Losing, or Losing?

A bowl of uneaten left overs slipped from her oily hand, and spilled everything on the kitchen floor. And she could not catch it with the other hand as it was also full of soiled plates, after dinner. She was stooping lower than her lowest grades in school, to collect the dirt and put it back into the dustbin, scared that she may be scolded for what just happened, when someone Like her mother hurled out, 'how do you hold a bowl that it slips off so easily!?"

A bag full of certificates that lies neglected somewhere in her father's home proved that she once was a good speaker, an elocusionist , an avid writer and a sometimes an academic achiever. 

It was not until she moved into a new home with a new set of people that she realized that now on she would be judged not on the basis of her education, degrees and her talents.. but by the precision with which she could chop potatoes and cabbages..By the strength with which she could squeeze all the water out of washed clothes. By the aptness with which she could keep the kitchen and table clean. By how well she could drape a saree..

By how quiet she could keep and abide by unexplained protocols with the only hope that the winds of justice will someday sail her ship to a safe island.

While she looked for a home in the new place and a family amidst all the new people, she realized marriages are different from what she has seen so far. 

Being the protagonist of an unapphrehended life, she realized she would never be a daughter in again. She did lose a major part of her self respect as she was being judged on capabilities that does not need education, or any values that she grew up with.

Her wedding teaser, once, portrayed her marriage, like one of those dreamy star studded things that every girl wants to have. She was blessed with the heaviest gold jewellery and lot of extravagance...Although she only prayed to find a family like her own, in the new home.

And then few weeks down the line she realized her prayers went unheard.

And then her learnings went on. Sometimes she learnt that she would never be chosen over the rest of the people. Not even once. Sometimes she learnt that embracing a new family in entirety also means that she is not supposed to have her spouse in seclusion for some time. Infact, even expecting such a seclusion is being disrespectful to the others in the same place. She learnt that her principles, values and feelings are nothing but a waste now. There is more aloneness associated with a lot of low self esteem, than ever before but may be by the time she learns to speaks up for herself, she will be used to lowered standards of life and living.. she will learn to be accepted as the 'last one' in the race.

And with all the learnings put together, if she would ever conceive a life inside her, once and for all she decided never to bring a girl child into this world.

Today's Scripted Wedding

The northern wind was stabbing me from the back, as I sat on the dusty terrace of our two-storied humble abode, to warm up under the fading winter sun. Never did I experience a colder winter in the last 5 years. Or did my tolerance threshold take a humble bow, with age and experience, I wondered! It has been seven weeks I left this place, being wedded to a new place, family and man. Embracing a brand new world, while still holding on to your roots that have grown deep and strong for the past 27 years, shaping oneself into a living testimony of resilience, ain't easy. There are a hundred things that run through my mind. Because being unconventionally new, is strange to me. A thousand battles lost, a hundreds won, a million miles crossed, I hoped, I broke, I hoped again, wearing my emotional armor strapped in place, with breath taking intentions, I am going on for three decades now. I don't own a new soul. It is rugged, and exhausted, yet loving and full of compassion. With all the scars left, I, am not new.

The sky turns red, as the dying sun splashes a dash of vermillion across it. It is even colder now. I get to see a lot of migratory birds, flying back home. The world has humble creatures, who thrive on hay and water. And then we have humans, the most intelligent in the race, practicing extravagance. Every day we make careful choices, knowingly or unknowingly, that give our future a shape. Looking back, at how things were a couple of months back, while I was still deciding if I was ready to begin a new way of life, I realize nothing changes if we don't. Being brought up by liberated parents, especially a mother who still teaches me to be a compassionate lady, motivates me to be more ambitious at work, who ostracized futile religious and social practices and has raised herself above the insignificant earthly matters that does nothing but takes the focus away from our daily state of well being, I still find happiness abiding by her preaching.

The grandeur and conventionalism of the wedding customs practiced even today, fail to convince my sense of practicality and logical conscience. Practices re-inforced at my own big day, did not comply with principles I grew up with all these years. Strangled in the arms of ancient rigid practises, aren't we failing as a society and as a nation in the global race of intellectual evolution? And all this in fear of being ogled at!

I chose to ‘walk’ the customary rounds around the groom, instead of being carried strenuously on a wooden stool (“piri” as we call it) by three or four men of the family. I did not hand over a tuft of rice grains to my mother saying that I was repaying the debt of all that she gave me. I was parting from my nurturer and the stringent customs of our community never put emotions first. I was vocal about some infrastructural problems of the wedding venue even while I was dressed as the bride; a bride who is  supposed to be shy and quiet.

