Happy October!
The pandemic shows no signs of leaving our lives any time soon, and I’d just like to urge everyone reading this to continue practicing the safety precautions that have been outlined for us globally. It has the potential to be terrifying and isolating, but it’s the need of the hour. We’ll all be able to go back to life as we know (knew?) it one day, but till then maybe the best we can do is continue to be alone, together.
This is maybe the first issue of mush with an overtly thematic approach. Issue 5 is centred around the format of a letter. The idea of pouring your thoughts towards someone or something in particular into a written body of work feels like an allowance for not only clarity in communication, but also the messiness and vulnerability that you have to navigate to be able to do so. Letter’s can be rants, tributes, declarations, and so much more.
One last thing, mush strives to publish narratives that are meant to be sat with and absorbed over time. So slow down and take as much time as you need, we’re not going anywhere, we promise.
x
Veer Misra (@v.eird)
Dear Mama, by Hansika Jethnani
Dear Mama,
I learned all the best and worst things about me from you. I learned how hope is a four-letter word far more useful than love. I learned how silence can slice words like knives, yet sometimes it’s words that do the slicing instead. I learned that anger stirs inside us from generations, a cyclone delayed. I learned that to scream and slap was all you knew, a battered hand speaking for a battered heart. I am trying to learn that it should not be all I know too. I learned that strength comes from the wallowing we are so afraid to do. I learned that pain is not a noun, but a verb demanding to be felt. I learned to feel it because of you. I learned that sometimes you marry not for love but for your parents. I believed that with all my kisses until I stopped kissing to find the perfect partner for you.
Remember when we strolled through the streets of Glasgow on a weekend that happened to be Glasgow Pride? You squirmed at the large crowd of queer people gathering unashamedly with their pride flags, queer music and colourful clothing. You said “they’re crazy!” and I said, “Mama, you can’t say that!” in a tone that established I really disagreed with you but was too afraid to completely call you out. I left it at that. I didn’t say why you couldn’t say that. I didn’t say anything else.
That was the summer I was starting to navigate my sexuality. I kind of knew. I told my close queer friends, I think I’m bisexual just two weeks before we were in Glasgow but I didn’t go beyond that thought. For so many years, I had the words “I can’t be gay” ringing in my head while I let my lips twirl around men, trying to find a man you’d like. On every date all I could think was, would you accept him? I didn’t realise how much I was trying to please you until I started going to therapy. Therapy was where my childhood trauma started to unfold. The seams on my skin waiting to be torn open by my therapist’s questions.
You said to me once, “you’re so beautiful! How can you be gay?” I have never really been able to shake off the hurt that sentence holds. As if my entire childhood of hearing the word gay as a synonym for disgusting at school was thrown across my face as a reminder from you. As if my queerness was dirty, an ugly we were all taught to loathe and scrub of our skin in silence, scraping off its every tinge. When did gay become a synonym for ugly? When did gay become a synonym for repulsive? I don’t know. What I do know is that these are the words you thought of, even as you attempted to accept me. You were so afraid of what the world thought of me, because you thought exactly like the world – I am an abomination you wished away instead.
After I told you I’m a lesbian, you were so frightened I’d fall in love with my girlfriend and want to live with her, that you put an omen out in the universe stopping that from happening. I understood so much of you while I spoke about you to my therapist. I remembered how I watched you draw illusions in your mind as a child. But I didn’t understand till then, that they were exactly that – illusions. Illusions sung like mantras you chanted and believed so dearly. An altered reality you conveniently created like an abstract painting given multiple meanings by every other viewer. Except, in this case, you were the only one inventing the story. You loved to trick yourself and others, and I didn’t know how well you did it until I unwrapped all the loaded presents I was carrying. Gifts you gave because it was the only love language you knew. You were too burdened in fury to ever feel the magic of a hug, but I fell in love and learned wrapped arms are drenched in love far more than wrapping paper could ever be.
