Persis Taraporevala

Where the mind is without fear; and so is the heart.

[persis]

I missed two days of #100daysofPhd because my boo finished his masters this week and exhibited his beautiful work. #day4 and #day5 are days of gratitude for the opportunities we’ve had since we moved to the UK and the hope that we continue to find our pockets of joy! Phd wise, empirical chapter uno is coming to a close. It feels completely organised and simultaneously unwieldy at the same time. How??? Why??? Ps: so very proud of this creature who made all these beauties and so many more despite losing access to his studio during covid. <3

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#100DaysOfPhD challenge #day3: I’ve been ‘working’ most weekends for the last month, which is me mindlessly staring at my screen assuring myself that *This* does indeed amount to productivity. Decided perhaps to let go of the farce for this Sunday. I ran, baked, made a peanut and chicken curry... saw someone from Pune praise Candance Owens as a feisty girl boss and almost wrote a long tirade on how we can see her as a girl boss but as one who upholds both patriarchy and racism. Decided not to. Breathe. I’ll do that another day when I don’t feel so charged about it. It’s been a good day.

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#Day2 of #100daysofPhd challenge. I was going to put up a picture of me post a short run, under a tree and very zen in the morning but I think Owen’s character in Central Park captures my Virgo moon need for order that the pandemic has rattled. Today has been a day of arranging my data.

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Starting #100DaysofPhD challenge. Phd are notoriously lonely, however the pandemic seems to make the loneliness far more palpable and it’s hitting my writing motivation. so starting with the 100 day challenge! Day #1 today Tia made aadrak chai (successfully) for the first time in the UK! I did some yoga and analyzed data and wrote about 270 words. More tomorrow!

Also Joy Crookes ‘Feet don’t fail me now’ has been the soundtrack for the day.

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Freedom is for the elites

India has been under lock down for over 50 days and the country has millions of internal migrants who are daily wage labourers stuck in alien cities, with no income, homeless and with limited to no access to public funds.

While trains have just been started, some regions had discussions with industry and decided that it would be risky to the economy to let people go home and stopped trains. Governments decided that people in precarious positions, with no access to power, who were hungry and unemployed did not have the right to go to their home towns and more importantly, did not have the right to choose for themselves what plan of action they would prefer.

Free will is only for the elites apparently.

This piece is messy and so am I. This piece is angry and so am I.

Words fail me as we fail people. Over and over again. We fail people. We are holding people hostage in these cities and not letting them travel home.

We are holding them hostage.

because freedom is only for the elites.

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shared homes

with equal fervour, my French flatmate offers me baguette and I offer her boiled peanuts. Our snack of choice. we agree on beer and music. life is good.

[persis]

‘God’s Little Soldier’

Last year I lost one of my favourite novelists to #MeToo. Let me rephrase that, last year the #MeToo movement in India helped me understand that the man I saw as a political and moral compass in my country had (allegedly) been a sexual predator this whole time. Many have raised issues about his recent rehabilitation into the literary world in India and those questions resonate with me, but having read his interview today there was something more specific that struck me - God and goodness. 

Kiran Nagarkar, as a novelist and a writer, was acidic and bitter. sometimes with humour. sometimes with a tinge of melancholy. When he spoke of himself, he often seemed convinced of his own defeat and smallness within larger systems. He also seemed to be, at the very least, agnostic and perhaps even an atheist. and today that man is gone. Today, when I read his words he is a man who is seeped in the conviction of his infallibility and a faith in God. 

I read an article that attempted to rehabilitate him back in the world of writing. Having been dropped by Penguin, Nagarkar was picked up by a new publishing house and will have a new novel out this year. As a part of a marketing strategy, he was interviewed by a national newspaper and was given a large print and digital platform to speak. He was questioned on the MeToo allegations and this where I saw a new Nagarkar. He did what I have never seen Nagarkar the skeptic do - he invoked God. Multiple times.