Layers of make-up done for 4 hours, weighed down by the profundity of all that I was wearing, and doing re-takes of rituals for the photographers and drones flying over me, I almost forgot that it was the beginning of a new venture. That it was also a marriage, besides the scripted wedding. The feeling did not sink in.

The quietude of Calcutta evenings does magic. It brings the rebel out of me. Yet again, diving into the couch of togetherness and companionship, and having someone to falling back upon, at the end of the day, is everything our generation understands of a marriage.

The Screwed Up Feminist

The journey has never been easy for  women who struggled to achieve what they wanted. Should I call it transcending a restrictive upbringing to pursue what means more to us ? Or is it about fighting back with stealth, stubbornness and sarcasm?  

26, educated, and working as a techie for about 4 years now, yet things have not proved much beneficial on grounds of my literacy, job, or being a popular blogger in my small circle of friends and colleagues. Certain struggles have been really staggering , and this piece of blog should be nothing but a searingly honest account of the battles silently fought , the pains endured and the strength acquired.

Someone said it right. It is hard to be a woman. You must think like a man, act like a lady, look like a young girl, and work like a horse. A veneer of sophistication and glamour is naturally associated with ladies. No wonder, women have earned good places in the corporate hierarchy of the respective professions. Having achieved all of that, today women are encouraged to function in an increasingly compartmentalized, unnatural fashion. Outside home we are encouraged to use our brains to serve the corporate world, and inside home there is a plethora  of domestic work besides mothering a child, husband and the family. A woman’s body is designed to function in a certain way, which includes fertility, and  healthy cycles, deviation from which might surprise a major part of the society when the result is not as expected.  It is unknown that, a disruption from the normal biological manifestation has never made anyone less of a woman. 

While women need appreciation as a whole-both mind and body, all I see is dogmatism running errands about a woman’s self-esteem and worth, bringing them down. There is much more about a woman, than her body. How many of us talk about marriages falling apart because of Endometriosis! A disease hitting one out ten women in America and growing at an alarmingly high rate in India. Is it the sterile aesthetics and plasticized beauty, or the taboo around woman’s physiological problems that has taken the focus far away from the authentic empathy for the pained?

What more? I am a feminist, and I am screwed.

I idealize about how the length of my clothes should not judge my moral character, but I have nothing to do and only negotiate with my feminist ideologies when the bus conductor stares at the peeking pink bra strap, with boggling eyes and shyly cover them.

I want to be unapologetic about the fact that I work as hard as any male bread earner, amidst a lot of men, competing with them and that there is a lot of struggle each day navigating the patriarchy. But I cannot shun the ones who ogle, label me as bossy, demanding, over ambitious. A male counterpart doing the same thing, is heralded for his authoritative skills.

In the domestic domain, as a daughter/daughter-in-law, as a wife, or as a mother I wish to be more vocal, because I am the one rolling round chapattis, mothering my child, cooking, cleaning, feeding, balancing my outside world with my family, when not a day passes by without being pushed and shoved in a crowded bus, on way to work. I wish to raise my girls teaching them  gender equality, to think liberally, to be aware, and modest. 150 years of a lot of Feminism! And I still see myself being socially challenged by the system, that dictates the way women ought to dress, walk, work, and talk. Hypocritically, I cannot be unremorseful, and only feed my future generation with the explanation to dress in an ‘un-provocative’ manner to avoid unwanted attention, and to be back home on time!

I would have nothing much to opinionate, if the man of the house wishes to refrain carrying out certain domestic roles. And all this only to avoid a conflict in the house. Being a loving parent or spouse has never been gender specific!

I am defiant that being cat called is not being complimented but objectification of a human in its core sense. It is 9 pm by the watch, and I am walking past a dark North Kolkata by-lane. Am I left with any blatant option other than ignoring and pacing up to reach home real fast?

So my dear women, it is time to button up, unstitch your hemline atleast knee length, get ready to confront a society that has disbelief in empathy, and ethics, take those khadi kurtis out of our closet and put your summer gowns away, stop PMSing and start adoring your monthly cramps because the world is a fair place, and yes if you are feminist, you are fucked up!

"They may not have my eyes, or my hands, but surely my heart"

Last few hours to go this Friendship Day, and this not being the conventional Mother’s Day, I preferably choose this day to put forward my views and questions on an unconventional , unorthodox shape of motherhood.  You are free to opinionate on my post. Because you are either already mothers, or have hailed from a known mother.

