Posts tagged "teenager"

Excavation

Where I dig into my archives and repost stuff I like. This one's from April 2005.

Wherever I go, I am not allowed to forget – how perfectly crisp and displaced my unaccented English is. If there is an accent it is not one you can pin down. To my countrymen it betrays my independent school upbringing, a way of life, perhaps even my inclination towards the ways of the “West”. To all others it is a curious melting pot of diverse manners of speaking, testament to the absorption of diffuse cultures, if we are even able to say clearly what “culture” is, if we even had any control over these points of contact.

In a backpacker’s lodge in Australia one year, the football-mad nationalities gathered around the TV to watch the emotional Manchester United-Liverpool showdown, while the Americans sat in a corner unsure of what to watch out for on the telly. I realized, but not without some shock, that in the event I would ever watch my national team play (and so they did – at the Tiger Cup the next year, to surprise victory), the jersey I would be wearing would be the one on-screen. Red, too.

I said to a visitor once: the best thing about living in this place is the First World living at Second World prices. Everything else is a sort of win some, lose much situation. Our methodology in learning and teaching the Chinese language perhaps betrays far more than we are willing to let it – those characters, if we ever learn them at all, have become meaningless, we learn the broad strokes but not the fine print, we repeat to perfection the art of imitating a model essay under duress by our tuition teachers; those words are hieroglyphics at best, and the best that many of us can do is to attempt to create meaning from these hieroglyphs.

I am never allowed to forget my accent. In English, it is an accent which points not to precise geographic locations, but to imprecise states of mind and imagined affiliations. In the mother tongue, it is the lack of a passable accent that is grating to even my ears. Both have to do with displacement and unsettlement, and neither of them are exactly pleasant.

The district does not sleep tonight. Sonagachi is just waking up, but the streets are already lined with last night’s vomit, uncleared, and the air still reeks of the liquor from every night before for the past years, uncleared. Today’s girls have taken the place of yesterday’s, though, who have either moved on to be the mummy (the lucky ones), or given way to one venereal disease and unwanted childbirth too many.

It is easy to rage when reading about it miles away from the scene – the exploitation! The misery! The violence against women and children! The illegality of human trafficking!

Being here changes all that. The rage is still present but tempered with resignation; even understanding. Some of the girls look as young as 12 – mostly, they are; if not, then they are malnourished and hence look many years younger than their actual age. Most of them are not here by choice. The only people who get to choose are those who had “choice” taken from them in the first place: the ones who, now hundreds of miles away from their homes (in Bangladesh, Nepal, rural parts of India whose village names they never knew, cannot remember, or can never return to again from shame) – these people can choose to stay in, or ship out into the big cities of West Bengal and beyond, where they have no one, whose language they do not even natively speak.

Sonagachi is Kolkata’s red light district – it also happens to be Asia’s largest. Conservative estimates put the number of sex workers in this district alone to be at least 40 000. This number means nothing until you take a walk through it: girls as far as your eyes can see. Some of them reek of alcohol and substances; all of them look resigned.

It wasn’t the fist-clenching, heart-pumping moment I had expected.

Instead, I felt the – what shall I call it – sadness – permeate my body and grip my soul, as my eyes fell to meet their vacuous ones, woman to woman.

It was the moment I had been waiting for all my life, to invoke that trite turn of phrase.

I’d felt her inch closer to me, her arms against mine, as we tried to pretend to be interested in watching the movie, my palm against hers. We lasted about eight minutes. By the ninth, we were kissing breathlessly, bodies against each others’. She was my first as I was hers – it felt nothing like kissing the many boys we’d each had. I remember with precision all which I was thinking as I stepped into her darkened flat: how is it possible that I have only known this person’s last name for a week, and yet feel this.. impossibly close? After. I was lying stomach down, fiddling with my mobile to pretend to have something to do other than swoon.

“When you grow up,” she said. “You’re going to be really scary – impossibly brilliant and sexy. And I’m going to have to try so hard not to want you.”

I was grasping at straws vacillating between my rising enchantment and the crushing despair: that in two hours she had accomplished what it took my men months to, if ever at all – wrap me around like that. And she knew it.

