The Hair-cut

Very few women in Ahmedabad, I realize, wear their hair very short. This must be true of other Tier II cities where modernity is still panting behind urbanisation. Of course, there is nothing to suggest that modernity is equal to short hair but modernity is equal to freedom of choice and is simultaneous with a public sphere that allows you an expression of that choice or opinion.

What happened when a (relatively) young woman like me, ( with no disease, touchwood) got her hair cut extremely short? Bijou, the husband went in to shock (that was predictable) and took two weeks to recover and get used to the spectacle of a short haired wife. People in the streets now knew that one is not born and brought up Ahmedabad. Male friends gasped and wondered why the Medusa surrendered her ill fated weapon. At church, the priest briefly hesitated and wondered if it was really me. Women cast longing yet pitying looks. Some discussed prospective haircuts, and others groaned at the sight that was me. Some were nonchalant; they've seen women without (much) hair before.

Surprising, I say, because for a number of years before marriage I've kept my hair short and been surrounded by adult married women who liked their hair short as well. My mother wore her hair short for ages, partly, I suspect, out of convenience, and partly because women from Kerala were expected to have long hair. Young children, in general, get their locks lopped off for fear of lice and of course, for the sake of the hassled mother who will have to figure out an extra ten minutes to comb and plait rebellious hair.

This kind of reaction was expected but still, surprising.

What is it about women and hair? Why do men dislike men with long hair? Why is hair synonymous with femininity? (No wonder, Alexander Pope fused the image of a sexual assault and a clip of a lock of his heroine's hair in his Rape of the Lock.) Why, I wondered, as a child, do women cover their heads and men don't, at church? I asked my father this question once. I remember the answer because I never understood the response then but I do now- the mischievously masculine chauvinist perspective- ' because men at prayer do not want to be distracted by lustrous hair'. So true. Which is why, at a mosque, at a synagogue, at many temples, women are exiled from the visible space of worship. Their presence distracts and forbids 'prayerful' thoughts. Even the gods may be distracted.

But to come back to my hair-cut. As a child, I hated getting my hair short. Growing up, I had absorbed and understood the social requirement of long hair on women. Eager to outrun adulthood, this little girl wanted to be feminine and beautiful, with long hair. So every trip to the hair-dresser was a traumatic event accompanied by the brutal, ruthless mother and a consoling chocolate promising father. As a college going girl, a disaster at the hair-dresser's forced me into very short hair which I later kept out of convenience, even though, I hated it. I was nervous, and self conscious, and worried that I looked odd.

This time, I loved it. It set me free. I accepted curious and surprised glances in my direction with amusement. I could handle criticism, scorn and even, admiration. This time, I wanted this look and I found I could carry it off,  never mind who approves. I refused to let my husband's reaction unsettle me which, I must admit, is very unusual.

It has taken me 29 years to be confident.

P.S: To adapt what the Red Queen says in Through the Looking Glass- "Off with your hair!"

Resisting Motherhood

One of the first few things that anyone tells me is that I don't look 'old' enough to be a mother.

I usually do not respond but the remark always reminds me of family photographs and the old albums I loved burying my nose in as a child. I always think of those young frail looking women- women in the family, my mother, her friends, sisters- with babies in tow that cautiously appear on the blurred edges, distant background or the fuzzy middles of those black and white, and occasionally color, photographs.  As a child, inhaling the dust of those disintegrating photographs, I would imagine their stories, the everyday-ness of their lives, on what lay behind those half smiles, transfixed solemn stares or toothy laughter. I would look at their babies, making connections, figuring out resemblances between the child and man/woman, but also noting the look of exhaustion, bone thin weariness that the women wore like lipstick.

No matter how prepared, every woman is unprepared for motherhood. I could not imagine the state of perpetual wakefulness and broken sleep that has come to characterize my 'sleeping' hours ever since Sophie, my daughter.