Every time I stop by the Jubilee hills Checkpost traffic signal, and gaze outside through the locked glasses of the Uber I am sitting in, the ‘beggars’ aged 5 or 6 years, bang on the closed car windows, and then leave the moment signals close, leaving tiny impressions of their hands on the glass. Some have mothers, others don’t. And some are abandoned, unwanted daughters and sons. We sympathize, and then leave.

Honestly, that’s how life goes on. In a fast moving age like ours, when broken things are disposed off and not fixed, sympathies for a brown eyed beggar child cannot be accommodated for more than a few seconds. I have no authority to tell you, what ‘could’ be done to eradicate motherless-hood. And here, poverty eradication is definitely not my topic of discussion.

But then, addressing all Mothers here, how do you define motherhood?

Is motherhood restricted to carrying the living embryo in your couch for 9 months, giving birth bearing the excruciating pain and then bringing up the child under your shelter? No wonder, all these guarantee that you have the shown the child, the light of the world.

But, people have abandoned and disowned their beautiful kids even after having gone through these conventional norms.  And lucky ones like us, who were born under the right stars, survived with an identity. Would it be very nonconformist if I said, the motherhood I would entail would be by providing identity to a nameless child? Will I be called an ultra modern extremist or a feminist who is trying to deny the biological conjunction between the two sexes before I give myself the right to be called a mother? Isn’t motherhood about accommodating another life into your own? Or is motherhood, only about adding a DNA matched heir to the family? Is impregnating oneself, the only license to mother a child?

“Biology is the least of what makes someone a mother.” Quoted  Oprah Winfrey.

Giving birth comes first, and then comes giving a life to it. Would you still judge me if I said, DNA is not going to be the pre-requisite to call someone my own? Would the society still roll eyes at me, if I said despite not having a physiological incapability, I chose to pick my heir from the unwanted ones? Every child deserves the love of a family, and that of a mother. Giving such children the needed love, care, education and a parent, takes courage, and utmost desire to be the guardian angel  to someone.

When marriage becomes license to rape

"For the average Indian man, masculinity is about acting tough, freely exercising his privilege to lay down the rules in personal relationships, and, above all, controlling women"... It was part of a discussion about a middle aged lady I knew, a high school teacher by profession, who fell  victim to marital rape, and after I made this statement, a highly literate(not educated) male acquaintance(i hate to call him a friend anymore) disregarded and tagged me as "Feminist saale"! While most cases of marital rape in India fail to get registered, or even recognized as a crime being difficult to prove it as forced sex against the consent of a woman, or as a natural occurrence in the institution of marriage, it can't get worse when even the educated strata of our society become victim to such a shameless act, and even worse that lot of men are not even acquainted with the fact that sex without the consent of their wife, who is also made of flesh, blood and a mind like men, is morally unethical, and that she has all the right to tell NO to it. Let me get it straight.  Marriage for such depraved men is not a license to rape because of the 'implied consent' which comes with wedlock. Is it patriarchy that is to be blamed? Indians like us, who consider marriage a pious institution, and make every effort to make it work at the cost of giving in to the 'needs' of the man of the house even if we don't 'want' it, however educated we are, are doing it wrong. What compels Indian women to stay with such sex-maniacs in the name of husbands?... husbands who are entitled to protect their wives, but end up committing such atrocities and even getting away with it ! 

Educating the rural lot might help lessening the gender imbalance. But what about the mind sets of already educated people, who don't leave out on a single chance to oppress the wife. Is wife all about body parts? Ms.Banerjee(ex Mrs.Mukherjee) who spent a year's salary to celebrate her wedding with a civil engineer guy, almost burnt herself locking herself up in the kitchen, when few neighbors came to her rescue, to give her a new life free from all oppression and life with a demon. But, in how many cases it becomes easy to walk out of marriage in our country? Are’nt women supposed to adjust and keep shut about the distress because no one will acknowledge marital rape as a crime? The idea that it is betrayal of marriage to the core, and trying to save the same marriage for the sake of social pressure, religious reasons or what so ever, is nothing but giving consent to be brutally ill treated repeatedly, needs to be inculcated in women. If a man  subjects his wife to physical pain, the wife should subject him to the rigors of the criminal justice system. And if a section of the society has to call it as a feminist tool to criminalize marriage, so be it. Something more than sensitizing the judiciary towards marital rape, is needed. The society needs to acknowledge criminalizing marital rape, and challenge the myth that rape by one’s spouse is inconsequential.

