Have you noticed that when something tragic happens we cling on to tiny details? We scrounge around as if collecting fragments of broken glass, desperate to know everything.   Grieving silence is punctuated with the most irrelevant questions. What time of the day was it? What were her exact words, how did they sound? How did you hear of it? Today, I noticed that I needed to know the answers to all these questions. It is as if the bare truth alone is too much to bear; the sense of knowing every little detail and the ability to paint an accurate picture gives one a false sense of control. If I know everything may be it will make sense. Maybe hidden somewhere in all that detail is something that will help, something that will make it all better. So I sit here restless and hungry for information, information that can never change the cold fact of death.

I should just start a separate blog dedicated to archiving my grandmother's thoughts. So today after she reads my little write up on school for the website she says, I did not go to a school like that but I overcame my prejudices. Pause. True, I must have been a little influenced by my father. After all, he was a theosophist who believed in universal brotherhood. Pause. Then I picked up a lot from your father. After he married your mother who is from a different state and community, whatever prejudice may have been lurking got washed out. Also, I leant about the world outside Kerala from my conversations with your Appa when he would come home for his holidays. He explains things very well; in this way my mind became broader. It's rather sweet when parents admit to learning from their children, no? 

My grandmother insists on affectionately calling my brother's young British friend saa'ip, the term used by Malayalis to refer to the erstwhile colonial masters. When I give her a hug she says 'thank you, thank you, after the saa'ip came I say thank you'. She can't contain her laughter. The saa'ip is a nice guy, she says. She actually uses the the word 'guy', one of the words that she has received through the osmosis of vocabulary via intergenerational cross-flows. British people are nice, she mutters and then pauses, they did turn us into a colony however. Hers must be the last generation to carry living memories of that period, for whom the moment of Independence isn't a chapter in a textbook but a personal memory. My grandmother was thirteen and remembers the parade in her small town. She pumps her fist and in falsetto cries, 'gandhiji ki jai! jawaharlal nehru ki jai!' You know, I even remember seeing your grandfather's face in the crowd. He was nineteen. Of course I didn't talk to him. Who would talk to him anyway? She laughs, pleased with her joke about his rather grim demeanour. When I the marriage proposal came, I thought, why not? There was no reason to decline. And the horoscopes matched like crazy, promising perfect compatibility and what not...she breaks her ramble only to say that she also remembers Mr. Jones, her English teacher, whose accent she could understand.

All criticism is audacious. Sometimes this audacity seems admirable and sometimes it seems foolish and outrageously naive. To pose a critique is to make a bold philosophical assertion: that all roads are forked, that we posses the capacity to influence if not dictate the terms of our existence. Criticism assumes choice, assumes agency, for it operates in a world of alternatives. But is this a world of alternatives? 

In times like this when premonitions of darkness lace my thoughts, I think it best to commit thought to paper.

I'm a bit tired of being a constant occupant of my mind, a stubborn tenant and the locus of experience. It's a drag.

I think about sleep
and air travel
and the insides of silent elevators, where you unknowingly, unfeelingly, glide up and down dark shafts.

These three things allow you to arrive at a new destination without the sense of having travelled.  They disturb the experience of time, and it's passing. They leave bits of time unattended, unaccounted for. Three hours vanish. Who knows where they went having escaped the merciless, brutal ticking of the clock.
A security lapse is a welcome breech.

Sleep is a strange thing. You are allowed to forgot the details. Who are you where are what day is it what time is it. It's a precious thing, that feeling of not knowing. And in times like this I wish I could hold on to it, prolong it, forget about remembering.

I wish I could discard hours at will. Well, the next eight hours are going to be an awful nuisance. I'll just pack them away, fold them neatly into a box. The next eight hours are dismissed. Slashed out off attendance sheets, punished for bad behaviour.

If you ask me, I think it's unfair that I have to exist all the fucking time or else not exist at all. What kind of all-or-nothing game is this? No room for negotiation. No toll free number to call and politely say - I'd like to exist Monday to mid-Wednesday and then again over the weekend. I'd like to take off the entire month of June.
One moment madam, let me transfer your call...

Social distance refers to the space between people for which no precise scale of measurement has been devised. It's the space between the waiter and the waited upon, measured not in inches but in fractions of dignity. Let's say that dignity can be measured with reference to everyday signs of acknowledgement - eye contact, subtle nods  either in agreement or disagreement, smiles and other evidence of recognition. Blowing my caappi, I realise that this canteen is different. Some kind of shrinkage has taken place as the skilled masseuse and the cleaner sit at the table next to mine enjoying their late morning break. I see the overlap in the Venn diagram of difference and inequality, an intersection in the sets sealed by a burst of laugher. 

Then, I think of the indignity of silence. 

The cold absence of eye contact. 

The enforced isolation of degraded life worlds, when bodies are invisiblised through sheer force of will.

It I don't see it, it doesn't exist - sounds like some kind of shared pathology in perception.

The hierarchy of work ensures that some people are only semi-present, as they don elaborate camouflages to erase their footprints.  This is the ultimate magic trick: labour without labourers, buildings without builders. Cleanliness without cleaners. Only sharp eyesight can detect the ghostly figures, the muted shadows that melt into the background, retreat into cubicled  spaces violently separated from those who enjoy the full benefits of being human. 

A search for belonging is a horrible thing as I’m house hunting in a city of the homeless.  I am an eternal foreigner, lost in a city of natives, making do with broken, borrowed sentences and the passing translator. I walk around observing the scenery, listening to the sound of laughter all the while asking strangers to point me to the ghetto of language orphans.