue to the work week, the weekend was restorative. “There was a sense of unwinding and disconnecting, rejuvenating and looking forward to the week ahead,” said Pune-based tech professional Priyanka Kadam, who has been working from home during the lockdown.

Kadam’s pre-pandemic weekend routines included spending hours with her sketchbook at a beloved café and meeting friends at favourite bars. Founder of the podcast network Audiomatic Rajesh Tahil fondly remembered going to the movies with wife journalist Genesia Alves, and “alone time”. “Having the house to yourself for an hour or so when everyone’s out,” said Tahil, who lives in Mumbai with Alves and their three children, “most of my family think of this as a luxury and maybe unconsciously, we tried to make room for it. However, during the lockdown, that’s been impossible.”

On the face of it, the internet offers alternative ways to access many weekend activities — restaurants are doing home delivery; musicians like Norah Jones and Radiohead have done regular live sets on social media; live shows are being performed on Zoom.  It takes some adjusting, for both audience and performers. Actor Mukul Chadda, who does an improv show on Zoom on Mondays with the group Improv Comedy Mumbai, said, “The audience is on mute, which is a problem because we get zero feedback. But slowly, we are expanding the range of games [performed during the show]. And we’ve found a lot more can be done than what was earlier thought.” Chadda described the improv show as his “only marker” of one week ending and another beginning. Improv Comedy Mumbai has been doing these shows for free since April and Chadda joined the online shows in May.

Our weekends help to centre us after the work week, which isolates many from their immediate world both physically (because of long hours in an office) and emotionally (because of the attention demanded by work). Weekends reconnect us to people and things that ground us. We’ve known the intellectual and emotional value of taking a break, but it’s taken the lockdown for us to realise that physicality is an important aspect of these activities. The enjoyment of the weekend isn’t just conceptual. It needs to be a tangible change from the rest of the week that we process through our bodies — by going out of the house, being part of an audience, seeing something live, nursing a hangover.

During the lockdown, instead of change, there is sameness laced with an all-pervading anxiety. The pandemic has turned commonplace behaviour, like going for a walk or giving someone a hug, feel dangerous. It’s taken away our sense of freedom. “There is no real time to unwind. It isn’t so much because of lack of clear demarcation between work days and weekends as much as the constant uncertainty we all are living in,” said Kadam. Instead of moving forward, time seems to loop.

Covid-19 feels as though it’s paused the passage of time (unless you’re a frontline worker witnessing severely-afflicted patients lose their battle with the infection; in those situations, the virus makes time move with terrifying speed). Speaking to the podcast Radiolab for an episode aired on May 29, a scientist researching the impact of the drug Remdesivir on the Sars-CoV-2 virus, said the clocks in her bio-safety lab in America keep stopping. They’re not sure why, but in the lab, the clocks’ batteries keep corroding. It’s as though the coronavirus is literally stopping time.

Last Saturday, Dubai-based food and travel writer Vidya Balachander stepped out of the house after nearly three months to meet friends for lunch. “Despite the blistering Dubai heat, the prospect of going out to eat was so tantalising,” said Balachander. They lunched at a Thai restaurant which, in true Dubai fashion, was along an artificial canal and reached by boat; and where distancing norms were strictly observed. There were enough reminders of the pandemic, but just the fact that they were eating out felt liberating. “I think the freedom to eat in restaurants was one we took so much for granted until the pandemic took it away from us,” said Balachander.

Their meal sounds like a diorama of familiar fragments of weekends past (a restaurant setting, friends gathering, a table heaped with food) and elements of a future shaped by the threat of infection — the servers wore gloves and masks, and the tables were arranged as per distancing requirements. Most importantly, this quintessential weekend activity of a meal with friends at a restaurant signifies a break from the mobius-strip reality of the lockdown.

It’s not as though the lockdown has been without silver linings. The air across the country is cleaner than it has been in years. There has been time to learn new things and work on abandoned projects. Our national reputation as far as Azerbaijan is concerned is intact since the country has been spared the experience of surviving a song sequence starring Salman Khan (a song for his Eid release Radhe was to be shot in that country, but the shoot was cancelled). Most importantly, the lockdown has  pushed us to appreciate time lost and time well-spent. Especially when days blur into one another, it has brought home the importance of the weekend and everything we associate with that break from routine. Without the respite of the weekend, it’s difficult to remain mindful of the present. As poet Emily Dickinson wrote,

“Forever — is composed of Nows —
’Tis not a different time —
Except for Infiniteness —
And Latitude of Home…”.

Here’s to surviving the lockdown and reviving the weekend.

Lockdown Chronicles #3

As I sit down to write this, outside my window is a white curtain of rain. Every now and then, when the wind picks up, it flutters like a real curtain. Today, June 4, is the first day of what in Maharashtra has been officially dubbed Mission Begin Again (it is not known if this is because someone in the Maharashtra government is a huge fan of Mark Ruffalo). This, if the Maharashtra government is to be believed, should be my last lockdown chronicle.

Mission Begin Again is the first step towards ‘unlocking’ the lockdown. It was supposed to have started yesterday and I thought of its timing when I opened my door at around 4pm and found the day’s newspaper. One instead of the three that I subscribe to, but still, it was an actual newspaper. It’s been two months since newspapers were delivered in my part of Mumbai and as I brought the flimsy, thin roll of newsprint into the house, I realised I’ve already lost the morning habit of newspaper and tea.

At 4.15pm, on Wednesday, I sat down with a cup of tea and opened up the newspaper to read the news that I already knew. 

If the cyclone hadn’t disrupted the state’s programming, I would have opened the newspaper on Wednesday morning to learn that on day one of Mission Begin Again, Mumbai’s doubling rate had slowed down (from 11-12 days to 19 days) and for the first time since Covid-19 reached Indian shores, the infection’s growth rate in Maharashtra had been below the national average for three consecutive days. Without cyclone warnings to splash across the front page, this would have been big news. It would have been just the kind of news a state would want to share with the public as it crossed its fingers and started lifting restrictions imposed to curb the spread of Covid-19.

This is the kind of scepticism that has become normal for us in the age of disguised propaganda and obviously-malicious misinformation.

On Wednesday, Maharashtra reported 122 deaths, the highest in a day so far.

Going through my journal of random Covid statistics, I note that since May 5, I’ve jotted down “highest daily spike in cases ” six times. The last time was on May 31, when there were 8,392 cases in India. On three days, I’ve written “highest number of deaths”. Today, Thursday, June 4, there are additions to both those categories as Maharashtra and India have reported new highs: 2,933 new cases in Maharashtra and 9,304 in India; and the number of deaths keeps rising (“123 deaths in Maha — highest in a day but health dept says 30 are from last two days and the rest, April 30-June 1. Confusing.”).

My notes are not comprehensive. This notebook isn’t even a journal technically. It’s a planner that has since been repurposed because planning seems particularly ridiculous when nothing in our everyday life seems to change even though in the world beyond the boundaries of the home, cosmic spanners seem to be thrown at regular intervals.

