Deepanjana Pal's Blog, page 5

‘I have lost a country to images, it is as simple as that.’

Alfin Sa’at is a Singaporean poet, playwright and essayist. The poem below is from his first collection of poems, One Fierce Hour, published in 1998. Emphases: mine.

The image above is a detail from a 16th century survey set, made in Germany; of gold, brass and silver. The survey set could be used to measure bearings, elevations and distances, for making topographical surveys and setting out construction works from plans. This particular set was probably commissioned as a luxury piece. From the British Museum’s collection.

Singapore You Are Not My Country

Singapore you are not my country.
Singapore you are not a country at all.
You are surprising Singapore, statistics-starved Singapore,
soulful Singapore of tourist brochures in Japanese
and hourglass kebayas.
You protest, but without picketing, without rioting,
without Catherine Lim,
but through your loudspeaker media, through the
hypnotic eyeballs of your newscaster,
and that weather woman who I swear is working
voodoo on my teevee screen.
Singapore, what are these lawsuits in my mailbox?
There are so many sheafs, I should have tipped the postman.
Singapore, I assert you are not a country at all.
Do not raise your voice against me,
I am not afraid of your anthem
although the lyrics are still bleeding from
the bark of my sapless heart.
Not because I sang them pigtailed pinafored
breakfasted chalkshoes in school
But because I used to watch telly till they ran out of shows.
Do not invite me to the podium and tell me to address you properly.
I am allergic to microphones and men in ego suits and public wigs.
And I am not a political martyr, I am a patriot
who has lost his country and virginity.
Do not wave a cane at me for vandalising
your propaganda with technicolour harangues,
Red Nadim semen white Mahsuri menses
the colourful language of my eloquent generation.
Your words are like walls on which truth is graffiti.
This has become an island of walls.
Asylum walls, factory walls, school walls,
the walls of the midnight Istana.
If I am paranoid I have learnt it from you,
O my delicate orchid stalk Singapore.
Always thirsty for water, spooked by armed archipelagoes,
always gasping for airspace, always running to keep ahead,
running away from yourself.
Singapore why do you wail that way, demanding my IC?
Singapore stop yelling and calling me names.
How dare you call me a chauvinist, an opposition party,
a liar, a traitor, a mendicant professor, a Marxist homosexual communist
pornography-banned literature-chewing gum-liberty smuggler?
How can you say I do not believe in
The Free Press autopsies, flogging, mudslinging, bankruptcy,
which are the five pillars of justice?
And how can you call yourself a country, you terrible
hallucination of highways and cranes and condominiums ten minutes’
drive from the MRT?

Tell that to the battered housewife who thinks happiness
lies at the end of a Toto queue,
Tell that to the tourist guide whose fillings are pewter
whose feelings are iron,
whose courtesy is gold, whose speech is silver, whose
handshake is a lethal yank at the jackpot machine.
Tell that to my imam who thinks we are all going to hell.
That that to the chao ah beng who has seven stitches, a
broken collarbone and three dead comrades but who
will not hesitate at thrusting his tiger ribcage into another fight
because the lanterns of his lungs have caught their own
fire and there is no turning back.
Tell that to the yuppie who sits in meat-markets disguised
as pubs, listening to Kenny G disguised as jazz,
on handphone disguised as conversation, and loneliness
disguised as a jukebox.
Tell that to all those exiles whose names are forgotten but
who leave behind a bad taste in the thoughtful mouth,
reminding us that the flapping, sunned linen shelters a
whiff of chloroform.
Tell that to Town Council men who feed pigeons with
crumbs of arsenic.
Tell that to Maria Hertogh a.k.a. Nadra who proved to us
that blood spilled was thicker than water shed as she
was caught pining under a stone angel in the nunnery
for her husband.
Tell that to Ah Meng, who bore five hairy bastards for our nation.
Tell that to Lee Kuan Yew’s squint.
Tell that to Josef Ng, who shaves my infant head amidst a
shower of one-cent coins, and both of us are pure again.
Tell that to my Warrant Officer who knew I was faking.
Tell that to the unemployed man who drinks cigarettes,
smokes tattoos, watches peanuts
unselfconscious of his gut belch debts and wife having an
affair with the Salesman of Nervous Breakdowns.
Tell that to Maya Angelous who are screeching like
witches United Nations-style poems populated by
Cheena Babi Bayee Tonchet Melayu Malas Keling
Garagok Mat Salleh.
Tell that to the fakirs of civil disobedience,
whose headphones are pounding the hooving basslines of
Damyata Damyata Damyata
Tell that to the statue of Li Po at Marina Park.
Tell that to the performance artists who need licences like
drivers and doctors and dogs,
when all they really need is just three percent of your love.
Tell that to the innocent faggot looking for kicks on a
Sunday evening to end up sucking the bit-hard pistol-
muzzle of the CID, ensnared no less by his weakness for
pretty boys naked out of uniform.
Tell that to the caretaker of the grave of Radin Mas.
Tell that to Chee Soon Juan’s smirk.
Tell that to the pawns of the Upgrading Empire who
penetrate their phalluses into heartlands to plant Lego
cineplexes Tupperware playgrounds suicidal balconies
carnal parks of cardboard and condoms and before we
know it, we are a colony once again.
Tell that to Malaysia whose Desaru is our spitoon whose
TV2 is our amusement whose Bumiputras are our
threat whose outrage is our greater outrage whose
turtles are weeping blind in the roaring daylight of our cameras.
Tell that to the old poets who have seen this piece of land
slip their metaphors each passing year from bumboats
to debris to sanitation projects to drowning attempts
to barbed neon water weeds on a river with
no reflections a long way off from the sea.
O Singapore your fair shores, your garlands, your GNP.
You are not a country, you are a construction from spare parts.
You are not a campaign, you are last year’s posters.
You are not a culture, you are poems on the MRT.
You are not a song, you are part swearword part lullaby.
You are not Paradise, you are an island with pythons.