I sat at the edge of the bed, as I would continue to for weeks after, watching her as the orange light fell upon her face, as I would for months after. Her hand in mine for never more than an hour each time. I remember thinking, my God, she’s so goddamn beautiful.

It has been a number of years, but I’m not sure I’m done growing up, or if I’ve even begun to.

Release

Where I dig into my archives and repost stuff I like. This one's from 2005.

like the foreign worker who, having spent six days of every week, fifty one weeks of every year, building for a country that is not his, listening to languages that are not his, but whose greatest pleasure comes from talking every Sunday in his native tongue for hours to any relative and friend in Dhaka who will listen, to release his repressed Bengali at a dollar a minute, no matter the cost, who,

like the repressed lesbian kissing her first girl after a string of boyfriends, and is perfunctorily surprised to find she likes it much more, because girls don’t merely stick it in and slop around but take their time with her, and she knows now, from a kiss alone, that irrevocably, and uncontrollably, she has to be, the mystery ends here, no matter the cost, who,

like the seven year old in his first week of school, is afraid of teachers, people he calls monsters, as they are very big and scary and always demand to know if his shoes are white, if his nails are clean, if he’s brought his consent form, like it matters at all, and he finally manages the courage to raise his hand, to ask in a meek voice, if he can go to the toilet, there where he swears to never again take Ryan on in the challenge of drinking three cans of Coke at a go, no matter the cost, who,

like the wage slave on her night out after years in the office, is relieved to find the bar to be the same as when she last left it, in 2001, only that the prices of the drinks have risen proportionately to her income, so has the number of suitors (men and women) taken on an inverse relationship to it, and she realizes she is now 28, though last she checked it was 2001, and once in 2003, so after a few rounds of whisky she gets groovy, at the time of the night where whisky is now called ‘happy juice’, determined to have fun for a change, no matter the cost, who,

like me, is relieved to find release, release from the spell of old, from the bright lights and other excesses, from the daisy chain of ex lovers of ex lovers who are now each other’s new lovers, from the endless chain that swears they love you, truly, really, but not really at all, but now finds greatest pleasure in holding the hand of the one I said I loved yesterday, though I already meant it everyday before yesterday, in sitting here writing, as she sits here sketching, admiring her with the silliness of the first flush of love on my face, knowing that I am, in far too many ways, as a woman reborn, in a motion picture where I provide the words and she the pictures, set to the soundtrack that is ours, and ours alone, and I leave this dangling without a full stop because that’s just the way it is, no matter the cost

Two Weeks

Some weird poetry from 2003, when I was a wee child.

two weeks before

and the morning after

all that mattered was not what really happened

where it brings us now, or what a gamble

we'd just taken.

It was you planting your signature hasty goodbye

sweetie on my cheeks in the elevator just before

the doors opened to my morning; and I would

step out to the tune of one bewitched.

It was you seeking out my lips under those

sheets, in the dizzy assurance of one who never

gave much thought to all that

she said; about as clueless as I was,

But at least I never pretended to know any better, and

even came out to the truth that morning brought.

two weeks later

and a headache after

all that matters is not what games we played

what games played us, or which part of you

I saw through.

It is coarseness lingering over still fresh wounds

threatening to persist in the spite of me dumping

them in pungent saline thinking it might remove

each vestige of my guilt.

It is your image cruising over my nightscape

explaining, in the manner I knew best, how

once you were done with me these would be

all you'd leave me with.

I ought to have listened, somewhere in the interim

of that morning and this night, but tried too hard

at mending the chasm between my yes and your no.

two weeks later

and a heartache after

who can say for sure what games we played?

all that matters is not the end heralding your

beginning, but the beginning receiving my end.

It will be me seeking a closure you were too selfish to grant,

calming a present lover's fears, being the pawn

in this game of which I was co-creator;

taking danger by its horns yet scarcely daring

to hazard a breath, for it may conjure your illusion.

two weeks later, and a mourning after

it will be me claiming your scalp, not that

I care much for victory or vague triumph: only

in hastening the signature dawn of a second morning.