Pause//Play

In Lorde’s ‘The Louvre’, there is a soft build-up, where she whispers to her lover than her lover is to be blamed for the violence that is her heart, that love has led her to. A few seconds before she offers an image, a fashioning of the violence: the “boom, boom, boom” of her heart, which she said needs to be broadcasted, danced to, there is radio silence. The second after she says is, the sonorous silence repeats itself, enclosing the violence of the booming. There is no music when she speaks the song of her heart, but the sound is music enough. Two commas. An ellipsis in the middle. It always surprised me that this song, of all the songs from Melodrama, does not have a video. Just music.

I imagine what a video of the song would look like. What a song that demands iconizing, idealizing, elevating the images of love, begging them to be “hung, down the back, but who cares, still in the Louvre”; would look like. I think of the radio silence that encases the desperate thumping of the heart. I think of the cover of Melodrama, Lorde lying on her bed, a wrist on her pillow, her hair askew; shaded in blue and yellow; as if she has been drawn into light from a photograph where light did not exist. The first time I heard ‘The Louvre’, I lay similarly. It was dark and soft enough that there was nothing except the song filling up the room. At some point, I felt myself dissolving, disappearing, broken from the world in the soft cocoon of silence, as my heart thumped fiercely. Two dark commas. A suspended ellipsis in the middle.

*

The summer before I turned 20, I met Rishabh for the first time. We sat in the porch, an open field before us, a hand pump in the corner. It was the first time we would be bathing in three days. We smelled like sweat and mud and exhaustion, and we had dreamt of a bucket, some running water. We were supposed to bathe. We didn’t.

We stayed back, sitting and talking about what has happened to us, what we couldn’t name. It was close to midnight, and the stars were out. There was no electricity in Ichadih. If we strayed too far from the building we were staying in, we could dissolve into the night, shapeless, formless. We listened to music, brief, soft and slow. A comma above. The ellipsis of our conversation. A comma below. Before Rishabh finally walked away to the hand pump; he admitted that there wasn’t too much to live for; “if it weren’t for my parents, I would have ended it a long time ago”. A comma, Mother-shaped, cocooning. A comma, Father-shaped, cocooning. An ellipsis, Rishabh-shaped, implying continuity, representing pause; cocooned.

*

This year, I kept a music diary of sorts, archiving my year through music. Think bullet journal, except songs where thoughts should exist, because that felt more authentic than my own thoughts. I listened to the same song on repeat, until I was no longer haunted by it. Someone told me when I was 14 that this was how they listened to music. This revelation was strange, because to point this habit out so specifically meant that there were other ways of listening; even a normative one, where a song you loved did not demand utter self-surrender.

In July, I would wake up in the middle of the night, filled with an ache for Elena Tonra’s voice, my heart, a rabbit in a rib cage. When she finally sang, “Poke at my iris, why can’t I cry about this?” it was a drug release, a sedative for a desperate, frightened thing. In August, I was standing at the kitchen doorway, behind Hovsep, as he washed the dishes. His back was turned to me, convinced I was still in the living room. The sunlight streamed in through the window, falling on his hands and hair, turning him yellow. He sang to himself; an audience of one. Much later, I would laugh with him, telling him that he had an unplanned flirty vibe: that without his planning it, everyone fell in love with him, just a little bit. It had something to do with how he would look at people, how his gaze stretched people out into more than the moment, adding a little stroke until a dot turned into a comma.

His singing was low and powerful, humming emerging from the centre of his rib, filling up his throat and then the kitchen. The utensils clanged against the sink, but never so loud as to interrupt the interluding bum-bum-bums he slipped into, as he switched from one song to the other. The water was running, but never so fast as to drown out the low pull of each “remember” he sang. The rabbit in the rib cage was quiet, listening; as I believe all the birds were, the trees visible from his window were, the bus stop was, the stove was, the unwashed plates were; the whole, still house was. It was a moment of perfect pause, where there was nothing but Hovsep and his light, the yellow afternoon light indistinguishable from his own skin. I stood at the doorway, watching how the music translated from notes of sound to strokes of light; how each note stretched the dots of an ellipsis into comma, comma, comma.

*

Two years after Rishabh admitted how little of a future he saw for himself, he texted me, telling me there was so much that had changed since when we were together in Jharkhand, last. That he had fallen in love, something he swore he never would; that he had fallen out of love; something he swore wouldn’t affect him; that he had seen the future and loved it; something he swore he was unable to do that night in Ichadih.