I don’t know how much I can blame you. You keep saying you did the best that you could how you knew to, and I believe that. I believe that because I know women were raised to tolerate all kinds of sirens and ringing bells. You were already too much of a lioness for some. In our household Log kya kahenge? was given more importance than ones own tongue, ones own breath as if that held the key to my being. I know you never had it easy. I tried to be empathetic – some days it was difficult, because the same sirens and ringing bells are on a loop in my head and I don’t know how to stop the noise. I do not want to tolerate. We have both suffered enough because of it. I want to break this vicious cycle, I want to have an argument with my partner that doesn’t end with me praying I don’t end up like you. I don’t want to scream like I am holding onto the entire worlds rage. Nobody should have a burden like that placed upon them. Burdens are packed to offload. I know you weren’t taught that, but I’m slowly learning.
I hope one day you are as free as I am trying to be while I write this to you Mama.
I hope one day you find peace in your being as you climb out of your own traumas.
I hope one day we will be able to meet half way.
Yours truly and always,
Hansika
A Love/Hate Letter to Love by Mayank Bhardwaj
Dear love,
I don’t know where to send this letter because I don’t know where you are. There is no address to you; there is no one particular place where you can be found. Nor there is anyone I can get behind and whisper asking about a corner where you’ll be waiting for someone like me. I sometimes wonder that after all that I’ve seen, the streets, the lights, the people, the tears and the empty rooms, if you are there in the form that people embody you to be or are you just somewhere near this bed where I’m writing this, hidden in plain sight.
When I was little, I hated that fact that you were the one that kept my mom and dad together. I use the word together with a stone on my conscience because the kind of love that kept them bonded to each other, was based on lies. I really hoped that there would be a better word to better define those bittersweet moments of togetherness they shared but I couldn’t find any other word that won’t make my heart crack a little. I gave it your name, Love. I wanted to think you were the thing that held them both by their hands when my head knew everything I was telling myself was just to make myself feel you a little. I started losing faith in you early on, but faith is a funny word in itself. If they say faith holds the world together, would you be the end of my world?
When I saw people around me holding hands as if they fit perfectly within each other, I used to wonder if I’d ever find someone who could find their way into the skin I hold. That someone was defined to me in a haze. They had long hair, green hazel eyes, and somehow the kind of jewellery that fascinated me. That was when I started thinking that the ways in which you held the world together wasn’t made for me. At the time, my teenage brain comprehended the world to be of two types of people: where each one would find another from the opposite side and everything would rush into place. I somehow kept my faith alive, but when someone from the opposite side finally held my hand and told me it would be okay, I really wanted to believe her. I wanted to believe that this was you behind her hair and it was you behind the sweet nothings I tried to feel through my bones. Love, you failed me again.
Who would have thought that the idea everyone describes as something transcendental and beyond the grasps of words could someone me feel so lost? I still believed everyone who told me great things about you. It was hard when all I can think of is being the one who feels different towards you. You were different for me and I hated you for it. I wanted to experience you through the ones that looked like me, smelled like me and had everything that I did. Being this way, you forced me to dive into this world head first without warning. You let me swim in my thoughts for days with my head underwater give my heart away to the wrong people over and over. Is this the way you wanted me to find you? Do you wish to tell me the truth but you just don’t want to be the one to say it? I have so many questions I wish I could whisper to you when I sit under trees writing about you, thinking about you and finding you in every other face I encounter. Faces change, the sun changes too and I wonder if my feelings for you will ever change.
If I’m being honest with you, these wonderings I have were answered when that one person came closer to me behind that taxi we took from the mall to his home. Somehow, I never saw him again? Answers also creeped in when another used to get out in his balcony in cold February winds just to answer my calls because he didn’t want his roommate to know that we both share the same feelings of confusion towards you. There was also the one who would not let me hold him while we were with other people not because he didn’t want to tell everyone about his complications with you, but because he had complications about himself, with himself. There is also another who is texting me every three days asking me how everything will change once I meet him. I really do believe everything will change once time goes by. It will also change the eyes I see you through. It will. How much do I have to fear in order to have more than a glimpse of you? Every time I lock eyes with someone hoping that you’re behind that sweater or behind the cotton in his gloves, you pull me out of my own illusion. I have started to enjoy the feeling of being in it and when I’m pulled away, there is nothing but fear and heartache. I hope there is more to you than that. I am writing this with maybe just a little bit of resentment for you, but also with hope. Hope is scary, but for you I’ll continue keeping it dangerously close to my heart.
