The Unkindly Ones...

I have read and heard about the hijra community before. The book Beautiful Thing talks about it in quite a detail. But today I read this, and I wondered about the human struggle to be something else...

It seems that, most of us, are fighting to be something else. Struggling to be someone else. There are people like Mona, born male, but wanting to be female. There are females, who don manly clothes, walk with a swagger and expect the world to look at them with fear. And then there are people like you and me, comfortable in our maleness and femaleness, but still struggling to free ourselves. Still fighting with ourselves, with our families, with the society.

And while the hijras need a sex-change to be what they want to be, it's never too late for us to drop the past baggage and be what we want to be.

Everyone has a chance to be what they wish to be.

I need to remember that often. 

Viva La Vida...

10 Things...

"I'm not telling you to make the world better, because I don't think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I'm just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave's a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that's what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it."
— Joan Didion



"Perhaps everybody has a garden of Eden, I don't know; but they have scarcely seen their garden before they see the flaming sword. Then, perhaps, life only offers the choice of remembering the garden or forgetting it. Either, or: it takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both. People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare."
— James Baldwin

I Fought For A Long Time Now...

"It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living. Because we are alone with the unfamiliar presence that has entered us; because everything we trust and are used to is for a moment taken away from us; because we stand in the midst of a transition where we cannot remain standing. That is why the sadness passes: the new presence inside us, the presence that has been added, has entered our heart, has gone into its innermost chamber and is no longer even there, - is already in our bloodstream. And we don't know what it was. We could easily be made to believe that nothing happened, and yet we have changed, as a house that a guest has entered changes. We can't say who has come, perhaps we will never know, but many signs indicate that the future enters us in this way in order to be transformed in us, long before it happens. And that is why it is so important to be solitary and attentive when one is sad: because the seemingly uneventful and motionless moment when our future steps into us is so much closer to life than that other loud and accidental point of time when it happens to us as if from outside. The quieter we are, the more patient and open we are in our sadnesses, the more deeply and serenely the new presence can enter us, and the more we can make it our own, the more it becomes our fate."
— Rainer Maria Rilke

*****
Much like that, one morning I woke up and realised I had changed. I still wore clips in my hair, much like a school girl, and still measured 26 at the waist, and I have it from a 19 year old guy that I can easily pass off as a 23 year old, if not 22(of course I am vain, darling); but my inner landscape had completely changed. So much so, that I now felt nothing like I did just 2 days back. When I told this to AP, he gave me that you're-crazy smile, ignoring my admission as some female whim, but inside I was struggling even as I said those words, I wish it was some whim. I feel like a woman these days. I don't feel like a girl anymore. How does that feel you ask me, the skeptical you, the curious you, and I say, I don't know, except that I know I am different now. Age is now a tangible thing. I can feel it between my fingers, heavy, I can smell it, like burning rubber, I can see it snaking through my life cutting my dreams short, and I can hear it constantly talking to me, telling me to calm the fuck down. It is driving me mad.


For the first time in my life, I sat down and sketched my future. For a person like me, who lives life as it comes, impulsive, I planned. I wrote down on a piece of paper- 2011, 2012, 2015....


That broke my heart. You'll argue that planning ahead is a good thing, but to me that was cheating. That was compromising. That was...dare I say...choosing what to dream?


All these years, I realise I was stuck at 22, blithely unconcerned about the hours ticking by...and then I suddenly realise I am 26 now.


It's safe to say I am freaking out like a pig that knows it is going to be butchered.


I remember waking up at an odd hour in the morn to loud cries one day. I was late in enrolling, and so my college had put me in a hotel outside the college premises. It was almost a dump, the hostel, and to add to that, there was an open field next to the hostel building where many pigs made home. My room window opened to dirty pigs for the whole one week I stayed there. And I remember waking up to loud unfamiliar cries, on the first day itself. I opened the window and I saw some two men trying to drag a pig into a tempo sort of a vehicle, the sun was just rising behind them. I almost wanted to cry for the pig, it desperately struggling to get away and run away and not die, its cries painful.


I feel pretty much like that pig now.


I can not be a free spirit anymore. I will be tied down. I just pray I have the fortitude to go through with what will come next.


But god, I am miserable. 

Enough Rope...

And then the day came,

when the risk

to remain tight

in a bud

was more painful

than the risk

it took

to Blossom.

-Anaïs Nin

A French Mistress...

What I thought was a bold move, I realise in the morning, was infact extreme cowardice.

I complain that destiny does not give me a choices. Now I do. And now I must choose.

And now I hate it.

The Hand That Feeds...

Today Apeksha pinged and asked me if I was okay with her talking to S.


Apeksha and I were talking about my moving and then we were laughing about the movie KKKG, and about my role as "pooh" in final year play, and out of the blue, this. For a moment, I felt dizzy.


I know it was not very mature on my part to forbid my best friends from talking to S. But I did it anyway.


Here's the thing. If I love you, I would not hesitate to even wash your feet and drink that water, but when you're out of my life, I take everything away. If it was possible, I would even want to erase every single memory of me from the minds of people I oust from my life. I am extreme in my love and hate.


My friends are my family. And I was hurt and I was not okay with them talking to someone who has hurt me.


And, yes, I knew by asking Apeksha not to keep in touch with S, I was in a way hurting him. I knew it would affect him.


I knew it was a wrong thing to do. And my sweet girlfriends, except G of course(Who is also a sweetheart, but just more practical to give into something like this), agreed without a single why. They understood they said. I do have sweet friends, no?


So Apeksha, I am okay. He was your friend too. He's been a good friend to you. Yes, I still want to keep you with me and not have you talk to S. But I don't have that right, even as your best friend, I do not.



Things happen, fuck ups happen, people you love don't always love you back, you get hurt and you don't always do the right thing.


But it's not too late for me to do the right thing. I am sorry I kept you away from a friend.