There are only a few bright spots (“Mackerel clouds!” on May 15; “Douglas — Myself worshipping at the altar of Hannah Gadsby. What a goddess.” on May 27). The last 30 days have been hard, with two cyclones and too many lay-offs adding to the general problem of living through a pandemic. In America — which is so far away and yet feels so close because it’s compressed into internet clips that bring the sights, sounds, horrors, heartbreak and strength of a distant nation into our homes — the lights of the White House were turned off and masked, armed soldiers ensured protesters didn’t gather at Lincoln Memorial. Most of us in India may not know where Minneapolis is, but many of us have watched George Floyd being killed by a (white) Minneapolis policeman. The protest videos from America are powerful because they show the kind of strength we would all like to imbibe. Instead of the numb horror that we have internalised as normal, we would like to rage like the Americans have when subjected to a police car deliberately driving into a cluster of civilians; when we’re being told to calm down by the very authorities that are denying us our rights. Increasingly, I’m convinced that heads of state from the rest of the world (particularly the autocratic, dictator types) have funded Trump’s presidential campaign. He makes everyone else look so good. Watch the American president at work, and you can only feel relief that he’s not your leader. Our leader(s) in India may be mismanaging the things in the country, but at least their response to a police crackdown on protesters isn’t a tweet that reads “LAW & ORDER!”, as though he’s taking part in a quiz about TV shows from the 1990s.

Then again, at least he writes his own tweets and comes out to face reporters regularly — only to make an exhibition of his idiotic arrogance, yes, but at least there are press conferences and at least some journalist at press conferences ask good, tough questions. Here in India, we only see our leader through televised addresses, which I at least will never again watch without turning on the closed-caption button.

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Next to America’s hyper-documented present is the lenticular print that is India. I wish there was a more pleasant-sounding term for lenticular prints. These are layered images that create an illusion — the top image flickers to reveal more or completely transform the image when you see it from a different angle. Look straight at India and it looks like we’re doing fine — a strict lockdown; a low fatality rate; helplines for those who need to be admitted to hospitals; government spokespersons reiterating there is no community transmission of Covid-19 in the country. (Sure, the economy is tanking, but which country’s isn’t, courtesy this pandemic? And yes we’re in seventh position in WHO’s ranking of countries most affected by Covid-19, but surely that’s because we have a large population?)

Tilt this (somewhat) reassuring tableau, and you see the millions of Indians who are beating their heads against the wall of apathy, ineptitude, prejudice and callousness whose every brick has been cemented by this pandemic.  There are those who have been frustrated by unhelpful helplines as they try to get tested or get family members admitted to Covid-19 hospitals. People have waited as long as 24 hours for civic authorities to find them a bed with a ventilator. It’s becoming harder and harder to get tested — whether this is because of a shortage of tests, or because laboratories are overwhelmed, or because civic authorities are tweaking the guidelines so that fewer tests are conducted, we don’t know.

Wiggle that picture-perfect postcard of Incredible India, and you’ll see how our government has used the pandemic to carry out its conservative, hateful agenda. Activists who protested peacefully have been arrested while politicians who actually delivered hate speech remain footloose and fancy free. Activist-lawyer Sudha Bharadwaj (whose family was last able to contact her on March 14) remains in jail as do 81-year-old activist-poet Varavara Rao, despite reporting “giddiness and other health issues”, and the wheelchair-bound GN Saibaba. Courts are denying bail to those falsely accused of making inflammatory speeches, stating grounds like “when you choose to play with embers, you cannot blame the wind for carrying the spark”. Multiple states have diluted and dismissed labour laws to create what Centre of Indian Trade Unions has described as “conditions of slavery” for workers.

Then there are the migrant labourers and daily-wagers, who stayed on in the cities they’ve helped build, expenses gnawing into their meagre savings and starvation slipping a little deeper under their skin with every hopeless day. After more than a month of keeping migrant workers in relief camps (many of which sounded like prison with less food), the Centre started running special trains to take workers back to their home states on May 1. By end-May, a little more than five million workers had won the lottery of a seat on these trains, which seems pretty good until you realise that between May 9 and May 20, 80 people have died on board these trains. Mohan Lal Sharma was reduced to a crumpled, decomposing body in a train loo; Arveena Khatoon’s child tried to wake her up, not knowing the 23-year-old mother had died, possibly of thirst, hunger and heat. Usually, even the shortest train trip is a punctuated by meals (tea + biscuits; juice + snack; soup + meal + ice cream), but Arveena had travelled for two days without any food. Going through the stories that PARI has done during the lockdown, you get a glimpse of what’s hidden under our Covid-19 statistics.

We may not have video evidence of this, but there is a knee on India’s neck. Some of us can’t breathe. Some are standing aside, like the three officers who ensured no one interrupted Derek Chauvin as he choked the life out of George Floyd. The rest of us are horrified witnesses, barely capable of comprehending what is being done in our name and dealing with our survivors’ guilt by manically seeking out distractions.

Flipping through my planner-turned-Covid-chronicle, I can see I made a concerted effort to fill the pages. Since May 5, there are seven days for which I’ve written down “blank” in big, neat letters (rather than just leaving the page blank). On one of those days, I remember getting the news that one of the nicest people in my office had been asked to leave. On another, my menstrual cramps had plunged me in such agony that despite the humid May heat, the only comfort was to stand under the shower and have viciously-hot water beat down on my lower back (there is just one line written on this day’s page: “Let menopause come. PLEASE.”). Most pages have Covid-related news — “16 migrants run over by cargo train”; “India crosses 1 lakh cases”; “Maha regularly reporting more than 2,000 cases daily”; “New BMC guidelines for testing and tracing”; “Lockdown extended to June 30” – and the number of cases and deaths recorded in Maharashtra and Mumbai.

I notice that there few mentions of an improving recovery rate and nothing about the days when the lowest number of cases were recorded. This is not because I’m seeking to steep myself in depressing news, but because surrounded as I am by illusions and performances, I need this journal to be real.

Since the middle of May, there are more cars and people on the road in Bandra. It’s almost as people believe they can will Covid-19 to disappear if they’re belligerent enough while pretending the pandemic is not real. Cars, driven by owners, shriek as they race through otherwise empty streets, breaking driving rules that the drivers either don’t know or can’t be bothered to follow. At shops, crowds masquerade as lines and there are more sunglasses than masks on display. More and more domestic help have been asked to resume work, but in a way that keeps their employers’ conscience shiny (eg. Overheard at Carter Road bandstand: “My maid called me and said, ‘Didi, please. I’m so bored at home’ so I said, ok come. I wouldn’t DREAM of asking her to come but if she wants to, it’s not fair to not let her, na? Who knows, maybe her husband beats her and work is her escape?”).