I still want you. I still feel that every word I hear about you is true. I still feel that everything will fall into place and when it does, I’ll write you another letter. You made me change my ideas about the world, about the people that walk this world and about everything that makes it a bitter scape for everyone to walk on. You change every few years because the more I look inside, the more I discover you. The more time tells me, the more knowledge I gain and the more time goes by, the more it takes hope with it too. I have reached out so many times now but you still haven’t answered. After everything you put people through, why do we keep searching for you? Why does every conversation that starts with you ends in tears and why does every conversation that starts with tears ends in your arms?
Giving up on you might be the easiest thing one could do. The ones who are about to give up on everything you have to offer, send them some reassurance will you? As for the ones that are still searching for you, tell them to keep hope. It’s the next best thing they will have till they find you.
Hoping you come with more answers than questions.
With the undefined feeling I call love,
Mayank
Dr not Mrs by Megha
1) “My living laughing love” (Anne Hathaway, p. 30)
When I was ten years old, my Ammoomma and I were at a Landmark bookstore in Chennai. Every Chennai trip of mine involved a repeating ritual of these ‘outings’ as Appooppa called them. The bookshop was the non-negotiable stop– the one for which I tolerated the clothes shops, the ‘knick-knack’ shops, and the occasional birthday-present-jewellery shop. That summer, Ammoo bought me the first six books in The Princess Diaries series. She didn’t check what the content was, she didn’t worry about what I may or may not be exposed to, I suspect she saw ‘Princess’ in the title, a cute illustration on the front, knew my reading was well up to the task, and bought the books. Which is how I found out what sex might be (my initial hypothesis from the somewhat subtle implications of the writing was, ‘if a girl and a boy see each other naked, she’ll get pregnant.’ This made me nervous).
Ammoo was an absolute force of nature. The kind that reminds you that softness is strength– like the quiet changing of tides, or how phototropic plants move.
2) “I learnt
the Stations of Bereavement,” (Mrs Lazarus, p. 49)She passed away this May, at 86, in her small Chennai flat. Not in her own bed actually, but in the slightly larger bed that Appoo preferred (they didn’t always share a bed because he refused to sleep without the air-conditioner on and she was asthmatic). I was there with her. I got there four days before it happened and stayed till three days after. Ma couldn’t make it to Chennai from Mumbai because of lockdown restrictions at the time, despite trying for weeks. I’m an only child, Ma is an only child, Ammoo has one sibling who hasn’t travelled in years, none of our relatives in Chennai came over. It was a surreal experience. Humans aren’t built to grieve alone, I don’t think. So I didn’t. I just went straight into ops mode and did all the logistic-ing and sorting and packing and ‘informing’ and obituary-writing that needed to be done.
It’s been just over four months since then.
I know grief comes in waves. And like a macro-bit of clockwork, this one keeps coming.
It feels different from when Appoo passed. That was seven years ago now, I was already a baby adult and had a good chunk of responsibility in his home care and various ambulances and hospitals, but we got to process that together.
This newer grief began a week before Ammoo actually passed when she first told us she wasn’t doing so well, and the three of us were in three different cities. Hearing that the doctor had come and said, “Her pulse is weak,” sent me into a spiral one Thursday morning, exactly a week before it happened. It didn’t take long that day for it to come out in my journal entries that she was (is?) my favourite person in the world. Not just because of the relationship we shared, but also because of who she was.