Singapore I am on trial.
These are the whites of my eyes and the reds of my wrists.
These are the deranged stars of my schizophrenia.
This is the milk latex gummy moon of my sedated smile.
I have lost a country to images, it is as simple as that.
Singapore you have a name on a map, but no maps to your name.
This will not do; we must stand aside and let the Lion crash
through a madness of cymbals back to that dark jungle heart
when eyes were still embers waiting for a crownless
Prince of Palembang.

Two Women

At one point in Afectos, dancer Rocio Molina slaps singer Rosario La Tremendita’s, well, ass. It comes out of nowhere. La Tremendita is in the middle of a haunting song whose tap-tapping pulse is manifested by the distinctive hand-clapping of flamenco, Molina’s tireless feet and some body percussion. This last element includes Molina slapping her own hips and then La Tremendita’s. Eyes closed, La Tremendita continues her song as though Molina’s hand hadn’t strayed anywhere near her backside, but Molina, she gives us a little grin. Just like that, a gesture that is associated with harassment and objectification is refashioned into something playful, cheeky and friendly.

It’s not the only bit of reclaiming that Afectos does. In the initial sequences, Molina is seen in red dancing shoes. I don’t know how popular Hans Christian Andersen’s version of The Red Shoes is in Spain, but while watching Molina dance triumphantly in those red shoes, it felt vaguely like that the little girl from the fairy tale had been redeemed.

[image error]Screengrab from Afectos at Baryshnikov Arts Center

In The Red Shoes, a decidedly creepy soldier puts a curse on a little girl’s favoured pair of red shoes. (“Dance you shall, dance in your red shoes till you are pale and cold, till your skin shrivels up and you are a skeleton! Dance you shall, from door to door, and where proud and wicked children live you shall knock, so that they may hear you and fear you! Dance you shall, dance!“) She can’t take them off and in no time, the shoes — a symbol of sin — overpower her, dragging her along to wherever they want to dance. Even when the girl has her legs chopped off at the ankles, she isn’t rid of the red shoes that follow her around everywhere, even to church, all the while dancing with wicked relentlessness.

The pace of Molina’s footwork is so fast, it does seem otherworldly; but like a miracle rather than a curse. This is because every part of Molina’s body body is quite obviously in her control. Every gesture, every tap, every kick, every flick and every spin is a celebration, inviting the viewer’s gaze and directing it to notice certain details — like the red shoes, for instance; or the almost-transparent fabric that revealingly covers everything but her breasts and urges you to marvel at how Molina elongates her stout body to create impossibly elegant and taut curves. 

[image error][image error][image error][image error][image error][image error][image error]Screengrabs from Afectos at Baryshnikov Arts Center

 Afectos had its American premiere at the Baryshnikov Arts Center in 2014 and that electric performance was free for a week. I watched it twice in that time, each time mesmerised by how the traditional gypsy melodies of La Tremendita’s songs were matched with Molina’s startlingly modern flamenco. They performed on a stage that was bare but for a few everyday items like a chair, a clothes’ rack and a side table. There was no frilly, red skirt, but Molina flounced a trench coat in style, turning the everyday garment that we associate with blending in, into a thing of dramatic flourish and distinctive, dominant femininity. Among the props was a regular stool which became the pedestal on which Molina struck poses that are difficult to imagine on a sculpture, let alone on a seemingly normal human body. The way Molina moved across the expanse of the mostly empty stage — sometimes silent; often a storm of percussion — it seemed almost too small to contain this powerhouse dancer. And all the while, La Tremendita’s songs soared and swooped like a circling kite.

There were six chapters in Afectos, which in my head are divided according to what Molina wore on top of her body suit — a pale crocheted dress; a grey trench coat; a black lacy tie-up; a black skirt and scarf; an orange jacket and polka-dotted scarf; a black skirt. Between and during these chapters, La Tremendita sang, clapped and stomped. Molina may technically have been the headlining act, but La Tremendita wasn’t just an accompanist. She was a collaborator. There was neither competition nor one-upmanship between her and Molina. They performed together, in graceful concert (at one point, they share the mic La Tremendita’s wearing, which makes it seem almost like we’re eavesdropping on a secret conversation). The movement of Molina’s body and the unwavering steadiness of La Tremendita’s powerful voice responded to one another. Afectos felt like a duet between rhythm and song, wind and earth.

[image error][image error][image error][image error][image error]Screengrabs from Afectos at Baryshnikov Arts Center

It’s difficult to pick favourites from the chapters. Perhaps chapter three, when the lace of Molina’s dress cast flickering shadows over her dancing, red shoes or when Molina and La Tremendita did the palmas, their bodies swaying in unison. Perhaps chapter four, when Molina, in all black, pulled her body into impossible arcs while La Tremendita (in a white jacket), turning her back to Molina, sang songs that vibrated with a furious sadness (I’ve no idea what the lyrics mean). At the end of this chapter, Molina and La Tremendita stood face to face — a study in contrasts and complements — and then Molina rested her head on La Tremendita’s shoulder.

The way the two women fit so neatly against one another (despite the obvious differences in height) reminded me of a scene from Celine Sciamma’s brilliant film about an artist and her collaborator, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, in which Marianne (Noemie Merlant) and Heloise (Adele Haenel) embrace. In the film, it’s a moment between two lovers, but rather than romantic tension, the gesture is one of companionship and tenderness, rich with the sense of blissful relief that comes from having a trusted confidante. (The romance, glorious and sensual, is palpable in other scenes and moments.)

In the process of telling its love story, Portrait… manages to do many things, not the least of which are an exploration of feminine friendships and redefining the idea of a muse. The film rejects the notion of the muse being an inert and passive inspiration, with no creative contribution to offer to the artist who ultimately claims authorship. Instead, Sciamma’s film imagines creativity as a partnership.

The first portrait Marianne paints of Heloise is done without Heloise’s consent (Marianne is commissioned by Heloise’s mother to paint the portrait without Heloise knowing of it). It’s pretty enough, but as Heloise points out, there’s little sense of her personality in it. The second painting is one for which Heloise agrees to sit, as is conventionally done for portraits. It’s during one of the sittings that Marianne realises Heloise has been observing her just as closely as she has been observing Heloise. The final portrait shows Heloise as someone who is looking back at the viewer, rather than passively waiting to be seen.