Meanwhile the streets of Bandra are lined with desperately-poor people, particularly women and children, who have come to this affluent part of the city in the hope that it will be charitable. Most of us try to be, but we also do our best to not make eye contact with them, refusing these people the simple courtesy of being acknowledged, mostly because we’re grappling with the guilt of knowing that what should be a basic right is a privilege in this country. A privilege that we, with our masks and sunglasses and gloves, have and hoard.

The police are sick of chasing morning and evening walkers off the bandstands. “You think I like doing this?” said the policeman who caught me smuggling a sunset and politely asked me to get off Carter Road bandstand. He was on a white scooter. “It’s driving all of us mad. Just stay home for a few more days. We keep telling people but still they keep coming. You can take all the sunset photos you want, go anywhere you want, but after May 31. For now, do us a favour and stay home. Anyway, these summer sunsets are boring. You want a good picture? Wait for the proper monsoon clouds,” he advised, unaware that this was very much a case of preaching to the choir. I almost opened up my Instagram to show him my cloud photos from last year.  

[image error]The cop is right about monsoon clouds, but this is not half bad.

While walking back, a woman stopped me to ask if the police are around. Standing on Carter Road, with the occasional four-wheel drive roaring past us, we chatted about policing and a civilian’s right to sunsets. Our tones are so warm and full of laughter that bystanders must think we’re old friends. We’ve never met before. All we have in common is a burning desire to get out of the house and an intention to upload sunset photos on Instagram.

As we talk, our gestures are exaggerated. She pulls her mask down briefly and then pulls it back up, as though the nose, lips, chin and cheeks she just flashed me are a secret sign. I keep laughing audibly in an effort to communicate sociability through the mask under which I’m sweating, partly because it’s hot and partly because small talk makes me nervous. She keeps looking at the sun and that’s when I realise she’s chosen me to (a) kill time until the sun’s at the perfect level for the photo she wants to take, (b) be her wingman if the cop shows up in his white scooter. Lurking in this is a reversal of the idea of the prince on the white charger, which the feminist cultural critic in me appreciates even while the introvert in me wants to walk away from this conversation with a stranger right. now.

 “It’s hard to convince yourself that there’s real need to worry,” said my non-friend while keeping an eye on the setting sun. “After all, how many people do you know who have Covid-19?” It’s meant to be a rhetorical question, but I have an answer. “Eight,” I reply. Even with her mask covering most of her face, I can see she’s taken aback. In fact, she actually takes a step back. The conversation ends abruptly after that.

In the last month, from my little circle of friends, family, colleagues and acquaintances in India, one person has died of Covid-19; two were asymptomatic positives (one spent 25 days in quarantine, repeatedly testing positive, but without showing any symptoms); five have symptoms that are considered mild and are in home quarantine; one is in ICU.

There’s a video I saw of a cat hunting a bird. The bird stood around, preening, drinking water from a little puddle. The cat sat, watching and moving almost imperceptibly closer to the bird every now and then. Almost two minutes later, when it pounced on the bird, it came as a shock to both the bird and me that the cat had actually come as close as it had. Covid-19, to me, feels like that apex predator. It’s moving slowly, imperceptibly closer, every few days. To the woman I was talking to, however, it’s a distant, blurry outline of threat that she can ignore if she moves away from people like me and those who are considered high-risk. 

At some point in the last 30 days, Covid-19 changed — not as an infection, but as a social construct. From a rich man’s disease, afflicting those who can afford international travel, it became something that affects the poor. When it was a disease carried to India by those with international frequent flier miles, the privileged locked themselves up, bought sanitisers, and wore masks. Two months in, the face of Covid-19 is no longer of a person with holiday photos in Florence or New York City. Instead, it’s associated with migrant workers and the urban poor, especially after slums areas like Dharavi started reporting spikes in the number of cases and deaths. Covid-19 became something that the rich think they no longer need to worry about. It affects and infects ‘them’, not ‘us’.

Disease is not the great leveller. It does, however, expose the fault lines in our society. The way it moves through a population shows the inequalities and skewed priorities. The way we tackle it shows the biases we are unwilling to let go. Each time I go to the market, I see more people wearing surgical gloves. Some put the change they get from a vendor into a separate bag. I’ve been forwarded instructions to sanitise fruits and vegetables bought from street vendors. We’re trying to slow down a disease that spreads through contact, so there is some sense in doing all this. Yet I can’t shake off the feeling that there are more people willing to wear gloves than masks, because untouchability and maintaining a physical distance from those we consider beneath us, is something we’ve imbibed as natural.

Perhaps the most telling sign of this being the end of days is that ultimately, Mumbai found beauty and relief in, of all things, a cyclone.

India has weathered two cyclones in the past fortnight. Cyclone Amphan made landfall near Sagar Island on May 20 and even after Bonbibi’s Sunderbans had absorbed the worst of the storm, it savaged stretches of southern Bengal.

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Wind raged through Kolkata at more than 120kmph, uprooting 5,000-odd trees and ripping the city’s infrastructure apart. Many parts of the city and the state lost power as electricity poles came crashing down. Crops were destroyed, people’s homes were devastated and 72 were killed. Amid these horrors were fragments of terrifying beauty — a tree is so brilliantly aflame that even columns of rain couldn’t douse it; the thick sweet smell of ripe mangoes filling the air after the precious fruit was thrown to the ground by vicious wind; a neighbourhood in darkness, lit up briefly by the firework of an exploding transformer box; the swirling thickness of grey-blue clouds gathering over different parts of the city, turning the tallest skyscrapers puny and against whose darkness, the white dome of Victoria Memorial, with her angel, stood out.

A little more than a week after Amphan, there was news of a cyclonic storm developing in the Arabian Sea. The cyclone was named Nisarga and projections suggested it would make landfall north of Mumbai. For a city that’s teeming with people and tottering, flimsy shacks, this is worrying. For a city like that which is also a Covid-19 hotspot, has been in lockdown and whose streets are currently lined with the poor and homeless, this is disastrous.

Mumbai is used to rain caused by cyclones going past it, but thanks to steering winds and the subtropical ridge, it’s never been directly hit. That track record remains intact. Nisarga first shifted course so that the landfall site changed from north of Mumbai (near Dahanu) to south of Mumbai. When Nisarga finally made landfall, it was in Raigad. Mumbai saw some wind and rain, and some stunning clouds in the evening as the satellite images showed Nisarga had moved inland.

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And so it was that the city lived up to the old name given to it by the Portuguese — Bom Bahia or “good bay” — as the winds that have protected the city for centuries, did their thing.

Then, because this city likes keeping everyone on their toes and the IMD is reliably unreliable, the day after the cyclone, the rain came down hard. Thunder rolled every few seconds, the sun disappeared, the wind picked up and sheets of almost opaque rain crashed down on the city.

Since I started writing this post in the morning, there’s been one weak moment of sunshine in the whole day and that lasted just a few minutes. It’s 1am now, and the storm is rattling my windows. It sounds like it’s laughing as it rushes past mostly-dark buildings and through headbanging trees. Despite everything, I find myself smiling. This rain, even as it drowns parts of the city and fills the lakes that supply us with water through the year, is not a disaster. It’s a familiar.

