From: Great House by Nicole Krauss

I'm embarrassed to say that my eyes actually filled with tears, Your Honour, though as is so often the case, the tears sprang from older, more obscure regrets i had delayed thinking about, which the gift, or loan, of of a stranger's furniture had somehow unsettled.

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Our kiss was anticlimactic. It wasn't that the kiss was bad, but it was just a note of punctuation in our long conversation, a parenthetical remark made in order to assure each other of a deeply felt agreement, a mutual offer of companionship, which is much more rare than sexual passion or even love.

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There is a fallacy that the powerful emotion of youth mellows with time. Not true. One learns to control and suppress it. But it doesn't lessen. It simply hides and concentrates itself in more discreet places. When one accidentally stumbles into one of these abysses, the pain is spectacular. I find these little abysses everywhere now.

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I knew that to find and to feel Yoav again would be terribly painful, because of what had become of him, and because of what I knew he could ignite in me, a vitality that was excruciating because like a flare it lit up the emptiness inside me and exposed what i already secretly knew about myself : how much time I'd spent being only partly alive, and how easily I'd accepted a lesser life................................................................................................................................................................................................................He awakened a hunger in me - not just for him, but also for the magnitude of life, for the extremes of all it has given to us to feel. A hunger and also courage.

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In life we sit at the table and refuse to eat, and in death we are eternally hungry.

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There are time when the kindness of strangers only makes matters worse because one realises how badly one is in need of kindness and that the only source is a stranger.

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And the answer that comes to me, which is only part of the answer,  is that i wanted to punish her for her intolerable stoicism, which made it impossible for me to ever be truly needed by her in the most profound ways a person can need another, a need that often goes by the name of love.

Notes on 'Unapologetic Feminists'

In the wake of the #MeToo movement, I attended an event at the Andheri Social outlet titled ‘She Too’ where the agenda included several women activists and social champions (I don’t know if the term ‘social worker’ is politically correct any more) who were all fighting to make women’s voices heard and more relevant in a society that remains patriarchal. The speakers comprised brave warriors who were working for various worthy causes such as improving mobility options at railway stations for the disabled, encouraging transgenders to contest elections, fighting to eradicate FGM amongst Mumbai’s Bohri community, fighting to curb the practice of unwanted caesarean deliveries in India, etc. 

What confounded me abt these worthies was that each of them opened their talks by offering an gratuitous and redundant-in-that-context ‘I am an unapologetic feminist’ introduction to their self and work. Frankly, I’ve never understood the meaning of that phrase – are there people around who are apologetic about being vegetarian? Or smokers? Or gay? Or Hindu? What is the need for a tag that adds nothing to the noun? Anyway, the event made me realize a disturbing fact that had been taking root in my mind since 2013 when I worked in a large Indian pvt bank and was part of its Internal Complaints Committee (ICC) dealing with issues of gender discrimination and sexual harassment.

It is this, dear unapologetic feminists – you do a great disservice when you focus your narrative solely on instances of patriarchy and its exploitative impact on women; on the ways and means by which women are held back from realising their true potential. By doing that, you are as guilty of perpetrating gender bias as anybody who claims Girls should learn to adjust.

 

But let’s rewind a little to my bank days. One of the eye-popping revelations of that experience was the considerable number of sexual harassment cases the ICC heard which later turned out to be motivated by two broad instances – first, the age old jilted-lover syndrome where the male had promised marriage to the female employee; the second, the refusal of the male reporting manager to grant promotion to a female employee who had embarked on an affair on the promise of a promotion. This is not to say that there were no instances of genuine harassment. Unfortunately, most of them were resolved by transferring the offender to a remote branch rather than summarily dismissing him. In the rare instances where dismissal was suggested, the respective zonal authority often stepped in to stop the process, recommending a transfer instead as the offender was a star performer, with a great sales record. Yes, this is the unfortunate fact of corporate POSH policy implementation which not many people talk abt.

Hell ! I digress. Coming back to the Andheri #SheToo event, the sad fact of most such events is the way women come together and make a mockery of a very real, burning issue – gender inequality. In fact, Feminism for me is nothing but the continuous struggle to ensure gender equality; to sensitize people (not just men), even the ones who believe they are permissive and modern, that we are caught in a mesh of stereotypes and unfair expectations, too tangled to work our way out; that there can be no emancipation for either sex without breaking away from the unrealistic expectations that both sexes have dumped over the other; that equality means ‘sameness’ not difference, hence gender-based reservation is not the right answer.

If we were to look at Feminism from the above lens, one would see that it is not abt constantly bashing men or designing feminist-label line of clothing  (I kid you not !), or calling out men only for eve-teasing. It is as much abt these things as encouraging women to earn a livelihood and share their husband’s financial burden (Shadi ke baad kyun kaam karna; pehley to ghar var set karungi); it is abt listening to those husbands who are unprepared to become fathers (After all it is my body and I have decided that I want a child now!!); it is about supporting our spouses and brothers who wish to stay at home to pursue an unremunerative initiative (I am fed up supporting his mad passion for art and am moving back with my parents); it is about learning to drive (Papa uss party mein nahin janey denge kyun ki voh itni raat ko leney nahin aa sakte); to create assets so that there can be complete autonomy over its use (my husband does not allow me to send money to my parents); or expecting our boyfriends to look like Salman and behave like Robert Downey Jr’s Iron Man (Kya chomu hai yaar ! Ma ke saath album dekhkar, rota hai). You can add, your own line of instances.

