Washing Our Hands Off -- A Short Short

The child is giving final touches to a crossword, which has shaped into the form of a toy - a female body. The child is thinking on fifty-six down, the last word that has a hint - anagram “EITLYSXUA”. The child figures it out. Mother sees Father hooked up to the T.V. – a ball match. Father is taking no notice of the child’s report card, which she has given him. Father switches to the News channel as ads come up. Mother tells Father that they are responsible for the child’s conduct today. The child had e-mailed a photograph to one of the child’s girl classmates. The photograph was of a M country's girl taking off pants from a near naked Z country's soldier’s body. That girl classmate had found it disgusting. “The language it contained,” mother says, “it was so sadistic.” Father says, “This is a common problem. Parents cannot force their children not to use the Internet and see pictures, and then mail it to someone they found interesting. They have every freedom to do it. It is the society, which has given it to them. Parents just have to follow the norms, give them their due. One cannot always supervise.” After a pause, he adds in a demonstratively consoling voice, “I will talk to him.”

Mother fumes at Father. The child resolves the anagram and puts the “Y” of “SEXUALITY”. The doll toy starts to talk and pleads in a very seductive voice. The child looks on with wide open eyes and with an expectant half-fulfilled smile playing on his lips. The doll says, “I am a feminist. I want to be like a man. Rearrange the acrosses and the downs. You genetician, do it for me”. Mother is calling to the child, “Dear, come here, papa wants to talk”. The child speaks to the doll, “Sweetie, the rules of the game made me do this. You asked for it. Mother is calling, if only parents could stop parenting. I will see what I can do. You chose this and I am not responsible.”

The child makes his way through the rooms into the drawing room. Father is listening attentively to the latest sound byte. The president is in the middle of a speech, “…the death of Harry is unfortunate. But he ought to have to have read the instructions. This is a time of deregulation. The State needs investments and consumers are free to choose. He should not have taken more than six pills. We are not washing our hands of this episode. It’s just that we want to liberate our citizens…”

Long Jottings

Having the blog dead for a long time, I thought of thinking not too much and writing the largely un-happening things in short paragraphs.

We went to the Fourth of July celebrations. Families, Music and Fireworks. Heard and actually made sense of the music of the band there – thanks to a former university music student amongst us. She told us that both she and her husband now teach at an international school in Mussoorie. With Susa’s composition playing in the background, all of us ended up talking about the inevitable mixed feelings of loving and hating certain things as one lived in another world after having lived for so long in one. And some of those likes and dislikes just stick to you. Glued memories make dreamy eyes and fascinating conversation. Pointing to the instruments played around by the band, she explained to us - the newly arrived Indian folks, with awesome patience the difference between a bassoon and trombone.

The weather in Mid West (in end-summer now I guess) is just about perfect. One could sometimes do with a little more of the breeze perhaps. Thursday night movies at the mall and the walk back home are pleasant. Thursday nights are the party nights.

I recently read a colleague’s auto-ethnography. The story there went like two South-Asian straight men apparently when they were returning from the mall walking; a couple of drunken college kids yelled at them as being “Fags”. When they later went to a restaurant that same night, and were waiting in line to order food, another incident occurred which made the incident a story for reflection, a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence. A boy and a girl couple came and were looking at another boy-boy pair there with a kind of look in their eyes. The boy-boy pair just reacted, “We are not gays.” The whole Heteronormativity thing plays out in interesting ways – eyes tell tales too. One of the South-Asian boys who witnessed it and then wrote the auto-ethnography also mentioned, “We could not afford a car and were labeled. The incident, which followed later made us think we could not blame it completely on postcolonial and race etc stereotypes. Cultural codes take a different turn and remain ambivalent too.”

A resilient fetish of the society with the “norm”. Auto-ethnography continues to be regarded by some as navel-gazing, similar to blogs. Coming to think of what stopped me from blogging for such a long time, a couple of thoughts had perhaps contributed to the hesitancy – some views that blogging is just navel-gazing, selfish self-sensitivity.

Some other quite striking incidents related to me by my friends could also have played the role.

A would be father-in-law dismissed his would be son-in-law – a guy his daughter loved, on the grounds that because he blogged, he was selfish and would be preoccupied with himself to take care of his daughter.

My writer friend told me that she quit blogging because she was unable to write any good five pages of a fictional story while she was writing blogs. She introduced me to blogging when apparently she enjoyed it and now she has not only stopped blogging but finished a novel as well. I can’t blog much anymore and instead of writing fiction, I am still investigating the tragic loss of my novel of my pre-blogging days. Obviously these are stray incidents and one could argue against the presumed interpretations drawn from these perhaps more idiosyncratic mentioned cases.

To end these jottings, I recently watched some fantastic films belonging to what could perhaps be called post-Third-World Cinema (I hope I did not use an extra hyphen). Relatively contemporary ones included Sissako’s “Bamako”, which made me remember Spivak’s essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?”. Even if they speak, are they heard? Can their statements/expressions be comprehended? From the position of the subaltern, the incomprehension in the face of people who are even willing to listen to them, perhaps makes even wanting to express difficult. Suicides are expressions too.