3) “We met as students... BA. MA. PhD.” (Mrs Faust, p. 23)
Ammoomma was, by most definitions, a total badass. She came from a family of freedom fighters, she’d seen her parents be imprisoned, taken care of her sister during this time, travelled outside her village for high school and college, decided she wanted to study literature, got her ‘wedding money’ from her own grandmother to pay for her Masters, where she was the only woman on the course. She then moved to Tirupati to do her PhD after that (so she could teach at the college while writing her thesis) and met Appooppa, also a young teacher working towards his PhD, but in history. They were from different castes, different states, and different backgrounds. She was slightly older than him. They got married anyway. They spent their academic careers together– from earning their PhDs (she got hers first), spending a few years in Somalia on government deputation, raising their daughter, retiring as their respective Heads of Department, and then moving to a small flat in Chennai, continuing to stay engaged with their academic communities, and passing as much of this on to their only grandchild as they could.
4) “The midnight hour, the chattering stars...” (Queen Herod, p. 9)
For as long as I can remember, Ammoo and I have stayed up later than Appoo. We were the two who would be awake chatting. So much of what I know of the world comes from her– my Hindu grandmother who gifted me an Old Testament when I was a teenager. And so, I grew up, never having read ‘the canon’ of anything (two degrees later, I still haven’t) but having absorbed as much as possible from her.
Maybe more importantly though, through her, I developed an appreciation that ‘good literature’ isn’t the only way to enjoy the world. She consumed newspaper cartoons, South Indian serials, Khushwant Singh joke books, celebrity magazines, Agatha Christie, and Dan Brown with equal enthusiasm. Particularly for someone who grew up and grew old before the internet was commonplace, the breadth of her knowledge across subjects, and the depth of it, to almost always include trivia or some obscure detail, was astounding. We used to have a family joke that if she went on Kaun Banega Crorepati, we’d all be rich. Her father never policed what she read or knew of the world, and she never policed me.
5) “London Town, made for a girl and her double...” (The Kray Sisters, p. 63)
When I went to college in the UK, we stayed closed, we spoke a few times a week on the phone– I’d tell her what I was reading about, and she’d tell me what controversial tweet Shashi Tharoor had just posted (which of course she read about in the newspaper). She had been to London once in the 90s, but like me, and so many of us, had such a vivid imagination of it from all her reading.
In my first year of college, I visited a friend of Appoo and Ammoo’s in Kent, a retired historian called Prof. Antony Copley. I had visited him once with Ma on a previous trip to the UK. He was seriously unwell and we were discussing how best to donate his large collection of books on Indian history to the Sri Venkateswara University library in Tirupati. I still regret not having been able to sort that out for him. When I left, he gave me a copy of one of his books, ‘A Spiritual Bloomsbury: Hinduism and Homosexuality in the Lives and Writings of Edward Carpenter, E.M. Forster, and Christopher Isherwood’ (Lexington, 2006). Ma didn’t approve of this when I told her. Prof. Copley had always been described as ‘a bachelor’ within the family when I was younger. I later found out that he had been publishing on sexual morality since the 80s, and had a sodomy charge against him from the late 50s. I never discussed this with Ammoo, but it seems impossible that she wouldn’t have known what her academic friends were writing about. They were friends despite this. I don’t want to do an ‘oh she had a gay friend and that makes everything okay’ thing, but I felt more optimistic about eventually sharing my life with her, uncensored.
6) “I felt like this: Tongue of stone.” (The Devil’s Wife, p. 42)
When I moved back to Bangalore after my Masters a few years ago is when I began coming out for real (a never-ending process, of course). The years of fights with Ma over illicit boyfriends (there had been no girlfriends yet and thinking beyond the gender binary was not something my teenage self did, unfortunately), had never spilt over to Ammoo. Ma is a very private person, so she largely kept these things to herself. So, Ammoo hadn’t known about the boys in school, about the Scottish partner through and post-university, let alone knowing that I’m bisexual and polyamorous. Ma still doesn’t know this latter bit.
I so often thought about coming out to Ammoo. I actually thought I’d come out to Ammoo first. I felt like she would get it. (We had always been the pair, the more similar minds and personalities, her and me vs. Ma and Appoo, who were the ‘larger’, louder, more strong-willed pair.) Knowing about her deep affection for Prof. Copley contributed towards this. She always asked about him so sweetly, asked me if I could visit him more often than I did.