Sophie, my daughter. It seems so strange to even say it. Sometimes I wonder at how God thought me fit to be a mother when I can barely make sense of my own life. Sometimes I wonder if all women thought the same thought but continued with growing children up, come what may. Perhaps others too, like me, have struggled with the definition of motherhood. We don't seem to experience the emotions we are supposed to. Worry, the urge to care, the desire to protect are natural to every parent. But this glorious paean to the Tiger-Warrior-Nurturer that resounds in every word spoken written read heard about the 'mother' is not me. 

Should I be worried about it? 

I have certainly struggled with my transition to motherhood. I have resented my changed status, become angry at what I am 'expected' to do, felt adamant when I did not perform 'motherly' things. These were feelings that did not occur only 'post-partum' as doctors fancifully put it. These are feelings that rise to the surface like the 'occasional' Hurricane Katrina.  I have certainly not been a role model mother. For the sake of my mental sanity, I left my baby behind at home with a woman I do not entirely trust, to go to work that is not entirely satisfactory.For the sake of my desire to get back to where I started from, I left my baby behind. I have felt terribly guilty, torn between wanting to stay at home with her and going mad when I did  so. 

I understood why those women in the photographs wore those barely clenched smiles. 

Today, as on other days, when I left for work, climbing into my car, and my baby wailed after me saying 'Amma , Amma', my heart tightened and a half suppressed thought lingered in my throat.

Perhaps it is not motherhood that is glorious.  It is a child's utter utter dependence on you, the mother, that makes motherhood. The knowledge that I am irreplaceable, so needed is a tremendous ego boost but it is also, I think, what compels women like me to figure out 'motherhood' as constructed by others down the ages.

Learning the Alphabet.

Two things that happened in the last week prompted this post.

One, a link to a blog that defiantly raises an "angry" fist  to the issues of the world from the all too sure perspective of literature and theory. Second, a seminar where a highly intelligent presentation collapsed into theoretical noise.

I remember my teacher at College, the nutty and cranky Dr Roy, sagely telling us what Adorno said to his students during a confrontation- theory is praxis. That was on one of those Royesque hot Delhi afternoon tutorial sessions spent in his dusty office up on the roof of St. Stephens. I still remember that moment. The creaky fan swirled hot air and dispersed Dr Roy's words into fragments of charged particles that settled around my soul, and opened up and justified to me, my world.

I loved, still love, the abstract words, weighed down by intended and interpreted meaning, that colonize the pages of texts tagged philosophy and theory. I dismissed my love for the more simple and direct. Charles Dickens, Lev Tolstoy, Steinbeck. But what nagged me, surrounded as I was, with friends who would sit  on candle light vigils, participate in marches, take trips to riot ridden Ahmedabad, raise their voices for the cause of those displaced by the Narmada project, my  boredom and disinterest in participating in a social cause. I felt guilty, terribly useless as a thinking individual, but I found the 'committed to a cause' bandwagon slightly neurotic with the penchant for speaking in the same and old language of 'activism'. 

Theory is praxis. It delighted me, it gave me conviction; it set my sense of wrong to right. I eased into myself. It was okay. I could read, think, write and yet feel I am somehow contributing. The blog I stumbled upon recently would have warmed the cockles of  my heart some years ago. It is full of subjectivities and issues of identities and representations and ideologies. The humanities departments in India, particularly the English Departments, constantly stumble into the fallacy of applying theory. They take historical, theoretical, philosophical responses to political , economic and social upheavals, and despite their own cautionary warning against universalization, promptly turn their meanings into categories, analysis into fixed concepts and critical language into jargon.

They reproduce without basis the historical consciousness of another age and era without scrutinizing the complexity and new realities of the present. Look at the way, for instance, Said's analysis of the Orientalist discourse is irresponsibly reproduced, cited, 'applied' to whatever might seem like a relationship of domination and colonization. Derrida is not understood, yet his trace, erasure and differance ceaselessly multiply across dissertations in India. Marx is sightlessly grasped and quoted to establish a reputation of sorts. It is 'fashionable' to use theory. The danger is when it is used as fixed unchanging thought.

In the pages and conversations of a persuasive old man, I found truth. Some years ago, I would have called truth debatable. Now I know that I can simply and confidently say truth according to me. It does not deny anyone else's version. It  identifies my authorship.

