Anniamma

Anniamma tells me her life would make for a wonderful movie script and the movie would definitely be a super-hit. I try to avoid the tears and the pain as she says this.

Anniamma is 29 years old. Of all the women, I have spoken to, she was the only one who made her children people for me. She called them by their names. Arun and Mani. They were not just numbers to feed or care for in the daily routine called life.

After being thrown out of two homes where people did not want to talk to me, her inviting smile eased me as she agreed to answer my questions, terribly insignificant ones in the face of her life, as it unfolded before me.

I ask her what she does in her free time. She laughs and tells me there is no such thing. I persist. I ask her if she sat around and talked to the other women after work. No, I don't. People don't talk to me. They tell me I have lost my jati and that's why they will not talk to me.

And before I know it, I am privy to details about a life of a woman I am unlikely to ever meet or make a difference to. Anniamma is maaried, she says, to her husband's younger brother because the former died from being afflicted with HIV. And as is custom, she lost any rights she had to the house she lived in with her first husband. Her other brother-in-law took the house away, sold it and didnt pay her a penny. (Inheritance laws are not for poor women)

As she sits facing me and the road, she is constantly looking out. She wants to show me her daughter. The daughter who does not acknowledge her as mother. Who lives with her uncle across the road. Her daughter walks past us as she gets ready to do the day's cooking. Anniamma tells me that a child' heart is like stone and a mother's like a flower. I cry looking at my daughter who is no longer my daughter, she says.

I do not ask all the questions swimming in my head, despite my valiant efforts to not have them even exist. I am wondering, despite myself, about the details. How did the estrangement happen? Why did the daughter choose her uncle over her mother? Was the "sin of sexual incest" something she could not "forgive" her mother of? Or is her "unforgiving stance" because her mother left her behind when she ran away with her lover?

But I ask none of them. I keep begging her to stop, in my head. I am telling her that I cannot handle more of these stark contradictions, the injustice, my helplessness. Please stop. Anniamma asks me if I would like to see her dead husband's photo. I quickly say no. But she persists and hands me a happy photo of her, her dead husband, her estranged daughter, her dead niece and her young son. Standing in front of a bush with pink and purple flowers in Majestic. My eyes glaze over as I try desperately to maintain the distance. Her words keep chipping away at this barrier I've constructed that helps me go on with the farce called research.

I can no longer take it and I try to shift the conversation to lighter things. I ask, quite casually, if she had her dinner. Since everyone else around seemed to be eating. She tells me then that she does not have wood to light the stove, no food to eat, no money to buy them. So the fires are out today, she says.

With that, I had to leave before she could tear down my barrier anymore. I mutter my thanks and leave but not before she has this to say: "If God can't look after us and give us a good life, why does he not just end this life?"

I am told that research does not entail action. I must not hold myself to obligations. That I do my research, get out of there and help later when I can. Anniamma exposed and laid bare the fallacy of this reasoning for me.

musings 6

What do the words I love you mean?

After an unexpected conversation tonight, I am left wondering at the import of the words and what they have until now meant to me.

I discover to my tumultous surprise that these words do not come strings unattached. That like for most people, they come to me with notions and expectations of exclusivity, of fidelity in mind and body, of unrealistic love made realistic by convention and conditioning.

Words that betray these unthought expectations create strangeness inside of me. The unnaturalness of extreme heat and extreme cold colliding against each other, of a liquid that seems like water but feels as heavy as oil, of heaviness and lightness existing in the same space at the same time...

I grapple for support in identifiable emotions of anger and hurt and sadness and equanimity and composure and evenness. I fail miserably. Uttterly. And yet I try, try and try. Till I succeed. Urging for reservoirs unknown within me to come rescue me.

musings 5

wring your heart out. dry it out on the clothesline. blood drips. creating a pool of red and green feelings to drown in. try desperately to hold, latch, grab. not let the colours blind you. rationality you scream. come rescue me.

love is a hard thing.

Musings 4

It is bloody difficult to go through everyday. And it is much more bloodier to go through everyday when you know others are having fun with their everydays

Musings 3

There are some moments one must have to be able to negotiate the world of noise and demand. One night when the inaneness of what you do fills you up to the brim, you turn it off. You turn off the sounds you can and you make peace with all the sounds you cant. You let the quietness hovering around you for days and weeks and months come inside you. You wait for it to envelop you, to let out the thoughts unworded, the words unspoken and because there is no one around you, you speak them in silence to yourself.

If only it were that easy.

Quietness and silence has to fight. Fight with other thoughts that suddenly want to be thought. Schedules about what must one must do about all the work undone, the superficiality of hair styles and what changing them means to you as a person, the relationship you demand so much of, the relationships you kill actively and passively, the sudden urge to drink water and let its reinvigorating touch cleanse you, how one must sleep so that one does not screw up your body rhythm.... these and much more, much much more... drive hard to keep the quietness away.

Most often they are successful. But sometimes these poisonous thoughts scamper away.

Musings2

Well, so today was one of those watershed conversations. We had talked long and hard earlier about keeping the relationship open and today we had the chance to really feel how difficult it is.

I hated it when I first heard it. And then I kept quiet about it. I felt jealous next. None of what he said about his love for me I heard. I merely kept quiet about it. And then I told him, I felt bad. And I told him why I felt bad.

And we spoke of inequality. Of egos. Of hurt. Of separation. Of love. Of Togetherness. Of binary simplicties. Of multiple complexities. Of finding new ways.

an encounter in a bus

hurrying, i got into the bus. halted in my tracks to make it to the front end of the bus, i stood impatiently asking the conductor and the passenger with no money to allow me space to move.

in a strangeness that should have alerted me of things to come, the two did not move. not even the conductor which in my experience in bus travels is strange because conductors are always asking people to move ahead.

and then the brush against my breasts happened. the conductor did it. apart from the usual feelings of whether it was an accident (which one knows it is not), i was at sea because it was the conductor. who do you raise the issue to? the driver? other passengers? i had always assumed the conductor would conduct the scene if one raised the issue of molestation. that he would be the one to help me take the offender to the police station etc etc. so when such a man brushes his hand 'accidentally', then what?

he tried a couple more times but missed my breasts my a few inches. then he came, leaned against the seat in front of me, positioned himself in such a way that his standing legs leaned against mine. my instinct was to take it away. but i stopped myself.

i let it be. for a good half a minute, we let it be. i thought to myself, if he could get pleasure from my body, perhaps i should too. and i let it be and i enjoyed myself.

i saw that it threw him off balance. that now he was no longer the seeker. that i had asserted myself. and he did not know what to do. he moved away and never came back.