Instead, I visited Edinburgh every chance I got. In 2015, I watched Carol Ann Duffy performing at the Edinburgh Book Festival. I went up to her afterwards (I never do this, I truly hate doing it) and asked for an autograph on a fresh copy of The World’s Wife, told her my grandmother in India was a professor and huge fan and got her to sign, “Dear Radhamani...”
A couple of years after I moved back, Ammoo was asked to speak at a conference at her old university. A keynote address, at the age of 85. She threw herself into it, decided to write about Carol Ann Duffy and The World’s Wife. In Ammoo’s own words (from the paper delivered which I typed out later for the conference publication), Carol Ann Duffy didn’t succeed Ted Hughes as the British Poet Laureate because,
“Tony Blair, the then Prime Minister of Britain had reservations as he was afraid of severe repercussions if she was appointed, the bitter comments by the spiteful British tabloids, in particular, all because of her unconventional attitudes towards personal morality. She was a self-acknowledged lesbian and continues to be so. She has scant regard for conventional morals, insisted on by religion or society.”
Transcribing these words of hers, from her handwriting onto my screen in 2019, was an extra push to come out. Ammoo wasn’t just incredibly open-minded and friends with Prof. Copley, she also didn’t mind Carol Ann Duffy’s “scant regard” for convention. I should tell her, right?
But I didn’t.
7) “And this is my lover, I said” (Mrs Tiresias, p. 17)
For a month in 2019, Ammoo lived with me in Bangalore. That month, I got the tattoo I’d been intending to get for years. It’s two lines from a poem Valliappooppa (Ammoo’s father) wrote, in Ammoo’s handwriting. I’d asked her to write it down for me (and translate it because I don’t read Malayalam) many times and she finally sent it to me in Malayalam and English on my birthday in 2018. She didn’t know what I intended to do with it and I was nervous about how she’d react, but when I came home, she loved it. She wasn’t ever entirely convinced that it was permanent, no matter how many times I said it was, but she loved it. For me, I don’t just love what it means, it also feels like a bit of home and legacy.
Otherwise, my life didn’t stop that month, it just meant I had to be mindful of being home before she slept (but we know she’s a late sleeper!) or telling her in advance that I’d be out. It also meant that my girlfriend, A, stayed over at mine more than usual. Which also meant that she and Ammoo met. Not once, but on a few occasions. Ammoo has sat at the dining table with us while we have dinner. She’s sat with us as we have breakfast before work.
There was one day, we were leaving the house and went to say bye to Ammoo, and Ammoo kissed A’s forehead. I am still filled with a warmth every time I think of it.
Now that warmth is tinged with the cool edges of a regret though.
I still didn’t tell her. She thought A was ‘just a friend’ who was staying over because our homes and offices weren’t too far apart so it was convenient. A is the only partner of mine that Ammoo has ever met. I’m grateful and I’m torn.
8) “It was a place where language stopped,
a black full stop, a black hole…” (Eurydice, p. 58)Those last few days this year, I sat with Ammoo in bed, holding her hand while she tossed and turned in her sleep. I still didn’t say anything. Her tests were all looking largely okay, we thought she’d get better. I thought I would get to tell her. I didn’t want to say it, whispered, under my breath, when I didn’t know how much she was hearing or processing, because that would have felt even more final. So I didn’t tell her.
Now, I’m left with signs that give me hope for what could have been and her handwriting tattooed onto my arm.
9) “Samaradi Thrishnakal Aakavey Neengi/
Samathayum Shanthiyum Kshemavum”(Wiping off the tendency to promote wars/
establishing equality, peace and prosperity)
*Section headings 1-8 are excerpts from poems in The World’s Wife collection by Carol Ann Duffy, Picador, 2000; Section 9’s heading is an excerpt from the poem Upasana (aka. Akhilanda Mandalam) by Pandalam K. P., translated by Dr M. Radhamani
Before you leave, we just wanted to mention that a platform like mush thrives simply on more and more people reading queer stories. If you like what you just read, it would be wonderful if you could share this newsletter with your friends, families, lovers, pets as well as any sociable gremlins that you might come across.
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I love this so much