What did I find? I found that if I do not give my reader, my listener, the key to enter my world, if they cannot comprehend or fail to identify with what I am saying, theory can not ever be praxis. It is not for your audience to step up. It is up to you to step down. When I stepped down, I  realized I had to unlearn everything I thought I had learnt. When I stepped down, my learning was of no use. But I have started re-learning the alphabet.

Thomas

I remember, the day my brother died, the phrase that slipped away from the labyrinths of my mind.

Thomas liked reading and quoting from the Ecclesiates in The Bible. I think it represented for him the challenges of offering a singular definition to the Biblical narrative. I can still see him, a small child of seven, velvet headed, big eyed, asking the Valya Thirumeni (the Bishop of the Marthoma Church) academic, theoretical questions about the Bible. That day, it seemed as if God spoke through the much impressed wise old man, "Come, I shall make you a priest". It was not said in laughter or in sarcasm. My mother's ambitious heart, proud of her beautiful intelligent child, chilled. She could not imagine giving up her son to priesthood.

Thomas inherited my father's alert, analytical, evaluative intelligence. To keep up with his elder sister, Thoma voraciously read whatever I read. My father did not treat us as children as far as reading was concerned. He wanted me to read Nehru's Discovery of India at the age of ten and insisted I read Naipaul's bitter scathing satire on India in his India: A Wounded Civilization at the age of fourteen. Thomas was undettered by age or size. Thomas absorbed rapidly, quickly, and soon outpaced me in knowing this world, different realities, life.

Thomas never had it easy. Perhaps because he was singularly capable, bright, and good looking he invited envy and suffered the burden of expectations. 

Once, all primed to participate in an inter-school debate competition of much repute, Thomas went on stage to deliver his best. It started well. But something, as usual, went wrong. The clock missed a stroke, the cars stopped honking, traffic stopped mid-way. Thomas froze. He missed a beat. The moment was gone. The rigour of his speech faltered. Thomas knew there was not a chance in a lifetime that he would win. 

This happens to all of us. I remember I was once invited to judge an inter-school debate at a prominent school in Delhi. Many a  child sweated it out. Some spoke gloriously, completely at ease in the limelight. Some gulped for air, paused, gulped some more and gave up. This has happened to me. I remember I abandoned the speech half way and ran till I couldn't feel my legs.

Thomas blinked. He picked up where he had left off and finished to a resounding round of applause. He didn't win. But he won every debate or elocution contest he participated in after that. He refused to let the demons of failure taunt and worry him.

What worried us when he left for engineering college in Kerala was his acute ignorance of Malayalam and the Malayali mode and manner. We worried about how he would adapt to a milieu he was not too fond of. Thomas was very apprehensive himself. He cared not a whit for engineering. His heart was in history, politics, geography, literature, philosophy. But he climbed the train fuelled by middle-class ambitions to Kerala and went up the hill to study the mysteries of engineering science. If life gives you lemons, make lemonade out of it. I speak not as a proud sister but as an envious sibling. Thomas was very popular in college. He made many a friend in that strange world called Kerala. He used his charm, his wit, his ideas to organize his College's first ever tech fest. We, anti-socials to the core, wondered if he was our own.

I remember, the day my brother died, the phrase that slipped away from the labyrinths of my mind.

What a waste I said, as if I was speaking about a stranger. What a waste. The phrase kept slipping away from me in the midst of my screaming in busy busy Connought Place suddenly gone silent, suddenly abandoned.

"Everything is meaningless," says the Teacher, "completely meaningless!" Ecclesiastes 1:2.

On the Wall

How do we choose what to put up on our walls?

I visited a neighbor who has spent most of his adult life in Africa. Contrary to expectations (true to the cliche, I thought his walls would be roaring with leonine artifacts), there were no memorabilia of his long stint in that very colorful country. There was just one detail that was subject to much private mirth. An entire wall covered with a poster (perhaps) of abundant flora and fauna.

I would never put up such a ghastly piece but I know there might be several who would be awestruck by the enormity and magnitude of the poster, the striking green of its aura. A Wordsworthian 'spots of time' moment.

What would  I put up?