Twice in Portrait … Heloise, the subject, effectively orders Marianne, the artist, to draw. The first instance is when Heloise tells Marianne to sketch the unsettling scene they’d seen earlier, of an abortion being done on a young woman. Heloise (who is soon to be married) casts herself as the abortionist. From demanding acknowledgement and being truly seen by Marianne, Heloise becomes the artist’s collaborator. She isn’t just posing, but directing this work — positioning the model, arranging the scenario, ordering the artist — that Marianne eventually creates.

Later, towards the end of the film, Heloise asks Marianne for a self-portrait. With a very strategically-placed mirror in which to see herself, Marianne becomes subject and artist for her muse, who is also the one who has effectively commissioned this sketch. Instead of on canvas or parchment, Marianne draws herself on the page (numbered 28) of a book Heloise is reading. All the while, Heloise watches her, just as she has since the beginning of their relationship.

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Years later, when Marianne finds a portrait of Heloise, it shows Heloise with a book in her hand. One finger is placed so that we can see the page number: 28. The detail indicates Heloise, while still a subject, retains a degree of control. She decides how she is represented and that little prop of the pagemarked book is a reminder of how a subject can, to some extent, control the gaze that is directed at them.     

It’s a curious twist that in terms of the stereotypes and constructs that we inherit, most cultures offer few or no blueprints for friendships between women. Two women are almost always depicted in antagonistic relationships in which one’s joy is dependant upon the other’s suffering. Women in popular culture are either solitary figures or stuck in unequal power dynamics, either seeking to dominate or doomed to victimhood. Works like Afectos and Portrait … offer alternatives to this limited worldview. They realise a world, fuelled by the imagination, in which women engage with one another as equals. They are artists and muses simultaneously, responding to one another and inspiring each other to thrive.  

At some point, I hope I’ll get down to writing down all the ecstatic epiphanies that struck me while watching Portrait …, but for now, it’s enough that the sound of me typing on the wretched butterfly keyboard (damn you Apple) is reminiscent of the triumphant flamenco patter of Molina in her red shoes.

[image error][image error][image error][image error][image error][image error][image error]Screengrabs from Afectos at Baryshnikov Arts Center

Hamlet: The play’s the thing

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Life. Nothing prepares you for it. Who’d have thunk that it would be possible to watch Hamlet being performed at The Globe — yeah, that one — without leaving my drawing room in Mumbai? All because of a pandemic. Or that while watching the high art Hamlet, I’d find myself missing RuPaul’s Drag Race.

I haven’t been to The Globe. Before watching this webcast, my understanding of what the Elizabethan stage looked like was largely informed by Shakespeare in Love. I’m so glad that the first time I saw this beautiful, historic stage, it was as the setting for a gender-blind, colour-blind and disability-blind Hamlet. Directed by Federay Holmes and Elle While, this Hamlet is irreverent, energetic, inconsistent, flawed and yet enjoyable.

First staged in 2018, this Hamlet is set in a cosmopolitan Denmark that lives in many time frames simultaneously. There are many people of colour (though most of the principal characters remain very Caucasian), women guards are on patrol and while Gertrude first appears dressed in an elaborate 16th-century-ish gown and wig, she later slips into a thoroughly 20th century negligée. Some men, like Claudius, strut around in full Elizabethan gear while others wear simple, form-fitting jackets that you can imagine being sold at an H&M. There is nothing uniform about the look of Holmes and While’s Hamlet. It, like The Globe, is straddling past and present.

Hamlet is played by Michelle Terry (artistic director of The Globe); Catrin Aaron is Horatio; Shubham Saraf plays Ophelia. It is a world in which women guards are as unremarkable as sneakers and pants. That’s not all. Nadia Nadarajah, a D/deaf actress, is a superb Guildenstern, which also means Guildenstern’s lines are in British Sign Language (and translated back to Shakespearean English by others on stage).

To take characters like Hamlet and Ophelia (or Guildenstern, for that matter), and do a gender-bender is a great idea because it lets both the actors and the audience examine and explore stereotypes and constructs. In theory, that’s what Holmes and While’s Hamlet does, but in terms of execution, the whole effort is teeters between confused and half-hearted. So, on one hand, when Guildenstern is being played by a woman, she wears a beard and pants to signify maleness in a conventional manner. Yet Laertes, also played a woman actor, is unaided by any accessory that would help sell the illusion of this tiny, slight woman being a warrior nobleman. in the text, Laertes’s character seems very typically male — he’s the protective big brother; the angry young man who wants a fight, no matter how senseless and futile that option may be. Holmes and While’s version doesn’t reinterpret this characterisation so when the role was played by this obviously femme actor, it just came across as absurd and unconvincing. Maybe if she’d played it with the more pronounced swagger of someone trying to be more alpha than they actually are, it would have worked better.

Even more discordant and disappointing was Ophelia. Not because Saraf is a bad actor, but because it felt a little lazy. When we see Saraf as Ophelia in one of the first scenes in the play, he’s standing at the back, in a grey dress that stands out against the warm tones of both the stage and most of Saraf’s co-actors’ wardrobe. So what exactly is the point of putting a man in a dress? It is just a stunt? Is him playing Ophelia supposed to push us to reconsider femininity or think about how big a role physicality plays in the way we respond to someone?

The idea of casting a man as Ophelia is wasted in this Hamlet and Saraf is partially responsible for this. After all, Terry, with nothing more than her incredible delivery, manages to cast a little hook into the phrase “unmanly grief” and reimagine Hamlet as an androgynous character, identified not by his gender but by grief. Saraf’s Ophelia, on the other hand, has little to offer once you’ve got over the surprise of seeing a man in a dress.