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Paatal Lok: Hella good

Ever since I finished watching episode 8 of Paatal Lok, I’ve had two imaginary scenarios playing out in my head so let me just get this out of my system.

Scenario 1: Shoot inside a hotel room

Cinematographer [to the two co-directors]: So the shot will basically show the two of them in bed.
Bengali Director: I think we need to establish that the woman is Bengali.
Cinematographer: While they’re having sex?
Non-Bengali Director: Well, the first scene in the episode shows her in a bar, writing poetry, on a napkin. If that’s not Bengali…
Bengali Director: But she was wearing a salwar kameez. Also this scene is 18 minutes later. What if it’s slipped the audience’s mind that the character is Bengali?
Non-Bengali Director: Ok. What do you want her to say?

Everyone racks their brain to get into the mind of a Bengali woman having sex.

Bengali Director: I know! She can recite my favourite Tagore poem!
Non-Bengali Director: While having sex?
Bengali Director: It’s perfect! It describes the whole Eros-Thanatos thing.
Non-Bengali director: You just want to have your favourite poem in the sex scene, don’t you?
Bengali Director: It’s a very specifically Bengali kink.

[image error]Madam, I believe you. (Also, please note: Shuklaji’s careful positioning of the janeu. This is the sort of detailing that makes Paatal Lok so good.)

Scene 2: The writers’ room for Paatal Lok.

Writer 1: …and then we show the guy and the Bengali woman having sex.
Writer 2: Hm. How do we establish her Bengali-ness?
Writer 1: Bro. The first time we saw her, she was writing poetry, on a napkin, in Bengali, in a bar in Kolkata.
Writer 2: Yeah, but in a salwar kameez.
Writer 1: She could say something in Bengali?
Writer 2: That’s not enough.

Everyone racks their brain to get into the mind of a Bengali woman having sex.

Writer 2: I know! Let’s have her recite something by RABINDRANATH TAGORE!
Writer 1: While having sex?
Writer 2: What could turn a Bengali on more than Tagore?

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You know, the more I think about it, I feel bad for Shuklaji. Maybe he wanted to yell out some Hindi poetry, but no. Chanda’s got to get through her recitation of “Prohoroshesher aaloy ranga”… .

In all seriousness, I’m reasonably sure none of the above scenarios actually happened because very little of Paatal Lok, the new streaming crime thriller produced by Anushka Sharma’s Clean Slate Films and directed by Avinash Arun and Prosit Roy, feels like it was done on the fly. It is, for most part, a superbly written show. Sure, it takes the idea of sex being poetic to a whole new level and the show does present a somewhat simplistic and cliché-ridden take on journalism, but hey, I bet a police officer watching Paatal Lok would probably roll their eyes at how easily the investigating officers get the information they need. The point is that the flaws are minor and despite them, Paatal Lok is perhaps the best of the procedurals produced in India so far.

A lot of Paatal Lok is drawn from the novel The Story of My Assassins by Tarun Tejpal, who used to be something of a rockstar in journalism and has since fallen from grace after he was charged with sexual assault and fraud. For whatever reason, neither Tejpal nor his novel are mentioned in the show’s credits. It is ironic, of course, that the depiction of the media and the star journalist are the most cringe-worthy parts of a show adapted from a novel by a journalist. (It’s still galaxies better than what was shown in at least the first season of Four More Shots Please!, but that’s not saying much.)

On a bridge in the Outer Jamuna Paar area of Delhi, there’s an unexpected encounter between four people in a car and a small contingent of policemen. The evidence suggests the four were hired to kill journalist Sanjeev Mehra, who is the face of a TV news channel that is struggling to get the ratings it needs. However, as investigating officer Inspector Hathi Ram Chaudhary and his sidekick Imran Ansari discover, the truth is a layer cake.

With Avinash Arun as a co-director (he made the exquisitely-shot Killa and was the cinematographer of Masaan), it’s not surprising that Paatal Lok looks as good as it does. Whether it’s a drab police station or a village fair with a ‘death well‘ filled with rushing, neon-accented racing cars, there’s a wonderful sense of geometry and colour in the cinematography of Paatal Lok.

[image error]This screengrab doesn’t do the shot in the death well/ maut ka kuan any justice, but if you’ve seen the show, you know how stunning it is. Also, Jaideep Ahlawat is excellent as Inspector Hathi Ram Chaudhary.

Considering all the issues that Paatal Lok touches upon, the show could easily have been reduced to a set of lectures or rants. Caste: check. Social privilege: check. Gender bias: check. Islamophobia: check. Homophobia: check. Toxic masculinity: check. Rape culture: check. Fake news: check. (There’s more but I’ll stop here.) However, the writing team of Sudip Sharma (who is also credited with creating the show), Sagar Haveli, Hardik Mehta and Gunjit Chopra make sure that Paatal Lok, for all its commentary on social inequalities, is never preachy. Almost every detail and backstory serves the central plot and adds the effect of perspective.

(MILD SPOILERS AHEAD)

I think my favourite episode is the third one (“A History of Violence”), in which Imran goes to Punjab to find out more about one of the accused (Tope Singh) while Hathi Ram goes to Chitrakoot to dig up the police records on another (Vishal “Hathora” Tyagi). In the show’s opening sequence, Hathi Ram explains to Imran how Indian society in general and specifically Delhi as a city are structured. There’s heaven, which is the realm of the privileged like Sanjeev Mehra. Then there’s hell, a netherland occupied by the poor and marginalised. Sandwiched between these two is the middle layer that Hathi Ram and Imran inhabit — far below the top, well above the bottom, and constantly out of place.

If Hathi Ram and Imran struggle to fit into urban social structures, in rural and semi-rural spaces, they stick out like sore thumbs. They’re also redundant as police officers because laws and the criminal justice system are irrelevant in these places where caste and class decide everything. Tope Singh and Tyagi’s past include episodes that are brutal but familiar. We’ve heard and read stories about incidents like these. Paatal Lok, written and made for an urbane audience, offers a reminder that behind the statistics and news reports is trauma suffered by real people. And it has consequences. The lower-caste boy whose act of defiance led to his mother being gang-raped grows up to be the man banging on his girlfriend’s door because violence is the only language he’s inherited.

In many ways, Paatal Lok is a very masculine show. There are very few women characters, though the show gets points for writing a transwoman character who isn’t sensationalised or fetishised. Not just that, they also cast a trans actor for the role so big props to them for that.

At one point, someone in the show says women are hired to accompany assassins because a car with only men in it looks suspicious. Add a woman and the same scene becomes less threatening. That’s what the women characters — all performing either supporting roles or extras — in Paatal Lok feel like: window dressing. There’s an inept woman constable; a womxn prisoner who has little to do other than weep; a housewife who badgers her husband and then gets slapped around (literally); and a journalist who has an affair with her boss. Eventually, some of these women end up with a little more to do and the journalist in particular gets a couple of zingers in, but that just barely blunts the male-centricity of Paatal Lok.