Emotions Exiled

What I feel cannot be expressed in phrasal combinations. It either needs to be screamed out loud or remain painfully silent, for words, I bet can't express better. Call this insanity, eccentricity or self-hypnotism. I call this being released from a beautiful nightmare. The divine sin, that banishes you is humanly gorgeous. Full of imperfections, yet so flawless. One in a million is ostracized for loving. Don't get me wrong. This is about learning to estrange those emotions you once held on to, like those were the last things to live by. Every dawn you see proves you are alive. Every dawn once brought back those sweet miseries that filled your head the previous night. The whole day, it fills the mind and body like you were stung blue by a red eyed scorpion. Self love is inspiring. Raw, unfabricated love kills. And the same heals. Broken dreams about unrequited love does'nt make the one in a million demolished creature a saddist. I call it invitation to a better living. It is about one single dawn when you wake up to feel You.  Yes, its me! The dawn, when you know estranging feelings for one person is not a lesson anymore, but something that has grown naturally in you. Call it whatever you want to, but I call it falling out of love...

Flashback

Every silence is made up of a network of minuscule sounds that envelops it. And every solitude, is made up of fragmented togetherness that surrounds you. It is night. Late in the night. The white and blue radio cabs are yet to take over the city. Hues of yellow-blue taxis predominate the eastern Bypass roads. The one I am sitting in, is playing Md.Rafi singing a cheerful Shammi Kapoor number on the radio. The lonesome honks of the few aged taxis and rusted buses, behind, disturbed my thoughts. The traffic sergeant at the Science city crossing once helped me find the direction to some exam center during my college days, few years back. A fleeting glimpse of the sergeant did not help me decipher if it was the same man. The taxi headlights caressed those dimmed streets of my city, I once crossed daily. Is it nostalgia that overruns me everytime I come back to this place? Or is it what you call ecstasy... the eternal pleasure that I get sinking into the depth of this city's enormous couch? Or is ecstasy a long forgotten song sung by mother when young? Is it meeting a long lost high school friend, amazed at the sight of her vermillion between the parting of her hair, suddenly realizing we have grown up? Or is it memories of occupying the first row in the classroom, and sneezing repeatedly every time the Hindi teacher banged on the table with her duster? From Tagore's rejection of Knighthood, to Ganguly's bare-chested jersey-waving victory, to irreplacable and untimely loss of film maker Rituparno Ghosh... all that we live with is memories. 

 

My mind fleets to the lazy afternoon in the now-shuttered College Street, where once I bargained on tons of second hand grad-school books, that I leafed through only a couple of weeks before the exam. Rest of the year was kept for the infamous "adda" over "cha and toast". Another, brake jerked me to consciousness. The taxi drove past the lane I was visiting about 7 years back, twice a week, while in school for English tuition. She was in her late 60s. One post on a social networking forum, about 3 months ago, read that she was no more. Cancer devoured her. Death is so strange; stranger than life. One moment you are alive. The next moment you' re gone.
Every shut sweet shop, and every dark lane I crossed reminded me of those rare visits to "mamabari" in South Kolkata. Getting ready to go out with mother was associated with her soft silk sarees, the smell of old naphthalene when she pulled them out from the steel wardrobe, piles of old photo albums, some of the oldest ones being ingested by arthropods..... layered frocks for children that was in style, and ofcourse, the joyous tram ride. My mind was flooded with childhood memories, associated with this city, the ancient aroma locked in those almirahs and the tiny world that every child lives in, called, Mother.

While my eyes were about to shut after the day's hectic schedule, light from a heading car blinded me, followed by screeching brakes. The awfully narrow alley leading to my home it was, and neither vehicle had way to pass. While the drivers screamed at each other, a man, who resembled a friend of mine came out of the cab to make way. Yes, I knew him. Alokesh Mitra, the geekiest of my batch in school, it was. He was heard to be a medico, practicing in Pune, now. As I yelled out waving at him, he smiled and came close. And after exchanging few anecdotes from our common past, he took off his black cap, that surprised me with his shaved head. "My father passed away.. I am returning from the crematorium, performing his last rites...". It was time to depart. He took out a pack of Gold Flakes from his pocket, lit one and aired it, as the smouldering smokes of agony slowly disappeared into the air.