Watching the scenes with Ophelia, I kept imagining the role being played by someone in drag (like Gigi Goode, or Raven, or maybe even Mama Ru herself?). With the make-up, hair, padding, contouring and costumes, there’s so much theatre to drag and all of it explores femininity and the social conventions around that concept. The more I watched Saraf as Ophelia, the more perfect an Ophelia in drag felt as an idea. Even in the simple scenes where she’s just quietly establishing herself as the good little girl, there’s an entire performance of femininity that could be done with drag make-up. Imagine the kinds of faces that Ophelia could have. Does she try to look like an anime girl? Does she have gigantic eyelashes that she bats every now and then? Does she sell the illusion of being a ‘real’ woman flawlessly? Each detail is a choice that tells you something — about Ophelia, about being womanly; about the way we, the audience, think about women and the roles the play. Later, in the scene with the crazed Ophelia, the actor could be with their make-up partially or entirely removed, and it would reflect the unravelling of the mind.

Drag would have also have been an interesting intervention when you think about the history of the performance of Shakespeare’s plays. Heroines were originally played by boys and young men. They embodied femininity and probably helped construct or at the very least cement codes of womanly behaviour. Shakespeare didn’t write female roles as parodies of women, which means the actors were expected to convince their audiences.

In drag, there’s a different kind of convincing that’s being done. Both performer and audience know femininity is an illusion that’s being shared, like when an Elizabethan boy dressed up as a heroine. But a drag queen isn’t hiding themselves in the performance; they’re revealing an aspect and questioning the narrow definitions and conventions within which femininity has to perform normally. To quote Hamlet, “The purpose of playing… is to hold as ‘twere the mirror up to Nature.”

[image error]From RuPaul’s Drag Race UK

In the persona of a drag queen is an unlikely equilibrium between complete artifice and realness. The persona is fabricated — pieced together by make-up and wigs and padding and sequins etc — and yet, it’s also a very genuine part of the performer; one that exists only on stage, when the spotlight shines on the queen. That’s the sort of duality that would have added another exciting dimension to this Hamlet, particularly because of all the façades and performances within the the script.

As it stood, Saraf just got out of the grey dress and work a black shift. Technically, it’s a rather drastic change in costume, but it didn’t feel either dramatic or thought-provoking. Nothing in his performance made think about Ophelia any differently. Most importantly, Ophelia was at all points, a man playacting in a dress.

Still, it was delightful to be reminded of just how accessible the Shakespearean plays can be when good actors perform them. Despite how different the English is from the version of the language we’re familiar with today, this Hamlet didn’t feel inaccessible even for a moment. As a listener, you didn’t get stuck on the unfamiliar grammar or odd vocabulary; you followed the emotion and the poetry. And the laughs.

One of the revelations of this Hamlet was just how funny the play can be. Yes there’s murder, abuse, depression, ghosts etc. etc., but it’s also full of absurd possibilities of humour ranging from silly to dark. This production of Hamlet doesn’t lose sight of what makes the play a tragedy, but it is as committed to finding the laughs tucked in the scenes and lurking in the repartée.

I also loved the live musicians and how the play ended with a dance that the whole cast performed. Watching it on my laptop, I couldn’t entirely follow each of the gestures to understand if there was a narrative to the choreography, but there’s something quite lovely about ending a play that is informed by loneliness, with a dance that emphasises a sense of cohesiveness because everyone performing it is in sync and attuned to one another.

The play is indeed the thing.

Lockdown Chronicles

Please don’t stop the music

On March 22, it begins a little before 5pm. The time lag is something I will remind myself of later because it shows that at a basic level, for all its love for virality and ‘sound energy’, the nation is not in sync. At 5pm, however, there are faces at windows and balconies; there are people on the road; and all anyone can hear is coordinated chaos.

“I can hear clapping and banging on vessels,” writes a friend. It is 4.55pm.

The original command, issued by the Prime Minister on March 19, was to clap at 5pm on March 20, ostensibly to support those working on the front lines against Covid-19 (because somehow, clapping for five minutes would show the virus our medical awesomeness). However, in the intervening few days, WhatsApp forwards circulated faster than contagion and informed the people of India that this wasn’t just the Prime Minister asking Indians to replicate viral videos from Covid-struck European cities. The 5pm clap was all about destroying the virus using sound energy.

Consequently now, on March 22, we are a nation of Saucepan Men and the air is filled with the sharp, echoing yowls of steel spoons and spatulas hitting the flat bottoms of pans and plates. Metal slams into metal and the sound is pure dissonance. In many neighbourhoods, conches are being blown (or perhaps played off YouTube?).

Two weeks later, despite this exhibition of sound energy, more than 3,000 people will have tested positive for Covid-19, at least 75 will have died of the infection and there are more than 200 containment zones in Mumbai. For now, though, there is only metallic jubilation all around — desperate, clanging, relentless.

A cluster of us old friends have over the years come together to form a nucleus. It would be wrong to call us a family because we’re not held together by obligation or inertia. You don’t choose family; you just make the best of it. These people, though, they’re chosen and for reasons I will never understand but always be thankful for, they’ve chosen me. So yes, we’re friends in the purest sense of that word. This collective keeps us somewhere close to sane when everything else is madness.

On March 22, for the first couple of minutes, we were still able to write messages to one another. “How the hell do so many people have conches?” “This cannot seriously be happening?!” “I want to cry a little.” By 5.04pm, we had all gone quiet. We sat in rooms across the world, hearing the noise of the herd — “GO CORONA GO” — swell up against our individual silences like a battering ram. Unbelonging has a tinny, mineral taste.

“Will it never stop?”

In one pocket of central Mumbai, one friend stood at his window and screamed at the people who were too busy banging plates to notice his rage. Far away in Andheri, at 5.17pm, another wrote that it had finally stopped and azaan was ringing cleanly through the air that was still humming with the tinnitus of the 5pm viral ritual.

In Bandra, with its artisanal bread and kombucha and Japanese cheesecake and sushi, it went on for 12 minutes. In that time, I felt as though everything inside me shattered to jagged, impossible-to-rejoin pieces.

Then at 5.12pm, there was quiet. The windows started emptying as people returned inside. I could see people walking into the kitchens facing my window and put the utensils back on their shelves.

That was when it happened.

