“I don’t know
politics but I know the names
Of
those in power, and can repeat them like
Days
of week, or names of months, beginning with Nehru…I am sinner,
I
am saint. I am the beloved and the
Betrayed.
I have no joys that are not yours, no
Aches
which are not yours. I too call myself I.”
from “An introduction” by Kamala Das
————
Maybe not all unhappy
families are unhappy in their own way, Mr. Tolstoy. Perhaps they are left on
their own to deal with it, is all.
I’ve worn the same silver flower nose pin for so long ,
sometimes it just seems to have grown into a part of me. Almost as if it were
always there, like some groove or ridge on my skin. Sometimes, my finger
brushes against it accidentally and I remember it like an old secret I wear on
myself. One that is visible to all but unspoken of, unaddressed. It’s like that
secret sigh of relief one feels, finding your own reality hidden in a sentence
or a moment in a book.
I dream of penning down biting social satire, or even better,
political. Instead, I find myself biting down on my own tongue. Temple
built,corona kills,Kashmir razed, delhi burning, feminists rage, workers of the
world unite, revolutionaries revolutionize, dalit lives matter. My
weary words rest their heavy heads on beaten down pillows at night, blinking
back at the sleepless ceiling. Kya farq padta hai?
What unfeeling monster have I become…indifferent, apathetic. Floating by each
day in an island of isolating self-absorption.
Even this act of writing is selfish, not one of love. Not of
creation in a real sense. Not giving as it should be. There’s so much me in
it, quite literally. Just as there is scepticism of the personal and
subjective, i feel sceptical of my motives. All my ideals have been broken
into, a bank robbery in broad daylight. Some blame it on alienation in an
advanced capitalist age. Some, depression. I feel like Fitzgerald himself in
the short story ‘Crack Up’, a portrait of his psyche unravelling in the roaring
’20s…mine,a desecrated coconut in the 2020s.
Waiting for the wall street crash of this century entailing fascism to take
over in many of its forms ( which it has anyway lol). Guess this is the point
at which we speak on the futility of war.
Instead,I’ll talk about the futility of family. I’ve repressed
things that are beyond fixing. The violence of the oppressed is
always justified, that of the oppressor is not. Does the
shroud of silence ever lift? Power
corrupts and absolute power…I don’t have the will to finish my
sentences. I’ll trail off mid-sentence, retracting into my cultured
petri-dish of privilege. The world a festering wound, better left unaddressed.
Protect my honour, I will and it will keep me safe so long. My father doesn’t
approve of nose piercings because it is a cheap giveaway for the lack of
respectability apparently. Even your grandmothers don’t have
pierced noses or tattoos, genteel women don’t. I long to be
nobody and nowhere, just the vast emptiness of words.I still don’t know
how to write conclusions, or even beginnings for that matter.