To be fair, one of the reasons Paatal Lok feels authentic in its north Indian setting is that it’s full of men who pepper their conversation with abuses that refer to penises, fucking and women. Much of the show is about machismo and the exhibitions of physical brutality and it’s telling that both the show’s hero and villain are products of violence. Hathi Ram’s meekness comes from having grown up with an abusive father and Tyagi’s rage is channelled very intentionally towards savagery by Masterji. You see Tyagi with the dogs in the farmhouse and you can almost imagine a different future for him — that is, until he chops his thumb on Masterji’s command, to become a modern-day Eklavya. It’s a terrible demand to make of Tyagi because it’s so unnecessary. Couched as a test of loyalty, it’s violence for the sake of violence.

[image error]Abhishek Banerjee as Vishal “Hathoda” Tyagi has this dead-eyed stare that is deeply unnerving. The last thing you expect him — or even Donullia, the dreaded bandit of Chitrakoot — to be is a mushball for street dogs. But they are, and it all adds up.

Mostly through Imran, who is effectively the show’s conscience and the only squeaky-clean good guy in the show, Paatal Lok conveys its distaste for the violence that is established as norm — boys will be beaten; women and children will be raped; the marginalised will be killed; the weak will be humiliated etc.

Yet what finally elevates Hathi Ram in his teenaged son’s eyes is that same violence. A few punches, kicks and swear words later (it’s interesting that Imran stands as a physical barrier between the violence and the boy), Hathi Ram is a hero to the same son who treated him with contempt earlier. The only way Hathi Ram can assert himself as an alpha is with a show of physical strength. Some may say that Hathi Ram’s alpha aura is dented when he later gets one tight slap from his wife, but the fact is he had hit her earlier. That she sees slapping him back as her only recourse is another cycle of violence. It’s also worth noting that while Hathi Ram slapping his wife is part of the man establishing his position as a patriarch, his wife slapping Hathi Ram is played for comedy. There’s an alternate fictional universe in which Hathi Ram comes home and his wife makes him sit down and watch Thappad with her.

For me, one of the most heartbreaking but hopeful stories in Paatal Lok is between the sadly-underwritten Cheeni and her childhood friend who finds ways to stay in touch with her even after she’s been taken into police custody. It’s a love story that is entirely the stuff of pipe dreams, especially considering the horrors that the two have survived, but it’s so tender and utterly precious in the ugliness that surrounds them. While it would have been nice if Cheeni had to do something other than weep and look scared, I’m so relieved she wasn’t subjected to a tasteless, voyeuristic, unnecessary and exploitative ‘reveal’ like the one Kuku had to go through in Sacred Games. In Paatal Lok, the non-mystery of her biological gender is dragged out for a few episodes and when she’s finally outed, it’s horrible, but the way it’s filmed is not graphic (relatively). The camera and the storytelling focus less on Cheeni’s body and more on how the men around her — particularly Hathi Ram and Tope Singh — try to establish their dominant masculinity.

[image error]Mairembam Ronaldo Singh, who is a trans actor, plays Cheeni.

Throughout the show, most men try to amplify what they consider their essential manliness when they’re around Cheeni and it’s almost always ugly. Three characters break this pattern. One is Kabir, who is also humiliated, victimised and stripped in order to establish his identity (religious in his case, as opposed to gender) and another is Imran. The real constant, though, is Cheeni’s friend. I ate two Snickers after the last, heartbreaking conversation Cheeni had with him in the courthouse.

It bears repeating that even the best of scripts can be reduced to a mess by bad or listless acting. Fortunately for Paatal Lok, most of its cast acts its heart out. No one overacts and everyone other than Neeraj Kabi as Sanjeev Mehra felt convincing. Jaideep Ahlawat as Hathi Ram is a treat to watch as he smoothly transitions from being the most progressive cop in the room to viciously assaulting a transwoman because he’s frustrated by his investigation. In a lesser actor’s hands, Hathi Ram could have come across as disjointed as he shuffles between meek and mutinous, kind and violent, offensive and terrified, but Ahlawat’s Hathi Ram feels real and complex. Abhishek Banerjee as the remorseless Tyagi also stands out as does Bodhisattva Sharma as Hathi Ram’s son, Siddharth. Nikita Grover as the woman constable who is basically the source of all of Hathi Ram’s woes, thanks to her love of pastries and being glued to her phone, is also excellent. Perhaps one of the more genius casting choices in Paatal Lok is that of getting bhajan singer and now reality tv star Anup Jalota as a UP politician. Gold.

So yeah, never mind that minor detail of the Tagore-spouting vamp, Paatal Lok is hella good.

Closed Caption: No Contest

It’s not the saddest news of the day — that would be the 114 deaths from Covid-19 reported in India today, so far — but it is certainly disappointing that the powers that be have fiddled with settings so that now, you don’t get the “subtitles/ closed captions” option if you look up the YouTube video of the 8pm address that was delivered today.

Because boss, I haven’t enjoyed an address to the nation this much in years.

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Lockdown Chronicles #2

At the horizon, the flat blue of the sky is smudged with orange heat and violet shadow. The rippling sea reflects the orange in some parts and the blue in others. Anchored boats bob as the water rises with incoming tide. The sun is a neat, brilliant, golden circle. This is an unspectacular sunset, all drama of light and colour beaten out of it by summer heat. It’s also the first sunset I’m seeing since March and I find myself grinning stupidly under my mask as I stare at the sky and sea before me.

That’s when I hear the abuse. It’s rendered largely unrecognisable by the virtue of it being yelled out, but I know it’s directed at me because no one else is here. I look up to see a policeman. He, I note, is not wearing a mask but he does have on aviators that make him look a bit like a human-sized fly. From the fact that I can now decipher words in his yell (something about throwing me in jail), one may conclude he is not ambling but striding towards me. I scoot, without regrets and with my contraband — photographs of a sunset, taken from a bandstand in Bandra.

Of course it makes sense that during a lockdown to contain an infection, seaside bandstands are among the public spaces that are closed, but it feels wrong. This is the sea whose breeze once helped blow the plague away from Bombay. These bandstands are among the few spaces in this crowded city that can legitimately be described as ‘open’. The sea is a comfort to Mumbai and now, just the sight of it is contraband for all of us who don’t live in sea-view apartments.

Back home, I go through the photos in my phone the way a shoplifter examines their loot. The pictures are unremarkable. Even so, as I look at the sunset that’s been miniaturised to fit my phone’s screen, I find myself breathing slower and deeper. 