Someone in an apartment near mine started blasting Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up”. The song is suddenly more musical and harmonious than it has ever been since its release in 1987. Most of the words are muffled but “Never gonna give you up” and “or desert you” — possibly because of the higher notes in their melody — ring loud and clear as Astley’s baritone happily soars through our little neighbourhood.

For the next 45 minutes, the silliest, ear-wormiest of pop music from the Eighties and Nineties thudded against our walls and window panes. Love songs, from us to an old-fashioned idea of India.

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Pineapple

The date is March 25 and I’m suffused with admiration for Amitabh Bachchan’s T-rated tweets because this lockdown has just about started, and already I’m confused about how many days into it we are. (It’s a little complicated for us in Mumbai because Maharashtra went into partial lockdown on March 20 and the national lockdown was announced on March 24. Also, I can’t count to save my life.)

The morning after the lockdown announcement is calm, quiet and not yet empty of newspapers. Last night, I could hear raised voices and yelling, which was … unexpected. You don’t expect Bandra to brawl.

“It’s like a stampede here,” a friend in Santacruz, who had stepped out to pick up a loaf of bread, told me. I worriedly asked if she was hurt or needed anything. “No, not like that. I mean, it’s a long queue,” she wrote back. Another friend messaged while also waiting in a queue, and we briefly mulled over whether millennials who want to buy ice creams from medical stores but can’t decide which flavour, should be allowed out in public. (Ans: No.)

That was last night. This morning, I had just about finished two of three newspapers, when I got a call from the ex. “Do Nespresso pods count as essential services?” Anuvab asked me. I confessed ignorance and expressed doubts. He said he was going to be like Leo di Caprio in The Revenant and step out to stock up on Nespresso.
“You don’t think there’ll be violence out there, do you?” he said.
“In Pali Market in general? Or outside Choice Foodland in particular?”
“Madam, it’s the great outdoors and we are living in times of pandemic. Anything could happen. If something happens to me, you’ll regret this mockery and rue the day you didn’t use your Press card to save my life.”
“Because Press id is anti-viral?” As usual, I’m struggling to keep up with what passes for logic in Anuvab’s head.
“No,” he said, “but the Press card might be handy if policemen want to throw me in jail for stepping out to buy Nespresso during a lockdown.”

Which is how two people who have uncoupled end up going grocery shopping together.

Not one of the policemen stationed in Pali Market showed any inclination to accost anyone. Anuvab decided to chat with a cop, who was clearly more interested in buying paneer. I sidled off to chat with a fruit vendor who suggested I buy a pineapple. “It might be the last pineapple you have this year,” he said, “and it’s only a little bit bruised at the bottom. You won’t even notice until you’ve almost finished eating it.”

A few minutes later, Anuvab and I reconvened outside Choice Foodland. The shopkeeper spotted him and beamed.
“What can I get you, sir?” he said.
“Those Nespresso pods,” Anuvab said, pointing at the baton-like packages stacked up near the cash counter. “How many do you have?”
The man seemed confused. “Nespresso? Like the ones you bought yesterday?”
It turned out the man had nine packets left after Anuvab’s previous foraging outing. Now he bought five more and asked if the remaining four could be “reserved” for him. “Just in case I run out,” Anuvab said. There are 10 pods in each packet. The shopkeeper smiled and said no, he wouldn’t be able to reserve anything for anyone.

I would make fun of the fact that Anuvab is stockpiling Nespresso pods but for the fact that I paid Rs 180 for a pineapple. It is safe to say none of us are making particularly sound decisions.

Essential items

Things I can’t find during lockdown:

Maggi noodles
Cake
Cooking oil.

This being Bandra, I have been offered imported instant noodles, McVitie’s chocolate-coated biscuits and cold-pressed olive oil as alternatives by compassionate salespersons. I appreciate the gesture, but my Maggi-loving heart demands I check at other stores before accepting this injustice.

Side note: guess what is not listed among essential items? Sanitary napkins. Though given even officially essential items aren’t coming into the city, it wouldn’t have helped even if all the men who run this blighted country had remembered that most women get periods every month.

Thanks to the lockdown, we now play pandemic hopscotch in Bandra. Outside every shop, there are squares painted on either the pavement or the road. Each aspiring customer is to stand on a square and wait for the queue to move so that shops aren’t crowded. Social distancing is an exercise in patience. Mark’s in Pali Market helpfully plays music from a speaker that has, like the rest of us, seen better days. As a result, one minute you’re listening to “Lambada”; next minute, you’re ordering things like keema, chicken and cooked tongue.

As grateful as I am for the cooked tongue, the tragic truth is even at Mark’s, there is not one packet of Maggi noodle to be procured.

This really hurts. I don’t want the fancy flavoured, foreign instant noodles. At best, I can stretch myself to Wai Wai, which is like a love-child of murukku and noodles (it’s so far removed from organic produce that you don’t even need to throw it in boiling water to make it edible). But really, I want Maggi — that rectangle slab of tasteless noodles (one-third of which has crumbled into squiggly bits at the bottom of the packet) with the masala that stains the noodles yellow and fills boiling water with the taste of childhood memories. (Add cheese and a splash of vinegar for pure, unadulterated contentment.)

“How can they not have Maggi?” I wail to my mother, who is cooling her heels in the opposite end of the country.
“It’s a travesty,” says my mother, with very little genuine sympathy. “Is the distribution system collapsing because of the state and the Centre bickering? Or is some sort of misunderstanding or glitch?”
“God knows.” I do not appreciate how this conversation is paying attention to the system instead of me, but I humour my mother. “It’s tough to get any idea of what’s actually happening because most reporters are stuck thanks to no public transport etc. Maybe it’s the police. There were loads of reports of cops not letting delivery guys through even though deliveries are allowed under lockdown.”
“In Kolkata, the cops are singing Anjan Dutta songs. I think I prefer them stopping delivery boys.”
“Please focus on the trauma being suffered by your only child, Mother. There’s no Maggi in Bandra!”
“Well, you could just make it,” my mother suggests. “The masala can’t be that complicated and surely shops aren’t running out of plain noodles too?”
“This is not about noodles, Ma! To not have the option of eating Maggi is like attacking my fundamental rights. It’s like taking a hammer to my mental health and general wellbeing. At difficult times like these, we need Maggi, with its assurance of zero nutrition and 100% nostalgia, to comfort us!”