Rishabh and I send each other music, collapsing into the same excitement for every new season of Coke Studio Pakistan. We send music when our hearts break, when we do not know where the words begin and end, or how they even fit, and we hope that simply listening to how there is pain greater than the pain of heartbreak, how there is relief greater than the relief of love; will be salve enough. Sometimes the ellipsis between the pauses of our comma-shaped meetings and re-meetings feel like dots tethering us.

*

These days, I have been listening to Taylor Swift’s 22, in which she is laughing about being young and wild and happy, a spunky song about taking risks, because she has the world ahead of her. Immediately after, I listen to The Japanese House, where 22-year-old Amber Bain sings that something has to change, a spunky song about ennui, because we are living a looped life. I think of Mobius strips, looking like my favourite number, which promises infinity but loops back to an unspecified origin.

These days, the moon has been orange. At night, I turn off the lights and imagine myself dancing in the future, the moon, a crystal ball; a disco ball; a solitary bulb in a dark room. I never dance, but I think of dancing so vividly, I may as well be.

I don’t know what a video of ‘The Louvre’ would look like. But each time, I imagine Lorde dancing, desperately, to her lover. I imagine me dancing to mine. Two commas, sad, dancing, suspended; an ellipsis, circular and buffering on top of our dark video.  

Is It Clickbait if I Say I Am Depressed? (Part 2: Elephant in the Room)

The Winged Nike at the Louvre, Paris

When we tell a story, there is a context for it. Before the story, a story; after a story, one more. Lacking context is awful, difficult—the dull axe with which a story, a punchline, dies before it ever really had the chance to live.

*

In 2016, a few months before it happened, I was in the women’s compartment on a local train in Mumbai. The women around me were reading, watching videos, immersed in their own worlds. Perhaps some were talking, but I don’t remember that. I remember, instead, that contextless, they would sometimes burst into a rehearsed song on the way to work. None of these women knew each other, except that they were the faces they met in between their home, and job. They were the faces they met as women, and only that, in the rare liminal space where relation does not exist. I can’t even say they were really friends—what do you call someone you simply see and sing with, every day?

That day, it was quiet, and I was wedged between two women. I grew smaller in the seat, a hunger burning in my stomach. I had eaten, but it hadn’t been enough, and I hadn’t want to ask my Maami for more when my Maama was running late. I would eat later, outside Maker Chambers—a sandwich, like an Office Going Person. I held myself tighter, because it hit me suddenly that what I was feeling wasn’t hunger at all. I started crying. I looked down at my lap, desperate that no one would see me. It wasn’t that I was embarrassed of being seen, it was that I was embarrassed that I would be seen, and whoever saw me would look away. Or worse, if they saw me, they would peer closer, to confirm that I was crying. Even worse, they may ask what was going on. And when I said “nothing”, it would be the worst of all, because it was the truth.

It was piteous, crying without reason. Surely, none of these women did that? If you were crying on public transport, unprovoked, surely there was a reason? A context?

*

A few months later, I was lying with my head on Vrinda’s lap when I told her I wanted to erase being. It wasn’t like I wanted to die, not at the time, but I wanted to not have been born. To start afresh. To scrap the semi-finished draft I was. My predicament was the premise for so many feel-good films that were focussed on telling you that your life matters, that somehow your presence at that moment in time may have prevented disaster befalling on the lives of others. That there is a reason that you are here, that you matter. It’s a Wonderful Life, for example. In a perverse way, The Butterfly Effect. Films that I wouldn’t watch because of the triteness of it all. The triteness of saying, “You matter. You are here. And you are important.” The triteness of crying because of how much you need to hear it. I knew it I saw my own predicament, a girl on the public transport crying quietly, I would cringe, embarrassed by the triteness of it all.

*

That summer I was in Mumbai, travelling, like an Office Going Person, because I had written a very enthusiastic email to Sanctuary Asia. I told them I love animals and I love writing; would they have a place for me? They did.

I spent that summer of not-yet-nineteen, travelling from one end of Mumbai to the other. To look at animals. I spent hours, cataloguing, tagging, archiving the images and stories—the evidence—that people could wage love and war and care and revolution, for something greater than themselves. I read stories of men (it was mostly men) who spent days knee-deep in mud, to photograph hatchling tadpoles. Men who had spent ten summers in Kanha, for a glimpse of Munna, the tiger. Then there were people like Purva, my editor, who would find dead moths by her window, and put them under the microscope, and take pictures. To show that the evidence of life exists when we aren’t even alive.

*

Elephants live in all-female herds, communicating in frequencies indecipherable to humans. These low-frequency infra sounds travel over ten kilometres, audible only to the herd. In company, they communicate by touching the tip of their trunks together, to express care. When an elephant calf is born, finally standing on its wobbly feet, the elephants trumpet loudly, audibly, celebrating new life. I think of my mother, who calls me, thousands of miles away and says “Is something wrong? I know in my heart that you aren’t feeling okay.” I think of holding hands with Vrinda through two hours of Psychology, for no other reason than that we could. I think of how my mother’s eyes light up when she sees a baby video, how she makes cooing sounds to a child who can’t hear her.

