beautiful things the boyfriend says, part 2

"Damn, that's cool"

"Painted jars :)"

"And then you just caught and put some faeries inside, right?"

can you even imagine

A woman, living in this city for under 20,000 dollars a year?

The professor asks, at the end of a wearying lecture on women and work. The hundred-strong class feels hushed, tired, but in the TA corner there is a hulchul, a few of us turning to look at each other and saying, can you imagine? Fake outrage with a bitter edge. Can you even? I think I can imagine!

I'm sorry you're poor! One of them laughs afterwards. I'm just sorry you're poor!

Most of the women in the class live at home and commute 3 hours to come to the university, work 30 hours a week, pay their exorbitant tuition, pay their bills at home, are caregivers; and somehow still have the energy to do their readings, sometimes.

I am only thinking about how I should drink some water and survive the one hour bus ride home and eat some kurma sitting in my fridge. I don't need to buy myself a slice of pizza right now.

a crisis of faith

I think I'm having one.

A pagan in North America

Thank you, Sun, for shining today and providing a scrap of warmth and a whisper of an excuse to step into the cold, dreary 'day'.

Thank you, trees, for clinging to your leaves for as long as you could, here at the mouth of December.

Thank you, snow, for keeping your distance for now.

Thank you, air, for being fresh and clean while being deathly, deathly cold.

Fuck you, all of you, fuck you for being so very very very very cold.

buddhi ke baal in the wind

I can't be atheist. Prayers slip out of my heart every now and then, ease this, make this easier to get through, give us strength, thank you 
 And then I try not to think about where they go

white classrooms

Stop smiling at me. I understand your language. I understand your accent. I don’t care that you don’t understand mine, I am angry at my stupid tongue for moulding to the way you roll your R’s, and my throat for swaying along to your cadences. I am appalled at how YOU trip over words like 'colonisation' and 'decolonisation' when those words are starting to live on the tip of my teeth, three months in Canada and white academia.

I don’t need you to make me feel heard. Stop this unbreaking eye contact and stop that fucking smile. Yes I come from a faraway land and everything is so new for me. You with your three kids and SUV and supportive husband know that there are cows on Delhi streets, and I feel no need to tell you more. LGBT rights are sooo important and homonormativity is sooo important and gay white men fucking it all up for you, sooo not my problem. Live in your bubble, I don't want to be the 'global South' voice beckoning from beyond anymore. I don’t want to hear your dawning realisation and self flagellation over being white and realising there’s more to question in life, you can’t get away with saying intersectionality and decolonising.

I wish I didn't have to feel bad for you sometimes. I wish I didn't feel the need to help. 

I no longer want to talk about my family and Delhi roads and my spicy food to you. I have a crust now. Three months in Toronto and I don’t wear my migration like an open bruise anymore. 

(Except when I make "snarky detached" comments about pronouncing my name, only to have your tongue forget in the next ten minutes.)

*

"It might be a good idea to mention why you chose to come to York knowing there would be financial hardships."
Cannot deal with this right now.

*

You know how I 'deal'? I mock you. relentlessly. I mock you with people who understand me, who are 'brown' to you and to me. I put on a 'white affect' and like, taaaalk like... this? I exorcise my frustration and my bile by screwing up my face and making my voice sound like yours, all your ignorant privileged bullshit. And I hear my anger translated into laughter, over beer and wine and steak and pizza, from people who have endured so much more.

This is how I win. 

costumes

At Jane station waiting for the 195 rocket,  there are no lines. This is pretty distinctive in the Toronto I've been in so far, with people queuing coffee shops and food places which curve in ways that I don't intuitively get. My political science-visible minority brain scans the predominantly nonwhite crowd and interprets the two knowledges and feels a kinship. Yet a discomfort- I don't know this context, since 'everything in advanced countries moves in straight lines' helps me make sense,  what should I do here?

Today the 195 stands at a distance from the busstop, waiting for the lane to clear. The bus is empty,  its a few steps away from the stop, I'm going to be late for office hours... I am hopping from foot to foot, and yet the impulse to scan everyone else around me, to mimic what they do and blend in, kicks in. No one is in line, and no one else looks impatient like I do. When it's time to get on the bus, a Very attractive man gives me a smile and motions that I climb in ahead of him.

(This is how I eat with people. I watch the way they cut into their chicken with knife and fork, how the dab on hot sauce and pile on some rice. I do it slowly, and I chatter or fade, drawing away attention from fingers that can't manipulate food the way they used to anymore.)

Lately the question of blending in is on my mind. I wanted to wear a sari as fall faded, knowing scarves and gloves and coats would soon be upon me. I did wear it once, to Chinatown and then to a Palestine film festival, a costumed-ally in multiculti Toronto. I could wear it to class maybe? Maybe an an experiment. Catalogue how many looks, how many compliments, beautiful/graceful/so complicated/I could never manage that.

The more I thought about that, the more I feel like it would be a 1000 times more unbearable here than back in Delhi. Saris, my mother's saris that I usually wear, would feel like skin, and these gender studies, intersectional eyes and words would flay it raw.

Or maybe they won't. Maybe I am over-imagining the attention. Maybe, in their own academic multiculti Canadian society women's studies way, they won't give a shit.  I can't decide which is worse.