Which brings me to my last point – that of choice. Most card-carrying Feminists define choice as the freedom to work, to attend college, to wear a bikini, to stop attending church, to have an abortion, etc. These are indeed valuable and must be guaranteed to all. However, for some it is abt the choice to wear a bindi, to take their husband’s names after marriage, to talk proudly abt their roles as mothers/daughters/wives without necessarily being made to feel like cave women who were slung over men’s shoulders and left to tend to the home fires.

In a PEN event early this year, award-winning author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie criticised Hillary Clinton’s then-Twitter bio (Clinton has since changed it) which read “Wife, Mom, grandma, women+kids advocate, senator, SecState, hair con, pantsuit aficionado, 2016 presidential candidate.” Adichie claimed that she felt just a little bit upset , more so after she went and checked Bill Clinton’s Twitter bio where the first word was not husband. In return, Clinton explained abt the internal conflict one faces when one is committed to relationships and also their own work and identity, and have to describe themselves. That Clinton subsequently changed her bio smacks of the tokenism that characterizes so much of current activism.

As a mother and a fiercely independent woman who is respected at work, doesn’t depend on her spouse financially, often sports the symbols of a Bengali married woman, goes for drinks with friends in the evenings, cannot cook to save her life or drive, depends on her spouse to invest her money, manages the grocery and taking the elders to the doctor, if you asked me for the truest and most unequivocal definition of myself, I’d reply – I am D’s mother. And I see nothing un-feminist or patriarchal abt this.

I cherish this definition as much as I groan abt D’s incessant demands sometimes; I celebrate this definition each time she confides her latest crisis to me; I am true to this definition when I teach her how important it is for her to work and learn to drive.

Where Are Our Stories of Defeat and Dust?

There was a time when I loved films and books that celebrated the ‘triumph of the human spirit’. This was before my cousin returned from Columbia after 7 years of struggle, suffering from a mental breakdown, overweight and dumped by her fiancé. This was before my husband was handed the pink slip 3 weeks after being awarded the company’s Quarterly Star award. Then, I didn’t know that no heartbreak on earth compares to the one you suffer when your child suffers her 1^st heartbreak; no shock as great as the one you encounter when your diseased heart refuses to beat according to a fixed rhythm.

Life as I’ve known it over the past decade has been a slowly accumulating debris of failures, thwarted hopes and faded dreams. About 4 years ago, a chance opportunity to relocate to the middle east seemed to be offering us a break from that monotonous run of disease, mediocrity and ordinariness dressed in fancy nurses, silver sedans and gated towers that characterizes middle-aged ennui and contentment. Several small and big changes were planned and for a fluttering 7-months or so, it all worked out beautifully. 

Till it didn’t one day. November 18, 2016.

Looking back on that morning, I am doubtless that it was a small catastrophe compared to the shit I’ve seen others stuck in. I acknowledge that it wasn’t anywhere close to the worst that can befall us. That came much before and taught us so much in its wake. What this did mark, however, was an irrevocable moment of defeat and its stolid acceptance by us.

Strive. Fail. Despair. Accept. Strive Again. Fail....

The sheer dichotomy that outlines what I see in the popular culture of my time and the reality of the lives of the people around me, is appalling. Suddenly, I’m left wondering -- where are the stories about the injured, the sick, the bipolar, the old, the 34-year old spinster who dreamed about being a bride since she first chanced upon her parents’ wedding album as a child, but is doomed to a life of loneliness and longing, writing mediocre rhymes that her friends Like on FB? Why aren’t there stories and posts about those whose lives aren’t a testament to the ‘triumph of the human spirit’? Sure, those tales will be morose, dark and scary. But wont they be authentic and closer to our shared humanity? Aren’t they worthy of being chronicled?

Why must we all Like and Comment on the endless fat-to-lean stories that proliferate social media? Who will write the story about that 32-year old girl whose eating disorder went out of control when she fell into a deep depression as her research funding was cancelled? Where is the story about the bright blind boy from Ajmer who was sent to a school for ‘special’ children and who slowly receded into a darkness far more potent than his visual impairment till he gradually stopped speaking? Ok, not so morose?

How about the homemaker from Jaipur who wanted to learn music all her life but was too busy to devote time for her hobby, and later found that when her son offered to enrol her for music classes on his visit home from Ontario, she had just lost interest.

You may say, I’m not a dreamer. You’d be right. I’m struggling to make sense and fit your shiny world where there is continuous adulation and celebration of the perfect, of victory, of shiny BMWs, 28-inch waists and lustrous hair, of IIT coaching and perfect 99% scores, of glass cabins, of the disabled who run marathons, and of the blind who write complex algorithms. I am protesting against the relentless Oprah-like glorification of the inexorable and commendable will to conquer obstacles. Because this relentlessness is based on a lie. The lie that hides the fact that the larger share of the pie belongs to those who have failed, whose scholarship didn’t work out, whose genius went unrecognized, whose weighing machine never reflected their efforts, who gave up.

Surely their stories matter, too?