I could go on about Maggi, but I stop because of what I see on my phone.

We’ve got into the habit of video calls ever since my mother had an accident a few months ago that initially left her looking like the first cousin of Frankenstein’s creation. Now, she’s almost entirely healed, but we still do the video calls. Most of the time, this means I see everything in the room other than my parents. Occasionally, my mother will carefully position the phone so that I have a stellar view one ear and one tuft of hair (both hers). This morning, however, is an exception. She’s in frame and in focus. Which is why not only can I see my mother, but I can also see her reaching for and then biting into a darbesh.

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I shriek at an appropriate volume. “A darbesh!” (It’s Bengali laddu.)

The only thing this achieves is that my mother takes her second bite even before she’s gulped down her first. She grins.

“How the hell did you get bloody darbesh in the middle of a lockdown?” I ask.
“It’s an essential item,” my mother replies.
“No it isn’t.”
“Well, it should be. Anyway, your father defied lockdown and went all the way to Dhakuria to get this darbesh. As a supportive wife, I’m duty-bound to eat this.”
“You’re also diabetic, in case you’d forgotten. And both of you are supposed to be staying at home. Not traipsing around Kolkata, looking for bloody darbesh.”
“I’m only having one a day.”
“Oh yay. Proper tsunami of relief.”
My mother grins again and finishes the wretched sweet.
I scowl.

Overheard in Bandra

“I can’t do this surgical mask ya. It’s too hot. I’ll get heat rash on my face.”
“Corona ya heat rash?”
“Corona.”
“You can not be serious.”
“Do you know how much I had to pay the dermatologist for that [indistinct] treatment? He’s Kareena Kapoor’s doctor. This glowing skin doesn’t come cheap. I can’t afford to go back to him with a heat rash.”
“You could die!”
“But while I’m alive, I’ll have great, blemish-free skin. If I die, you can admire that skin in the coffin.”
“You’re Hindu.”
“Ya, but I live in Bandra.”

'I will stay here'

It turns out panic is a quiet thing with a fluttering, quickened but unsteady pulse. Maybe it’s proof that we’re still alive, still responding and still capable of processing threats, rather than simply walking through danger like automatons. “We’re programmed to survive,” someone told me the other day, as though the idea of being programmed was reassuring in any way.

Someone else told me that now they’re stuck at home with nothing to do and nowhere to go, they’re collecting silver linings — swans and dolphins had returned to the canals in Venice; you could see stars clearly at night in Mumbai; there were blue skies over Beijing. Only there are no swans or dolphins in Venice and while recorded pollution levels do seem to be lower in both Beijing and Mumbai, it’s possible that the stars look shinier and the skies look bluer because we want them to be that way.

These fictional silver linings are the stories we want to believe. The beauty described in them is a mask for the morbid, helpless terror of living while a pandemic silently rages through your world. The (false) hope they hold out helps us make sense of the chaos that would otherwise probably overwhelm us. “It’s Kalyug, bro,” someone said in the lift last week, when we were still going to offices. “The only good thing is that for once, the West is more ****ed than we are. I bet all those NRIs are wishing they were in India now,” cackled someone else.

Before the pandemic, there was the epidemic and it was called nationalism. Among its symptoms is delusion — about Indian healthcare’s ability to handle an outbreak, for instance; and also the meanings of “hate speech” and “containing violence”.

Last week, the Home Minister (HM) of the country said a phrase in Parliament that stuck in my head: “The way these unfortunate incidents have been painted to the rest of the world”. Maybe it struck me because I’d just bought a painting.

I’m not in the habit of walking into a gallery and walking out with a painting, but that’s pretty much how the chips fell when I went to see It’s a Normal Day by Mahesh Baliga. Now, if I turn my head less than 90 degrees, I can see one of the paintings from the show in my home. It should feel surreal, but the painting has found its place easily. Instead of hanging on a wall, it stands against a mirror at my eye level. I like the obvious symbolism because the fact is, I did buy “I will stay here” because it felt like a reflection of a part of me. That part which somehow manages to be in love with the idea of being Indian even while the country named India transforms into something I don’t recognise.

The “unfortunate incidents” that the HM was referring to were the Delhi riots that consumed neighbourhoods in northeast Delhi in end-February. The HM was responding to questions that had been raised in both houses of Parliament. He spoke in the Lok Sabha on March 11 and in the Rajya Sabha on March 12). Everything in me revolted when I listened to him. That I was giving him my time and attention felt like an act of complicity; as though I was participating in his project of fashioning a new normal.  

The picture that the HM painted in Parliament was more like a lenticular print, which shows one image when you see head-on and another when you tilt it. The first was of a riot contained (rather than abetted) by Delhi Police. The second showed those the HM holds responsible for the violence — his party’s political opponents. According to the HM in Parliament, where his speeches serve to establish an official record of events, the riots in Delhi lasted 36 hours and were ably managed by the Delhi Police, which contained the violence and kept the rest of the capital safe.

I would like to believe the HM was not speaking to the survivors of the Delhi riots, whose lives and homes have been reduced to charred, bloodstained rubble. I would like to believe that he knows the survivors have far more urgent concerns — like rebuilding in the middle of a pandemic — than fact-checking him. The injured in the Delhi riots include a 10-month-old girl. The dead include a woman who survived the Partition of India and was burnt alive in her home. Rather than expect the listenership of survivors, I would like to believe that the HM was speaking to the ones who were safe; people like us, who made a noise because that was all we could do at that point, while staring with incredulous horror at screens and phones; maniacally and helplessly sifting through news and rumours of violence in northeast Delhi. I would like to believe he was speaking to us because I think it irritates him that the stories from those riots got amplified in a way that doesn’t serve the current dispensation well. But that might just be me trying to score cheap thrills.

