coming down

Diwali came and went.

First, I quarrel with all that comes along with celebrating Diwali.
I hold on to my personal tradition, I make my rangoli, I have helping hands, I make something I am proud of.
There are lights, there is food and there is laughter.

I send pictures home. They don't get that my rangoli is Ravan. I am celebrating Ravan and mourning Rama's plunder. They don't get it - all they care about is that I am doing what I love half the world away. Good. This should be family love - live and let live at a distance. I couldn't do this if I lived with them.

After all that franticness, energy levels flag. I have nothing to say in class except wish it was over. I have excuses. My head hurts, it must be the weather changing. My skin itches, it must be the dryness. Self care is what all the QTPOCs are talking about. I think I'll just stay in bed.

Ahhhbu Gharaaaib. Sad-damn Hoosain. Jhoojharat.

I think I'll just stay in bed.

the chemical life

Moths flutter through our house, our kitchen and our rooms. We kill them with our hands when we can. In my room I just close my eyes and turn off the lights, hoping they go away.
Mice scurry, surprising us in our bathrooms and dropping droppings all over the kitchen and eating away my beloved paapads.
Ants swarm the kitchen counters, the knife left dripping with jam.
Bees wander into the shed, L talks to them with her mind and they leave without a sting.

The bananas sit atop the fridge, perennially yellow.

"When we die, lets hope an animal eats our corpse," says L.

"POC HAIKU COMICS" - what are your struggles/experiences of being a POC and/or immigrant; how have you overcome the struggles; what makes you proud to be a POC and/or immigrant?

Cars, keys, switches, people
Everything moves the "wrong way"
A hiccup, I relearn

learning

First I learn the names of the bus and subway stops. Dundas West Lansdowne Dufferin Ossington Christie Bathurst Spadina St George. They sound poetic like that, a reassuring settling sound at the end.

I read a book set in Australia which features a town called Bathurst. So India Canada Australia clearly all have British colonialism inscribed in their bodies. Lansdowne, Uttarakhand, India. Bathurst, Australia. Later a conversation about First Nations and their struggles to reclaim land in Canada leads to the realisation - we are not in the postcolonial moment here, we are in a still actively colonial one. The question of historical reparations and reconciliation is still far away here.

I learn that I will always be a last minute preparer. I learn to be the less-than-amazing teacher I am in my head. I learn to knit.

Breathe, it's only been a month, I tell myself. You have a lot of time before you can have the social life you like.

And I ask questions. What is the deal with hand cream. What is nuit blanche. What are family bathrooms. Why do the binders have three rings and not two/four. Why is it Mississaugas 'of the New Credit'. When is it daylights savings. Where can I buy cheap boots.

And I ask myself - how is it that you, as a so-called actively political person supposedly attuned to racist and sexist conversations, manage to miss the ignorant, masquerading as interest, racist conversation when it is personally directed at you.

a life just beginning

We stand in the parking lot of a provincial park north of Toronto, looking to the north sky. We strain our necks and I imagine the greenish tinge, but the aurora never appears. Obnoxious laughter is in the air but I am rescued in the front seat. The lights shine on those beautiful faces, and a lip ring flashes in the dark as we chat about family and alcohol and auroras. I get a tight hug from a tall person (how I miss those) and I walk home alone and warm at 11.30 at night. Toronto is a privilege.

*

We are on the terrace and smoking up but we're just sober enough to say no, we're not going to make out, that would make things so weird. I don't remember how it goes after that, but it's an entirely different person who says later, ohmaigad you're so pretty in the light your lips are so saaaaaft. QPOC SUPREMACY! someone shouts into the night sky. We groove to desi music later, there's dappaan koothu involved, and then I am walking home drunk with anarchist drunks who make rainbows out of flowers and that's my amaanat.

*

The bhindi is loved, fried, crunched, loved, finished.

*

Her smile lights up the room and her voice rings out, her friends are my friends and my friends are her friends. I love her and love her.

*

We are in our warm kitchen, which swallows up the mornings into its many jars in its doorless cabinets. In the evening the rainbow flowers are in the centre of the table, surrounded by wine glasses and so much talking and so much giggling. They hold hands and they kiss, happy and certain and confident, and I ache for my lover, when will we cook and host dinners for our friends and cuddle in the tea-light?

*

I stand in front of my class and talk about home for an hour, how shitty it is for a dark skinned person, how shitty it is because the caste system still lives. And then 23 women blow me away with their candour, broken legs and friends with fatal cancer and family who loves them and family who is fierce and they are mixed and they don't know where they fit in, this is my culture and this is who I am and this is how I care and this is me this is me this is me. I hug the girl who cries and I walk out into the rain with my hair on end.

*

Back home, I heat up the rasam and drink it in a glass North Indian style, and share the garlic with my roommate. We chat, we drink and we go our separate ways.

I could live like this.

hi how are you please thank you have a good day nice to meet you! what a friendly citycountry

My first few days here people smiled at me, and spoke to me unbidden on the street, offered change and directions and advice on cellphone plans, and looked at my TShirt and said, "girl in glasses! you have 4 boyfriends?" [Troy and Abed, oh how I wish to be their Annie.]

Today I am a woman with purpose, I stride into the subway and walk past an eastern european accented woman who asks me where to drop the token. I show her, barely wait for her to mumble anything at me, and stride on. Should I have asked if she needed help? Maybe.

I stride on, making no eye contact, receiving no smiles, no chat, and consult my phone for directions. But the vending machine defeats me, and two people walk past, but someone stops to help and grins, I did nothing at all but there you go, and in my zeal to call out a 'thank you' I miss my packet of chips falling and punch at the machine some more before the bulb goes on.

~~

In the Bellevue park near Kensington market, people of all sorts and colours (skin and hair) gather in the sunshine, frisbee players, friends, families, musicians, weed dealers, starry eyed graduate students and acrobats. A black man strips off his shirt and stomps around in the mini amphitheatre area, throwing down blocks of wood to his beat, rapping and shouting, fuck police! fuck police! fuck you! stop shooting at me stop shooting at me stop shooting at me

moving

People say when they come back that Delhi smells different. I was told Toronto will smell different, right away, I will notice. Well, not yet. The air is cleaner, maybe? But it feels like I know that only on an intellectual sort of level. The sound levels aren't much lower where I live, where streetcars trundle past and go ting! and buses whoosh and cars zoom and fighter jets fly past in the sky for an exhibition, like no one in this fucking city knows the sinking feeling of impending war. [Most do, but they're not the ones who are consulted.] I can't help it, my house sits at an intersection. Maybe let the city envelop me at all time of the day, now when I can still look at it with starry eyes.

When I hugged my lover at the airport of this city I will forever thank for bringing us closer, I knew his smell immediately, I buried my face in him and nearly lost myself in the intensity of it. It was the only sensory thing of his that lingered on after he'd left, in the cotton tshirt that slowly became just a cotton tshirt so soon. Everything else was pixels and skype; the lovebites faded too soon.

I catch whiffs of it now, six days and one load of laundry [this is where you drop the coins, this is where you wait] later. It can't be from my clothes. It must be me, maybe my skin touching his skin soaked up as much as it could, still viscerally sure that this parting will be for a long time too. I meet new people and hug them but I don't get their smell, not like I have his. Or maybe it was me all along and Delhi didn't let me smell it. Maybe the patina of my old city is falling off of me and I will be naked to this city sooner than I knew.