Today is exactly a month from the madness of April 5, when the Prime Minister’s call to switch off lights in homes for nine minutes left electricity boards and the power ministry scrambling for a man-made miracle. The announcement, made during a Prime Ministerial address to the nation, seemed at the time to be frustrating insubstantial and full of hollow rhetoric. In fact, it was revealing. It showed just how lightly the Prime Minister was taking the Covid-19 outbreak and that he saw the country, on the brink of financial collapse and riddled with the fear of contracting this new infection, as his entertainment. Some people looked for new streaming shows during lockdown; our Prime Minister got the entire country to make a TikTok video for him.

[image error]This is one stretch of Mumbai just before and during the nine-minute stunt. The photographs were taken by an HT photographer. A month later, I see more lights in the darkness.

When it finally happened, the engineers did end up saving the day. All the flats around me shut off their lights and quite a few yelled “Go Corona Go” for good measure. I remember feeling like the swivel-headed cop from The Lego Movie, except both my faces were snarling. I was furious that the Prime Minister would infantilise us like this, waving the lollipop of an idiotic spectacle to divert our attention; and I was doubly furious at us, because of course most of the country did switch off their lights because they believed that at 9pm on April 5, for nine minutes, the mahashakti of candles had anti-viral properties.

Welcome to 21st-century India where on one hand, engineers make careful calculations to ensure the country’s plunge into darkness is only temporary while on the other, nationalists following their Dear Leader’s instructions breathe new life to the Orientalist stereotype of the exotic, superstitious and gullible ‘native’. Back in the old days, at least you could grind your teeth and blame it on the British. Now it’s all on us.

At the time, the Prime Minister’s supporters said to detractors that the Prime Minister was just trying to comfort the anxious masses with small but significant acts that united the nation and made a leader memorable.

A month later, the memory of that night has been crowded out by drudgery, tragedy, anxiety and exhaustion. It’s from a distant past when fresh produce was not rotting in fields across India, daily-wagers hadn’t been driven to starvation because of gaps in our public distribution system, and we didn’t suspect migrant labourers were being forced to stay where they are because host states don’t want to lose cheap labour. We didn’t realise it then, but those were more hopeful times.

The present is made up of the restlessness of the privileged, the hunger of the poor, survivors’ guilt and the desperate selfishness that comes from abject fear.

My personal triumph is that I have not done any Insta Live sessions during this lockdown. Not that anyone wanted me to, but when has the lack of an invitation stopped anyone from putting their face on camera in the age of the internet? Every time I open Instagram, it seems half my timeline is going live with someone. Some of these live sessions are, admittedly, interesting and informative, but from my limited experience, most Insta Lives seem to be two or more friends hanging out, turning their genuine friendship into a performance (works for Fleabag, but boss, we are not all Fleabag. Sadly). I’m vaguely relieved that I have not felt the need to do this. I may not have much to show for the six-odd weeks of lockdown, but at least I didn’t contribute to the noise.

Instead, I’ve stayed indoors, in an apartment that has so quickly become home and whose lease I will probably not be able to renew next year. This is not the first apartment I’ve called home, but it’s the first one that is all mine and I’ve been enjoying it as fully as I possibly can. I’ve been trying to appreciate it without thinking about how it’s highly unlikely that I’ll be able to renew this lease, given the mangled mess that is the Indian economy in general and the media sector in particular.

I’m surprised to find I haven’t mentioned the house at all in my notebook. Its pages are filled with all sorts of nonsense, but there’s nothing about the house. No mention of the moon that I marvel at while sitting at my desk, working from home, as it rises, opalescent and beautiful, above the terrace of the hideously-ugly building that faces mine. Nothing about the path that the sunlight follows from one room to another, slanting past other multi-storeyed buildings and the occasional cloud.

Here’s what I do write in my notebook: Covid statistics; grumbles; art; and stupid questions.

Samples:

Stupid questions from April 5: “If examiners can’t take answer sheets home, then how the hell will the kids get results on time? Also, obviously school/ college/ uni can’t be held ‘normally’ given infection rate, so why aren’t boards and HRD figuring out something for the academic calendar? And online is NOT the answer. How many students can afford smartphones and gadgets (not even getting into access to electricity and internet)?”

Grumble from April 8: “Made the worst lunch ever. Not even first attempts at cooking back in uni days compare. Completely inedible, but forced self to eat it in the hope that I would feel virtuous by the end of the meal. Instead feeling sick. Thank god wasted money on big jar of Nutella.” 

Stupid questions from April 10: “All very well to say vegetable markets and meat shops are part of essential services and should remain open, but what are they going to sell? How are farmers supposed to get produce from fields/ orchards to the mandi without labour to help load and unload the produce? Are we going to have the rabi crop just go to waste while the poor starve?”   

Stupid questions from April 14: “Just one thing about the gathering of migrant labourers at Bandra station — surreal to think it was so close to home — has the Railway ministry explained that internal circular that ABP Mazha carried, and the curious detail that YOU COULD BUY TRAIN TICKETS FOR APRIL 14 ONLINE?” 

Culture-vulture-ing from April 15: “Marie Brennan is a goddess and The Natural History of Dragons is perfect lockdown reading – short chapters, great world-building, AND DRAGONS! Love how Brennan throws conventional structure out the window and packs all the action in the last few chapters.” 

Covid-related note from April 15: “29yo dies by suicide in Nair Hospital after testing positive for Covid-19. She hanged herself in the bathroom hours after getting the positive result.”

Culture-vulture-ing from April 17: “Werner Herzog + Baby Yoda. LOVE The Mandalorian.”

Stupid question from April 23: “Lockdown to be extended, people saying till May 23. But what after that? No vaccine, no treatment; we cannot afford an indefinite lockdown. So then what? Do our leaders really think it’ll disappear by May 23? Need to make this distancing thing work once public transport reopens, but how? Three to six feet from the next passenger on a local train? HA! What about enforcing a long-term work-from-home policy (can’t think of any other way to reduce pressure on public transport)? Doesn’t solve the problem for a lot of industries, but surely the priority has to be to figure out ways that the privileged can work from home (since they can) and the labourers, who need work and whose labour is essential to so many industries, are the ones who step out?”

Covid-related note from April 25: “The building parking lot is full of boxes of ration that are being distributed (I presume). Step out and within seconds, there’s a hungry child who will beg you to buy them some rice and oil, a couple of bananas, a packet of milk. How many people are we losing to hunger? Is anyone even counting?”

Stupid question from April 27: “If all of us download that deeply dodgy Arogya Setu, will India become South Korea? ”

Culture-vulture-ing from May 3: “Parks and Recreation is just the cutest, most enjoyably escapist show ever. Please let there be such a thing as a Ron Swanson plushy.”  

I understand how entirely and ridiculously steeped in privilege this sounds, but I’m waiting for the lockdown to ease up because I’m running out of notebooks.