*

In February 2009, Brijendra Singh spotted a herd of elephants in Corbett National Park. Brijendra Singh had spent most of his life chasing animals in Corbett. He knew all the animals by heart, and could identify the elephants from a distance. Through his binoculars, he saw Holi, a young elephant with a bullet hole in her ear, possibly from being shot. Holi was standing unsually still, as the matriarch of the herd touched her head with the tip of her trunk, slightly caressing her wide ears, and then her eyes. At Holi’s feet was her dead baby.

“How the little calf had died is any one’s guess – but, he had died a few days after birth”, Brijendra Sigh wrote. In a while, the herd had moved ahead, leaving Holi in her private grief. Holi watched her baby, dead. She stepped back. She was standing in between life and death, in between the herd calling to her, and the life that she had created taken away, dead.

Elephant babies communicate with their mothers through touch, scent and sound. As the babies are born nearly blind, they hear for their mothers, waiting for her cooing, her touch, before they can find their feet. Because they are very small, they stay under their mothers’ bellies when the herd moves, finding comfort in the shadow of their mothers. Or they use their floppy trunks to grab their mother’s tails and follow her. Her baby, dead.

In one fell swoop, Holi moved ahead and picked up her dead baby, new and young enough to fit in her mouth, and turned to join her herd.

*

Where does one begin, and where does one end? We carry collective trauma, environmental trauma, as though all of life is a continuous process in grieving. We walk into a room and grief descends. Empty chairs, a metaphor. Half-finished coffee, a metaphor. Dust gathering on table-tops, a metaphor. We leave the room, weeping.

No one talks on the train. I think of a fight I overheard the previous night. I think of my cousin telling me he just wants to have a friend. I think of the grandmother I love, sitting on a swing, telling me that my feminism will fade in time. I think of Holi, carrying her dead baby. I cry. Nothing is wrong, but what do we do with this grief—the elephant that is in every room we will ever walk into?

*

“You matter. You are here. And you are important”. When my mother tells me, I laugh. Of course she thinks that. She’s my mother.

Elephant mothers imprint on their babies immediately. It doesn’t take much, mere wobbly-feet existence, and mothers fall in love. This love is biological, meant to ensure the protection of the elephant calf the perpetuation of the species. But if this love is like a switch that turning on, at birth, why is it so hard to turn off? This love which encumbers biology, which encumbers survival.

Desperate to keep her dead baby safe in her mouth, Holi refused to eat. Her dead baby was a natural lure for animals seeking easy prey, which meant that Holi and her herd were especially vulnerable to the predators. And yet she held on, carrying her baby, refusing to let go. The herd has slowed, putting other babies at risk. Yet the matriarch simply comforted her, as Holi carried her child.  Brijendra Singh wrote that this was unnatural, unheard of, almost un-biological. Yet it happened. In living, grief transcended survival.

*

I sometimes wonder what if I had cried openly. Would the women hold my hand, tell me whatever it was, it would be okay? Would they understand this silent sadness, would they cry for Holi, would they tell me about their dead babies, the ones they carried in their hearts? In other words, would they understand my out-of-context sadness? In other words, would we—will we—without knowing each other, sing together?

Is it Clickbait if I say I am Depressed? (Part 1: World Wide Web)

There are only two ways of beginning this: I never thought it would be as bad as January 2017/it is as bad as January 2017. In the September of my 2^nd year of college, I felt as though I was losing grip of reality. I was swimming. I was writing essays for class. I was volunteering at the hospital. I was nursing a gigantic crush on the guy I would go on to date. I was the thinnest I was in college. I was scoring the highest I ever did on assignments. I was curating a poetry project. For myself, I said. I was productive. I wanted to die.

That semester was The Semester When We Read The Crack Up. When F Scott Fitzgerald was 39, he was no longer happy. It didn’t come suddenly, this unhappiness; but slowly built, spinning itself round him, spool after spool, silken and thick. People around him knew—he wrote this unhappiness so frequently, it was impossible to not know. 

I was 19. I imagined him holding his pen up, uncertain how to phrase this next part
authoritatively, as an author must: 

“the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise”. 

I thought of him, Arachne-like, holding his pen like a knitting needle, trying to put a positive spin on this story of brokenness; determined to make it otherwise. I imagined him covered with the silk of his sadness, picking at this silk for weaving his stories. I imagined how he got entwined in the spool, how his armchair, his feet, his torso, were all covered in web after web of silk. How he saw the web; and was "determined to make it otherwise", see his trap as a chrysalis.