On a recent trip to Delhi, I went to my favorite place, the National Gallery of Modern Art. I bought off a number of prints of the work of painters I particularly like. But even as I put across the 500 rupee note to the woman across the counter, I had this sinking feeling that this is a great waste of money because Bijou would probably vehemently disagree about what I call beautiful.

Most things concerning decor Bijou and I agree on. But sometimes he has a streak of Gujarati mixed with middle class Mallu love for the kitschy beautiful. The love that stirs our fellow folk to build ostentatious wedding cake houses that stick out like sore thumbs in pristine geography. Like the time he brought home two huuge portraits of Christ on the Cross and the scene at Gethsemene in vibrant motion picture colors reminiscent of filmstar images pinned to the inside of an auto rickshaw. I recoiled in horror. Bijou sensed that something had gone wrong but his bad angel the male ego refused to stash those things away. So there they are, up on the walls of my beautiful house, sternly reminding me of God's presence (or the lack of it ) in our lives.

I'll admit, I'm not one for godly pictures on walls. But people do put up images of their gods on their walls as a reminder of their faith to the outside world. And to their erring conscience of their gods' presence. Some put things that they think they should put up, as an icon of "artistic" taste and sensibility. For instance, Da Vinci's Mona Lisa. Little did Da Vinci know that his experiment with the nature of paint, with using chemical formulations that might affect the longevity of his work, his study of human form, of the representations of the lightness and the darkness of being would be so 'ably' and effortlessly reproduced by the mechanics of modern technology. That it would also be preserved into everyday commonness with reproductions circulating around the globe, across time.

So what would I put up?

Would I put up Amrita Shergill's Three Sisters? If one was to imagine a context for the painting, I would imagine that they are being looked at by a prospective groom. They are also being looked at by us, intruders but gazers nevertheless. Perhaps the girl in light green is the intended bride but the sisters are not spared scrutiny either. Tense and in anticipation of moving out of the onlooker's frame, the irritable defiance of the sister in red sets the mood of the painting. Conscious of being looked at, the figures subtly question your authority to look at them. The sister in pink is resigned, looking away, not defeated, but resigned to the inevitability of scrutiny.

Or would I put up this up? Shergill's Woman Resting on Charpoy.

Women in India never lounge about. Only in the privacy of solitude do we allow ourselves leisure, make ourselves a cup of tea. Never do I see women relaxing in their balconies or leaning against the wall on the steps of their houses. To do so would perhaps be an inadvertent signal of availability. Frightened by our own sexuality, we do not relax in our bodies. We cover up in public. We wear the sari but primly.We refuse to enjoy the sun on our skin. We might open up in the darkness of clubs and other such spaces of artficial freedom but we teach our babies to wear a slip or a banyan (or an undershirt). Bijou and some friends were made uneasy by this picture. Perhaps because the woman in red with one leg slightly raised challenges us to keep looking. The painter's access to her privacy brings the langour of her physical ease to public representation. We may see it but find ourelves doing so surreptitiously.

Things that are not exactly easy on the eye, disturbing but beautiful, is a work of art. But to call something beautiful is the choice we make. Bijou's preference for kitsch over academic art is also perhaps an "artistic" choice. 

After all, academic art was made to embrace kitsch not too long ago. 

(Anjolie Ela Menon is representative- see http://www.india-today.com/itoday/20000918/mscape2.shtml and http://www.indiahabitat.org/vag/vag_mar2k1_artist5.htm)

The Conservatives

I am no feminist. It is true that I completed an  MPhil course on a lengthy and unwieldly look at feminist theory across the ages and spaces. It is true that I have always been an (loud but behind the doors) advocate for justice for women, a defender of the female faith, with righteous indignation bubbling inside me when I hear of educated women falling prey to patriarchal vices.

But always, always, with a weariness that goes with the well worn shoe.

I am no feminist. My mother whipped me into becoming one.

Despite the metaphor, I kid you not.

She refused to socialize me into gendered identities. She wouldn't give me Barbies and other such excessively femininely anatomized dolls. She encouraged me to play every physical sport on earth. She was tireless in her determination that I should at all costs have a career. I wasn't allowed the luxury of even contemplating the possibility of just being happily married in the future. She was vehement in her tirades against bondages that tie down women ideologically.