We are living in hope that April was the cruellest month as far as the story of Covid-19 in India is concerned, even as the lockdown has been extended for the second time to May 17. On April 1, 36 people in Maharashtra tested positive for the Sars-Cov-2 virus that causes Covid-19. A month later, on May 1, the number of new cases were 1,008. In Mumbai, the number of containment zones — where multiple people are testing positive for the virus — came down to 1,036 on April 27 after 231 zones fell off the list because they had not reported any cases in 14 days. That’s right. Came down to 1,036. Today, India reported 3,900 new cases, the sharpest spike in daily cases of Covid-19.

It’s not all doom and gloom. The mortality rate in Maharashtra has come down — from 7.21% on April 12 to 4.23% on May 3. (The national mortality rate is around 3.25%.) Meanwhile on April 4, Kerala reported the second consecutive day without anyone testing positive for Sars-Cov-2 (it reported three new cases today).

The word on the street is that India’s population is remarkably resilient as far as Covid-19 is concerned, with 1,573 deaths reported so far. The United States of America has more deaths (69,680) from Covid-19 than we have reported cases (46,620), and no one is quite sure why. To quote one Maybelline, maybe we’re born with it. (Or maybe we just don’t have enough reliable testing kits.)

If only these silver linings felt shinier.

Sometimes — particularly while cooking — I wonder what we will remember of this past month.  Will it settle in memory as the month in which everyone and their goldfish did live sessions on Instagram, when screenshots of Zoom meetings became the new humblebrag, and when my tribe of privileged bubble-dwellers philosophised about isolation, beauty and self-improvement? Will this visceral hatred of sweeping the floor be the remains of these days?

Last night, I made a list of things I would like to not forget from this past month. This is the edited version. 

Shortage of testing kits.

Abundance of art — particularly dance and theatre — made available for free.

The drudgery of domestic chores.

Covid-19 is not a great leveller: the poor are devastated in ways the middle classes and elite can’t imagine.

Frontline workers being barred from or turfed out of their homes by housing societies that feared doctors and nurses would bring the infection back with them.

Private hospitals charging between Rs 1 lakh to Rs 2 lakh a day to treat Covid-19 patients. (Average hospital stay: 14 days.) Note: there is no known treatment for the infection at present, beyond attaching a severely-affected patient to a ventilator and saying many prayers.

The triumph of making excellent food, day after day, using only two utensils and one knife because the more items you use, the bigger the pile that needs washing afterwards. 

Stepping out to see women and children, begging for food, in every lane, outside every shop, at every market.

The two girls who come to the window at 5.45pm to catch the golden light of the sun as it gets ready to set, and make TikTok videos.

Those who collected funds and organised relief packages for the destitute, and the ones who feed the dogs and cats on the streets.

The terror of starting to cramp two days before the period is due, when there is no Combiflam at home.

Flamingos returned to our city and thanks to the internet, we could see them without moving an inch.  

Pay has been cut, jobs have been lost, opportunities have been revoked and assignments have been cancelled. Still, we remain afloat and we smuggle sunsets.

[image error]May 3, 2020

The Epiphany of Twelfth Night

It has been almost three years since Malvolia, in her yellow stockings, and Sir Andrew Aguecheek in his pink suit, stood in fake rain, on the National Theatre’s stage in London. He — filled with hurt and humiliation, cuddling a teddy bear. She — roughed-up, dragging herself towards the spotlight, furious as the pounding rain. Around them, lovers were united. The happy movements contrasted starkly with the stillness of the two who had been cast out. Feste, the fool, sang, “For the rain it raineth every day.”

How is it that someone still hasn’t written “Thirteenth Night”, telling the stories of Malvolia and Sir Andrew, the two outcasts who were toyed with by the spoilt little rich kids of Illyria and who are surely due their retribution? All those who watched this play live, how have you held back from writing Malvolia and Andrew’s stories? Because it’s been a little more than 24 hours since I watched the recording on YouTube, and I’m *this* close to plotting the fan-fiction version.

[image error]Tamsin Greig as Malvolia in Twelfth Night (National Theatre)



[image error]Daniel Rigby as Sir Andrew Aguecheek in Twelfth Night (National Theatre)

Technically, even though it holds on to most of the lines of the original play, director Simon Godwin isn’t faithful to William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. This fantastic production has a great cast (with stand-out performances by Tamsin Greig as Malvolia and Daniel Rigby as Sir Andrew), a glorious soundtrack and absolutely stunning stage design — all of which take many liberties with Shakespeare’s play as they translate it for the 21st century.

For instance, among the props used are (in no specific order):

A car
A fountain
A saxophonist
Shiny, gold swimming shorts
Twirly things on bra cups.

None of which sound particularly Shakespearean.

Godwin also flips the gender of a few significant supporting and minor characters — the steward Malvolio is now the chaperone/ lady-companion Malvolia; the fool is Feste, a singer; and Fabian the servant becomes Fabia, the handywoman. Gender-bending is hardly a new device in contemporary theatre. Arguably, it wasn’t new even in the 17th century when Shakespeare’s plays were originally staged since boys played the female roles and the audience was very aware that they were seeing a performance of femininity. Often, the decision to feminise a role or cast a woman to play a male part feels gimmicky (which is not necessarily a bad thing). Once in a while, the gender-flip utterly transforms the play. Godwin’s Twelfth Night is one of the latter.

Even without the gender-bending, Twelfth Night is stuffed with spectacles. To begin with, there’s the fantastic set (designed by Soutra Gilmour) that becomes a staircase, a posh home, a garden, a gloomy street, a neon-bright gay bar, a chapel etc etc. How perfect for a play in which so many are not what they seem, that the set too keeps and reveals secrets?

Then there’s the live music and Shakespeare’s sonnets and speeches set to music (all contemporary in melody and arrangement, composed by Michael Bruce). I’m in love with the woman who plays the woodwind instruments. Also, while the idea of having Malvolia sing Sonnet 135 is genius and you can’t help but bob to the rendition of “To be or not to be” sung by the queen at the Elephant, I’m haunted by the song that Doon Mackichan as Feste sings at the end of the play.

Finally, there are the big laughs that the play brings out through performance. Twelfth Night is a comedy and while the central idea — everyone’s conning everyone else — is funny, the humour can feel laboured and dated in performance. Godwin’s Twelfth Night feels sharply modern, not just because everyone’s dressed in suits (made of gorgeous fabrics) and dresses, but because the performances translate Shakespearean wit into contemporary cool.

A lot lies in the dialogue delivery, which is perfectly-pitched in terms of tones and emphases, conning you into thinking that you might totally say things like “Who saw Cesario, ho?” while hanging out with friends. (Don’t.) But there’s also how the performance turns physical details into big statements.

For instance, when Olivia says, “Give me my veil: come, throw it o’er my face” (before she has to meet the boy — ie a cross-dressed Viola — whom Orsino has sent to woo her), Godwin has Olivia and her handmaidens put on sunglasses. Not only is it funny to see the women, all dressed in black, suddenly turn into mafiosi, it actually updates Olivia’s character. For the 17th-century Olivia, the veil was a symbol of propriety and it created a façade to the wearer. The sunglasses offers that protective façade, but it also becomes a power move on Olivia’s part.