By the time the HM stood up in Parliament, the physical fires had cooled in northeast Delhi and at least some of the dead (more than 50) had been counted. Homes had been abandoned out of fear and the desperately-makeshift barricades set up during rioting were being replaced by tall, metal gates. Against this backdrop, the HM schooled the nation on the meaning of hate speech, protest and violence as part of his efforts to establish a record of what had happened in Delhi.  

The HM said the riots in Delhi were a conspiracy carried out by approximately 300 people who came to the capital from Uttar Pradesh. He said the Delhi Police had worked to ensure the riots didn’t spread to other parts of Delhi. He said the there was no rioting after 11pm, on February 25, and that the Delhi Police was in the process of carrying out a scientific investigation to identify perpetrators of violence using face-identification software that was integrated with voter ID data “and other data in the government’s possession”. He accused unnamed people of spreading misinformation about the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (which, the HM reminded the House, was passed fairly and transparently by Parliament). He stressed that those who accuse CAA’s supporters of being violent are turning a blind eye to the tens of thousands of CAA protesters who have taken to the streets. The HM blamed the riots on sit-ins protesting the CAA (like Shaheen Bagh), which were supposedly the direct fallout of political addresses (by leaders like Sonia Gandhi whom he didn’t name but misquoted) that the HM termed as hate speech. While appealing for peace from his fellow parliamentarians — “Let us not be communal in the House” — he lamented that while Muslim victims had been remembered by his political opponents, the Hindu police official Ankit Sharma deserved mention too. There were 400 stab wounds on his body, the HM told the House, and yet Sharma wasn’t considered worthy of remembrance.   

According to Sharma’s post-mortem report, he was stabbed 12 times. The lesser number doesn’t make his death any less gruesome, but the exaggerated number shows the HM has no compunction in using a man’s death as a rhetorical device to gloss over the detail that a minority of the victims were Hindus.

Some of the other claims that the HM made in Parliament were fact-checked by NDTV. According to call records, Delhi Police received 3,500 distress calls on February 24 and 7,500 distress calls on February 25. Calls continued to come in on February 26 and February 27, by which time the riots were over as per the HM’s version of events. ‘Stray’ accounts of violence from the north-east Delhi were reported even on February 28.

Imagine being someone who called the police helpline during the riots only to be abused by the officer on duty — recordings of calls circulated on social media in which police officers casually abused callers before hanging up on them — and hearing the HM say that he wanted to praise Delhi Police for how it handled the situation.

Countering the HM’s claim that Delhi Police succeeded in preventing further flare-ups, there is evident to show the police stations in northeast Delhi knew on February 23 that the situation was volatile. At least 14 first information reports (FIRs) were filed at the Khajuri Khas, Bhajanpura, Dayalpur and Jyoti Nagar stations, detailing clear signs of rioting. Despite this, neither were arrests made nor were additional personnel deployed. It took a court order passed at midnight to force Delhi Police to give safe passage to ambulances, which you’d think would be part of the law enforcement agency’s basic duties.  

Imagine being someone who was in an ambulance that was stopped and delayed by police officers, whose injured body was manhandled by them; and hearing the HM praise Delhi Police for its handling of the riots.

Videos recorded by journalists and civilians show Delhi Police officers leading rioters, tormenting grievously-injured men and standing back to watch rioters go on rampage. There are videos that show them joining in stone pelting, but according to the HM, our eyes are being deceived. The police officers aren’t rioting, but throwing stones at rioters, he told the Lok Sabha. He also assured the House that all evidence was being studied “scientifically” and therefore, no questions could be raised about the findings. He didn’t mention the police action against student protesters in campuses across the country and neither did the obnoxious slogans of “goli maaron saalon ko” find mention in mitigating factors that the HM placed on record. He pointed fingers at political opponents who organised rallies in December but ignored his party members who made threatening speeches hours before the violence broke out.

At this moment, less than a month after the Delhi riots, it’s difficult to imagine we will forget the stories that we’ve heard from those horrific nights. Yet the fact is, we’re already starting to forget. The first step is the version that the HM has put on record. In some time, there will be another one, by Delhi Police when it’s done with its “scientific” investigation. Sooner rather than later, some stories will be thrust towards forgetfulness.

“Our memories have been regulated, replaced, and erased. We remember what others tell us to remember, and forget what we’re told to forget. We stay silent when we’re asked to, and sing on command. Memories have become a tool of the era, used to forge collective and national memories, made up of what we’re either told to forget or asked to remember.”

This is from a lecture by Yan Lianke, a professor of Chinese culture in which he talks about, among other things, how the coronavirus outbreak may be remembered, but there is so much that Lianke says about culture and memory that feels potently relevant to us in India. Today, it feels more urgent than ever to hear stories and tell them; to document and archive; to remember what has happened and to imagine an alternative. Especially when what is placed on record are twisted, misshapen narratives like the one the HM delivered in Parliament.

“I will stay here” is inspired by a poem attributed to Kabir:

Aag lagi is vriksh ko,
jalan lage sab paat
Tum kyun jalo pankheruon,
pankh tumhaare saath.

Phal phul khaaye is vriksh ke,
bheent bhare hain paat
Udna hamaara dharam nahin,
jalna vriksh ke saath.

In the first verse, Kabir speaks as a tree that has been set on fire. It tells the birds sitting on its burning branches that they should fly away. After all, they have wings. The birds’ reply is the second verse: “We’ve eaten the fruit of this tree… flight is not our way, we’ll burn with the tree.”

So indeed it is. Even as the HM and his tribe set fire to the tree that is India, even as it all goes to hell and I wonder daily whether you really can love a country even while being ashamed of it or if it’s just deep-rooted socialisation, I will stay here, along with all those other shrieking birds of my diverse flock. Because it’s in the stories of this messy, mangled basket-case of a culture that we belong. And ultimately, thanks to retellings and reimaginings, variations and versions, and other things magical and miraculous, we live in hope that the stories will outlive the tree.

[image error]“I will stay here” by Mahesh Baliga

Angles

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It was my city, the empty one*

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*with apologies to Sandro Penna

Portrait of a Lady on Fire

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“Do all lovers feel like they’re inventing something?”