*

Spiders wrap their prey in silk. They are expert spinners, covering their prey, line by line, with their own sticky creation. Before long, the resisting prey surrenders, surrounded by the spool of silk. The silk paralyzes the prey; slowly, literally consuming it. By the time the spider finally feasts, its prey is indistinguishable from the sad silk it is wrapped in, trapped in.

I always knew I was sad. This primary knowledge is integral to how I wove myself. I sought out the most tragic of stories and read until the tragedy in the story was indistinguishable from the tragedy in my heart. I wrote Mother’s Day cards fueled by self-sacrifice, demanding "nothing except more love". I wrote diary entries informing myself I was a terrible daughter, a terrible friend. The first word I remember learning is ‘Sorry’: a ‘Magic Word’. Where the word implied healing, I would weaponize it, use it to become sacrificial. In my sacrifice, I would become the scapegoat for the pain of others. I would be glorious. Instead of wafting into the spider’s web, I decided to invite the spider into my home to build its web. Instead of being hung and killed by the spider, I would choose to die the death of a martyr; my final moment, being crucified at the centre of a shining web.

You could say I harboured a romantic notion of self-sacrifice. I could say that is what we value in women. 

*

In September 2016, I lay in my hostel bed, slowly thinking that if I did it, who would find me first, how they would tell my parents, and how this would irrevocably change my family and my friends. At that time, my mother was running around Calcutta, building a home. Papa gave her the money, she ran around the city, talking to carpenter, electrician, painter, mechanic, glassblower, about how she hoped to build a home, possibly a final home. She spent all day working, laughing to me over the phone that she had dreams about the house, about how it all coming together. She sounded exhilarated and exhausted. When the house was finally made, it was something to behold. I stood there, in February, when the house was complete, feeling the earth shake.

Nobody else did, but I could feel the earth spinning, as though it had been bearing the brunt of something heavier than itself. I paused, gripping the marble tabletop, and felt my legs shake. Almost in response, the tile had grown a slim crack, evident only if you were looking for it. Around me, everyone applauded, praising this house with its golden lights and filigree woodwork. I saw it crack.

When I returned, I turned to Vrinda and Sanna asked them to tell me why not. I had made a list of reasons in September, and the only item left in why not was that my Mum was making the greatest project of her life—I couldn’t do it to her, not then. The reason was over. The house was complete. They said something, and it was good enough. It was reason enough, to not—or it would be, in a while. On the best days, I can remember what they said. Right now, I cannot.

*

I have always found the word clickbait strange. Click, implies action; bait, implies trap. Surely one cannot action themselves into a trap—if you walk into a trap, surely you wanted to, and if you wanted to—it cannot be a trap. Why would someone will themselves into a trap?

More than anything, at the heart of that is thr question of what it means to be human. Where do you really begin and end? In horror films, you watch the protagonist walk into the haunted house, unassuming. You call her stupid. You know what will happen; you hate her for not knowing her own fate. You still scream. In watching her, do you become her? 

*

I stepped out in the sun after four days today. I walked down the road, starving, and went to Pret a Manger. I saw a man and a woman sit on a bicycle parking bar and talk. I saw a family of Hindi-speaking tourists say it will be cheaper to take the metro. I watched a man pass by where another had asked for my number last week. None of them felt real. Sign 1.

I took the brioche I wanted and took a second one. I considered a bottle of juice and I picked it out. I thought of how matted my hair was, how unwashed I was, how evident it was that I hadn’t been able to sleep in two days. The shop assistant called me love, like he knew. Sign 2.

I walked into Sainsbury, casually picked up two packets of chips, instant ramen—food that I wouldn’t have to leave my room to make. I smiled at myself. This was so clearly. Sign 3.

Papa called. I felt relief I had missed it because I wouldn’t have to pretend to be fine. Sign 4.

I guilt myself for the relief and call back. Mummy asked how work is going. I shout at her in fury and burst into tears I didn’t see coming. Sign 5.

I write on my weekly planner list, in big blue felt pen letters: DO NOT SELF HARM. DO NOT SELF HARM. DO NOT SELF HARM. DO NOT SELF HARM. DO NOT SELF HARM. DO NOT SELF HARM. DO NOT SELF HARM. Sign 6, Sign 7, Sign 8, Sign 9, 10, 11, 12, 13.

I fantasize about how one little movement, a tiny one, not too dangerous, could have been mistaken for an accidental scratch, really, how a slight swish, could make it all a little more tolerable.

Sign 14.

*