All this, of course, right through the ages of 0-18.

There were contradictions. I saw her helpless against some choices she thought she had made. I saw her floundering, many a time, against the compelling rationale and logic of tradition and male reason. She had only her inexplicable reasoning that can't be put into social language to depend upon.

Nevertheless, our generation, this generation of women who ride the waves of Twittering Faces and are surveyed by the masculine eye on the covers of bidding scam cover stories, be it spectrum or sweat equity,  are only The Conservatives.

I am the spokesperson for The Conservatives. I have thrown to the sea the monetary and emotional investment my parents made in my education, years of studious toil, academic excellence, for the sake of marital peace and concord. Unable to argue my case or defend my right or have the courage to take a stand, I am, back to where we started from. A prehistoric anomaly, date me beyond much before the Suffragettes.

Or, take the woman in the predicament cubicle adjacent to me. Lazy about her intellectual abilities, she is much more interested in her husband's career than her own. She has a mother who rose from Lab Assistant to Professor and Head of the Department, who managed home and work,  faced all odds (and ends) to walk a very thin line of frustration and achievement. Yet, my friend, a co conservative, happily gives up a lucrative bank job because she has a high income group husband and was all set to go to the US immediately after marriage.

Yet another co conservative gives up yet another lucrative government bank job on being persuaded by her husband (perhaps) of the lack of challenge in a sarkari naukri, of the inappropriateness of her long working hours for a happy married life. She too is the offspring of the working mother syndrome.

We may head public or private institutions. We are 'allowed' a prominent voice in the administration of public and external affairs. We are 'given' representation on workforces, task teams, educational institutions, scholarship processes, university admissions. But we make choices, willingly, that date back to beyond. Even our grandmothers have been more self righteous.

Complacent in our 'relative' freedom or the lack of war against the male bastion, we luxuriate in the space our fore-mothers made for us. The foray into the outside world our mothers fought for, we shrug aside and relax in air-conditioned cars bought by our husbands. A false sense of economic security lulls us. A good education, an MBA, has ' bought' us a coveted husband with whom we can speak in strange tongues and familiar dictions of interest. For all other purposes, we continue to display our husbands' underwear on the domestic washing lines of marital triumph.

Jane of no trade.

What is it about early mornings that stirs the desire in me to compose, create, make something beautiful with words?

As an eight year old I once woke up very early in the morning to come up with a poem by the time I finished breakfast:

When I wake up in the morning,

And see the bright sun shine,

In my heart I feel,

It's a good day for me.

But when I go to school,

I do many naughty things,

And then I feel

It's been a bad day for me!

I was praised at school, my mother choked on her milk when she heard it, and I was reasonably satisfied by the adulation. At around Christmas time, the same year, I produced another masterpiece:

O little pony

O little pony

Will you stop there?

For I have to go to Bethlehem

Baby Jesus is born there.

Clearly, it was a very productive year for me. There were other little masterpieces along the way but like every other unsung poet, I was eventually distracted by the mundane, the petty.

In the memory of very promising innings, my mother often asks me, why don't you write? Why are you not writing anymore? Your poems are so wonderful.

Well, mothers will always say that.

I have always been afraid of writing for someone else. I don't fear criticism but I fear a lack of approval or the absence of praise. When praise comes my way, I am suspicious, lifting the sheets to see if there is a monster under the bed. Self doubt or excessive self awareness is so natural to me that I have no idea what I really look like. When I catch a glimpse of myself in flashing car windows and tall shop windows, I am startled by the wild haired stranger looking at me.

I painstakingly hid my identity when I first started a blog. I abandoned it when I realized I couldn't do without readers as well. I would read other blogs and cringe at the non- attractiveness of my writing. I am the best fan of a reasonably good writer's writing. I am scathing with the criticism but I am most loyal as a reader.

This is my second attempt at keeping a blog. Ever since all my comfort zones have abandoned me, I realize I have nothing to lose.

Reader, I fear you not.