He stood firm in his innocence. He pointed to his home, his partner and his female fictional characters to prove that he could not be a predator and then he said that he says that ‘by the grace of God’ and ‘God willing’ he had a clean conscience and would not censor his own writing. There was a hardness to Nagarkar that I have not seen before, it was a movement away from the self-effacing man to one who saw his role as part of society and one of faith. It was almost as if he turned to God, in his personal space, to identify himself as a good man. 

I am unsure of how to end this post, because like many people involved and who supported the MeToo movement it was something that made us confront violence in our past and present, it made us all to keenly aware of things we had long let slide and thought impossible to stop. It simultaneously emboldened and drained me, it was therapy on steroids and this year I want to keep supporting it while taking time to untangle and think/feel through processes. Perhaps Nagarkar has the right to call upon God, perhaps I have no right to question it but something sits uneasy within me. 

and here I leave it with you. so that we may sit uneasy together, in these times of change. 

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and flex.

her sentences are loose and they slip off her tongue and fingers like an old bra strap, falling awkwardly to the side. They slip out from under her sleeve. discoloured and unappealing. 

she pauses.

she dislikes her simile. 

she has focused on muscle and metaphor. her sentences are muscle and have become loose with disuse. so everyday, little by little, she exercises them. Today, today was just that. 

[persis]

Mine

Beyonce has percolated into my subconscious. Her lyrics are part of my conversation and I am not sure if these phrases would have come to me, in the form that they appear, prior to the words sinking into my subconscious and becoming one with my vocabulary. A friend and I were discussing how to report a senior in her office who was flirting with bullying. He moved between public humiliation and humour with an ease that is afforded only to those in power and we discussed how to report his behaviour to management. I texted, ‘always stay gracious’, i.e. don’t lose your cool when you talk to them, stay on point and be firm. But we all know that those words form part of my favourite line and a half of Formation -  

‘You know you that bitch when you cause all this conversation Always stay gracious, best revenge is your paper’

I have my baggage with the idea of paper being revenge. My mama, who has the heart of a free bird, taught me that revenge only weighed you down and leaving and being free was all you really needed. Always stay gracious however stayed back with this bitch. 

Today I am listening to Mine, partly as a means of listening to Drake a bit more as a means of understanding my friend’s deep deep love for him. And in there Bey says, 

‘Let's stop holding back on this and let's get carried away’

and I’m feeling it. let’s stop holding back and let’s get carried away people. with love though, and remember always stay gracious. 

Photo credits: Wiki Commons 

[persis]

Directions

I have a highly impaired sense of direction. Unlike my sister, I cannot tell you where I have been a few hours back using only the position of the sun, my shadow and an innate compass. No, I need physical maps, I need markers and visual cues. I need trees with particular shapes, low hanging wires, shops and broken rubble to lead me back on a trail I have taken. My worst nightmare are roundabouts in planned areas, where all the trees have been pruned to look alike, where not a hair is out of place and where I have to drive in circles and thus lose any shred of direction I had to begin with.

A few weeks back I was in Paris, after a decade, without my love living in the city. And I had to navigate myself in the seemingly unending underground metro system without her. Needless to say, it was disastrous. The Paris metro system has one of the most complicated systems, their staircases inside are sometimes the size of boulevards and like the living world above ground they turn left, right and all around. The underground feels very much like a system of roads, rather than a corridor to herd mindless humans to their trains. Thankfully, a few structural engineers placed little internal windows to help confused souls such as myself to locate where I need to be. Merci.

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Saris on the mind: wishful thinking in winter

I stare at saris.

I stare at the fabric, print and the manner in which they encompass and yet fall from a body. I am greedy. I watch older women in the colony and will myself to absorb their ability to drape. How effortlessly the garment floats around them, covering and uncovering them simultaneously.

My currently expanding collection a combination of gifts from people, hand-me-downs from my mother and grandmothers and my own acquisitions. Cotton is my weakness. Or my strength, depending on how you view it. I love all kinds of pure cotton, rough, smooth, woven patterns and prints, opaque and sheer, porous weaves and tight, plain and textured...everything but starched cotton can win my heart. A starched sari is not a sari as the very essence of free flowing cloth is confined in rice water. Do not starch your saris. Let them crumple and respond, let them be free. If you do not appreciate where the sari has moved, re-drape it but do not force it to be still. I digress though...I have some silk, net and chiffon but cotton is where my heart lies.