There’s also a lot of broad, physical humour in Twelfth Night — from dry-humping in a paddle pool to fencing in pink socks and dancing in a fountain, it’s all here.

[image error]How can you not burst out laughing at this sight? #TeamAndrew




[image error]Best happy dance ever. #Malvolia4Eva

Once you get used to all this, you start seeing what this particular Twelfth Night is doing — it’s reorienting the play. This performance is not just an oddball love story with sub-plots involving shipwrecks and practical jokes. This Twelfth Night is about two outcasts: Malvolia and Sir Andrew. It is true that the actors playing these two roles are outstanding and steal the show from the rest of the cast (which is also very good), but this doesn’t happen by chance. The performance is intentionally designed to focus on the outcasts. That’s why the play ends with Malvolia.

Usually, physical humour tends to belittle the one doing it — they’re the idiot slipping on a banana peel or crashing into the glass door etc, looking stupid. In this particular performance of Twelfth Night, though, the broad humour actually serves to make us feel for the actors — Greig and Rigby — who are the butt of ridicule.

Greig, who lights up the stage in every scene she’s in, is incandescent while delivering Malvolia’s long monologue in which she discovers the love letter from Olivia (it’s actually a prank by Maria, a maid and Sir Toby’s lover). All the actors in Twelfth Night break the fourth wall and talk to the audience from time to time, but no one does it with as much elegance and wit as Greig. She brings us, with all our 21st-century trappings, into this little bubble of hope and joy that she’s building with every line that she reads from this letter. We know it’s a prank; we’re reminded that it’s a prank by Sir Toby and Fabia at regular intervals. And yet you can’t help but be swept up by Malvolia’s happiness in those moments.

There’s an effervescence that Greig brings to this monologue that is utterly heart-warming. Until now, we’ve known Malvolia to be strict, unsmiling and humourless. Now, when she imagines herself to be truly seen and noticed, she’s delighted and feels liberated. It’s rib-crackingly funny and you are laughing at her, but affectionately because most of us can relate to what she’s feeling at this point. There’s also a certain vulnerability that Greig layers into the performance as Malvolia decides she will let her guard down and open herself up to the possibility of love and happily-ever-after.

[image error]

Malvolia’s happiness is particularly poignant since it establishes her as a lesbian. Suddenly, the butch behaviour, the androgynous wardrobe and the severe haircut seem to indicate something completely different from the conservative propriety that Malvolia radiated before. It also meant that the subsequent scenes in which she presents herself to Olivia and is later locked up, broke my heart. The determination to humiliate her becomes not just a clash between different social classes, but an enthusiastic and callous display of homophobia.

When Malvolia is tied up and Feste, the clown, pretending to be a priest, terrorises her, I kept remembering the giddy delight with which Malvolia had danced in the fountain, filled with joy at the idea of being loved. I found myself mentally shooting daggers at Sir Toby, who of course doesn’t have the gumption to actually do anything himself, but is full of beans when it comes to getting Feste to impersonate a priest. In the original play, the fool, like Feste, impersonates a priest who questions Malvolio. Whether or not any critique of the church was intended in that characterisation, that a (fake) priest terrorises Malvolia for being a lesbian definitely feels like a statement.

The put-downs Malvolia had subjected Maria to feel benign in comparison to what Maria puts Malvolia through, with help from Feste and Fabia. At least Feste does Malvolia the courtesy of getting paper and pen to write a letter to Olivia and (eventually) delivers the letter too. Both she and Fabia do the barest minimum to redeem themelves by telling Olivia the truth. Maria has no such arc of redemption.

Godwin’s decision to gender-flip not just Malvolia, but also Feste and Fabia means that all of Malvolia’s tormentors are women. (Sir Toby may not like Malvolia and technically have custody of her when she’s locked up, but he’s one of the most passive villains in literature, made up of little more than bluster). The ones actively plotting and acting against Malvolia are Maria, Fabia and Feste — all of them of a lower socio-economic class than Malvolia; all of them women. The greater power that Malvolia exercises as Olivia’s preferred companion is undercut when the other three occupy the higher moral ground of heteronormativity. The prank upon Malvolia becomes, in a way, a treatise on how a woman is expected to behave and how cruel women can be to one another.

The shenanigans of Viola, Orsino and Olivia’s love triangle seems almost frivolous in comparison especially as they’re carried out while Malvolia is still locked up. (Though, it should be said, Oliver Chris’s Orsino and Viola played by Tamara Lawrance make a very cute couple.) Consequently, when Malvolia finally emerged, pulled off her wig and promised to have her vengeance, I for one cheered.

Incidentally, I loved the idea that Mavolia was wearing a wig this entire time. Even when we thought she was revealing herself, she was keeping a part of herself secret. It’s a simple but effective reminder of how the LGBTQIA community has to protect itself and the performance of conformity that is demanded if you want to ‘belong’ in society.

Greig at least has a part that was conceived as important and is meant to hog at least some of the limelight. Rigby, the other actor who steals the show in Godwin’s Twelfth Night, plays Sir Andrew Aguecheek, a minor character who in the original text appears to be a human prop for the alcoholic nitwit, Sir Toby Belch. Yet Rigby, armed with only ridiculousness, endears himself to the audience and stands out — and not just because he’s wearing a pink suit.

Rigby plays Sir Andrew with an earnestness that is entirely adorable and packs in every bit of physical comedy you can think of, from doing voices (the shriek when he sees Cesario at the end is genius) to so-bad-it’s-good dancing. Rigby’s Sir Andrew is weak-willed, stupid and eager to please, but he’s not vicious. His critical fault is that he desperately wants to be liked by the cool ‘dude’ and in the process, ends up with egg on his face. By the end of the play, it’s Sir Andrew who comes across as the better man because there’s no malice in him. He’s one of the victims of the play, having been fleeced and conned by Sir Toby. It’s some validation that Sir Andrew gets to exit with the greatest hair flick in performance history, but really, it’s not enough.

[image error]Someone give Sir Andrew his own monologue, if not a whole play, dammit.

I actually went back to the original text of Twelfth Night after watching this performance and it made me appreciate Godwin and the cast so much more. Because the play reads very differently from the performance that Godwin staged with his cast and crew. It is, of course, to Shakespeare’s credit that more than 300 years later, his writing and ideas still allow for so much interpretation and experiment. This particular production of Twelfth Night doesn’t just explores the ideas about class, power and love in the original text. The staging actually adds to Shakespeare’s play. It urges you to think about the plays’ characters and situations differently. For instance, is Olivia truly the demure maiden or someone fixated upon appearances (it’s hilariously telling that she drops her performance of grief almost as soon as she meets Cesario)? Is Sir Toby less a harmless drunk and more an obnoxious conman? And most importantly: Don’t Malvolia and Sir Andrew deserve better than what their lot is in Twelfth Night?

The answer is yes.