Héloise, Portrait of a Lady on Fire

City light

The skyline in central Mumbai is changing so drastically and so fast. Very little of the new architecture is beautiful, but there is something undeniably solid and futuristic about these concrete towers; an arrogance in their hollow, monumental greyness, animated at night by electric lights. Most of the time, it all looks just hideous. But for a few moments, every day, as the light shifts and changes from day to twilight, even these monstrosities turn into something magical.

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February 2020. All photographs taken on an iPhone Xs. Don’t nick. It’s hardly polite.

Posing for Adama Kouyaté

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Adama Kouyaté passed away yesterday (February 19), after a long illness. He was born in 1927 and had been among Mali’s most celebrated photographers for decades. Technically speaking, Kouyaté was a commercial photographer (more on that later). He took photos of people in his photo studio (the one in Ségu seems to have been almost like a magician’s cave), often using props and backdrops. It was a profession that didn’t always earn him a living. The son of a cobbler (or master shoemaker. It depends on who is telling his story), Kouyaté would discover photography not by picking up the camera, but by standing before it. In 1946, he invited photographer Bakary Doumbia to make a portrait of him and his girlfriend and when he saw the photograph that Doumbia had made, Kouyaté decided he was going to be a photographer. Along the way, when photography didn’t earn him enough money, he became a truck driver, but eventually he returned to and remained in his beloved studio and dark room.

The first photograph I saw of Kouyaté’s was one of three men, standing against a painted backdrop. It’s dated 1971, in case the bell-bottomed trousers and prints didn’t give away the era. I’d just discovered that colour film was “optimised” to render “non-Caucasian tones” as “highly deficient”, which was a polite way of saying if you weren’t white, then you were going to look like a parody of yourself in a photograph. And all the while, you’d grow up being told photographs don’t lie. It took someone with serious developing skills to get past the racist bias that was effectively coded into the technology of photography.

In the photograph of the three men, Kouyaté captures different shades and nuances of colour in black and white. You can tell the three boys have different complexions. You can sense the difference between the darkness of the jacket and the darkness of skin. You can practically feel the difference in the textures of the various fabrics in the photo, from the painted background to the patterned trousers and the mesh shirt. And then there are the faces — three very different expressions, each of which speak volumes about how the subject is approaching this business of being photographed — and the performance of their poses. (There are some fabulous shots here that offer a look at everyday performances of masculinity, as captured by Kouyaté in his studio.)

Obviously, my first reaction was to Google the photographer, who turned out to be from Mali (which is . His name was Adama Kouyaté, a photographer who had also been a boxer at some point and who had been in jail for his pro-democracy activism.

So far, I haven’t found a good obituary of Kouyaté’s, but I did find this essay in Aperture from 2013, which feels like a decent introduction to his work.

The photographer was witness to and guardian of the happiness of a Bamakoan society that yearned for its image—the image of its new independence.
**
With each passing shot, these silent magicians, servants to a narcissistic
luxury, have become artists. They are true directors, awaiting the arrival of a subject they can magnify inside a “perfectly decked out” space. The African photo studio is an artistic space par excellence. There, intimacy can be invented and freedom is always present. 

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I chanced upon Kouyaté’s photographs of women much later and it was like falling in love. The interesting part of Kouyaté being a commercial photographer is that while he can (and did) suggest poses and props, the relationship between the photographer and the model is very different that that of an artist and their model. Kouyaté could give his model a cigarette or a radio irrespective of whether they smoked or cared to have a prop in their shot. He could use two lights (instead of the usual three) to ensure the photos had shadows and a sense of depth. He could suggest poses and decide frames (I love how Kouyaté often retains a bit of a curtain, a fragment of the lights, a patch of the unglamorous flooring in his photos. It’s like the dream world and real world are in the same frame, in equilibrium). Ultimately though the photo had to be pleasing to the subject paying for them.

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And so you see men and women perform for the camera. They look at you, demanding you pay attention to them while the photographer arranges the scene so that you notice the angle at which they’re holding themselves, the prop that they’re using, the artificiality of the situation and the authenticity of wanting to be remembered a certain way.

There’s one photo in which a couple is kissing. It seems as though the man sprang the kiss on his wife/ girlfriend. You don’t see either of their faces, but you can see his hand curved around her shoulder. She stands with her hands at her side, her legs slightly apart; a warrior-like, solid stance. Behind them, the backdrop is rolled up and the wall is a blank canvas. With the backdrop, this photograph would have been properly cheesy. Against this spartan setting, the kiss is richly romantic.

Given the history of exoticising women (particularly African women), Kouyaté’s photographs of them are delightful for how engaged the women in the photographs tend to be. Their gazes are direct, looking straight at the camera, the photographer and the viewer. So many of them seem to be having fun. Some look stern. No one looks uncomfortable. These women are building new narratives with these photographs, aided by Kouyaté. With every pose and each press of the shutter, a new normal was being established. Captured by Kouyaté’s camera and transformed in a dark room, by Kouyaté’s magical eye, these photographs are the imaginary turned real.

The camera holds out a certain kind of hope that using shadows, props, angles, chemicals and the photographer’s gaze, the device will find and reveal beauty that the naked eye misses. It empowers the person in front of the camera to become something that could be a complete fantasy or integrally true. In the studio, in front of the camera, daydreams become tangible, black-and-white reality; developed by Kouyaté in his dark room to reveal nuances despite the biases and obstacles built into the film that didn’t want to see black people. (Never forget: film that was sensitive to darker shades was developed because furniture makers and confectioners complained their products weren’t photographing well.)

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Did the woman in the photograph know how perfectly Kouyaté was arranging the geometry of his frame, right down to the details of the disruptions of the black patch of curtain and the diagonal of the rolled-up carpet in the background? Did she realise the pattern on her skirt would twin so beautifully with the radio? She may have accepted all of Kouyaté’s directions blindly, but she was also trusting him to make her look beautiful. That’s the understanding between a commercial photographer and their subject. Not necessarily truth, but necessarily beauty.

If you were lucky enough to be photographed by someone like the magician of Ségu, you got both.