I have, in the last year, widened my collection of saris and attempted to wear them with a regularity that would surprise my younger self. The ease of walking in a sari after it is draped need not be explained. However my skills in draping remain wanting. There are some saris, like a good relationship, where the connect is instant. The pleats fall where they need to and comfort me with their gentle beauty. Swish, swish, I move in front of the mirror and the sari responds to my movements and gravity with leisurely sways. Our connect is telepathic.

But at times it is not. At times there are saris that resist me and I refuse to force fabric to fit me. I refuse to contort it beyond my control. I remember helping my mother drape her saris. I squatted to the floor and pressed her pleats together. I was, of course, interchangeable and could be replaced by my younger sister or my father in the same situation. But it was never a battle with her. And I find that at times I find myself at my wit's end with certain saris. I drape, un-drape and re-drape a few times. My lover squats to compress unruly pleats with his strong hands and I look expectantly at the fabric. Sometimes, he wins the fabric over with mild coercion but at times we fail. I un-drape and fold and hang the garment with a small twinge of pain. I know that I will eventually understand the fabric, that we will not be at odds with each other, that we will come to love each other. But now is not the time.

And this is why I stare at women in saris and will to steal their abilities. This is why I love the summer where I can wear saris freely without fear of catching a cold, unlike the winter where the thought of any exposed skin creates trauma to my body and to people around me. That is why, the other day, I bought a half sleeve peach and white blouse from a shop. Ready-made, i.e. already stitched and ready to wear. In the hope to wear it soon. Last year, around this time, I was tired of the cold. I was tired of layering. Of scarves and wool and gloves and boots. I decided to protest. To will the sun out, even if for a while. I wore a sari. I challenged the skies and the world. Show me your worst, or show me the sun. And the next few days were beautifully sunny. I took full credit for this change in weather, sharing credit only with the weavers of the sari. Right now it's 8 degrees Celsius and shall stay safe in my wool.

But I can still stare at the fabric on people. I can imagine myself in under two months, walking freely and unencumbered by temperature to wear a beautiful Kota cotton or Jamdani weave...

image credits: persis taraporevala instagram 2016

[persis]

Winter has hit Delhi. The handcart in front of my home offers me several winter delicacies, all of which include generous amounts of gur, rice and peanuts. It also has a low flame that heats popcorn and any other item I may want warmed as I travel outside the womb of my home. The ingredients foster heat into my body and are essential at a time when the sun sets at 6 p.m. and leaves me with a city that is both dark and cold.

The dark night sky is overshadowed by the absurd lights from the mall across the street. The stars are hidden under a blanket of man-made light and smog. The mall light radiates into my neighbourhood like a gigantic tube-light that offers no warmth, and whose existence is undeniable and yet unreal. I thank the handcart for its warm ingredients, its small bunsen burner and the quiet heat and light it offers my street.

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Fuel

4 slices of salami

some cheese

a pear

a cup of coffee

these articles constitute the fuel that is driving me to write a report I have no interest in. These articles have replaced love, engagement, joy and learning. 

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The affects and effects of having grandparents who lived in Nigeria - autographed books by one of my favourite authors and beautiful bags!

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F for.....

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India Votes!

 My mum called me in the morning. Today my home town goes to the polling booths and she called at 7:30 a.m. to tell me they were on their way to vote. She said that she had called because she knew it'd make me really happy to know that they had voted. You gotta love your politically and emotionally conscious parents! 

I voted last week in Delhi, sadly India does not approve of non-human franchise.

[persis]

Infernally grey Delhi, where the winters rob the city of sunshine and cast a shadow of smog and sunless life suitable for the undead. Dear sun before you scorch us in the summer, attempt a few polite hellos in the winter. It's the least we ask from you.

Also, need to start using a real camera.