the gift

a response to Raju Tai's 'Letting F.R.I.E.N.D.S Go

dear raju tai,

i woke up yesterday morning to a sunburst whose withering symphony flickered in the wind, like snakeskin. after a night of revelry with friends, my mind’s eye, groggy with day dreams, encountered the day. the body shivered as it sensed the mood and apprehended the tenor of conversation it desired. it was at that moment that my eyes fell upon your delicate diary entry to the universe: Letting F.R.I.E.N.D.S go.

unbidden, like a careful hand, your musings soared from the pages of the morning, and let in the light. i remembered cohen who observed that there is always a crack, that allows the light to come through.

and suddenly, the essay transformed into a jaali, a perforated silver sheet, sequinned with stars, not diamonds. i remembered a beautiful mary oliver poem we had shared together many years ago, as friends : )

this understanding, this nous, is perhaps what became the backdrop for my reading of your essay on friends - the mythology, and the material reality of the mediated experience. the poem at the end reminded me of something i had said to a friend during a conversation about how being ‘drained’ and encountering a form of burnout was fast becoming a new genre of ‘normal: “more and more, it seems, we have to learn how to pick ourselves up”.
the time is such - is it not? or are we being indulgent?

let that be, then. back to F.R.I.E.N.D.S.
your nostalgic re-assessment about social relationships, aloneness, ‘bad friends’ and the suspension of disbelief, provoked many stray reflections about how our relationship to the idea of friendship evolves, as we navigate the quagmire of the everyday. we learn to love the world, over time, and sensitivity, when it is found teaches the body to be grateful.

yesterday morning, for instance, when i woke up - i woke up light, like a cloud waiting to be blown away. i had cooked kori gassi and mushroom pulimunchi (rava fry) the previous night, for my oldest friends in delhi, who i had invited over for a “shettynaad scene” (the derivative name i’ve given to such ‘gatherings’). it’s been two months since i moved into a new flat, and this was the final ‘ritual’ - like some elaborate ‘breaking-in’ of the house. is this not a way of thinking of home, through one’s friends?

we learn to ‘belong’ in a socially mediated environment that grows in effulgent interfaces, and vibrant membranes. we float untethered, grasping the nearest pole - something that feels like a home, even if it is for a bit. and over time, we learn to fly, inside our skin. home becomes an idea that you carry in your fist, wherever you go. Gate A4, by the evergreen Naomi Shihab Nye, narrativises this idea beautifully.
i have, over time, surrendered to the idea of a home that is built with the rooted presence of movement. an old poem goes, (if i remember it right).

a kind of home
aranya

The river has no centre
No real beginning, or end,

It's stillness
Is in its movement

I could live with that

A kind of home

taking this idea to its end - that we are still, we can be still, only in movement - one perceives that the entity that christens the desiring body, does so with the tools of belief and sensation. it is this belief that drives our movement, how we love, and break. perhaps a person might be thrilled with the stardust of first interactions and intense conversations that amount to ‘nothing’ (within the problematic scheme of capitalist productivity that treats human resource as creator or consumer). perhaps another might find a home in silence - the kind of silence that unwinds over minutes and days, maybe even months. perhaps this person might like to share the home they have built with you - and call it friendship. F.R.I.E.N.D.S, more than anything, taught me about this - that our reality is made up of people. and each person has a distinct character like a brush stroke in an impressionistic painting. our own characters are a composite of these different characters, and we learn to work with the colours we have - birthing new shades, new landscapes and conditions of possibility.

you point out, with such nazakat, the schism that lies between the perception of the american dream of companionship (on steroids) - the cafe , basement fantasies, the inherited flat and “rent control” - and the reality of growing up in
turn-o’the-millenium India. your account of this gap is so evocative, that it felt like a fragment from a reflective ethnography of friendship in the 90s and the first decade of the 2000s. more than anyone, tai, you have taught me, perhaps, through practice and engagement, the place and meaning of television in households in our region.

what is interesting to me, is the fresh skein of media whose becoming is caught (in medias res) in such writings - such ‘love letters’ to different kinds of readers, and rasiks. this audience is significant (if we conceive of the writers who write newsletters today, as an entity). we deal with overlapping themes. the same idea, it seems, soars above our collective morning pages. it falls as a dandelion falls, with practiced intuition, that gives its heart to the wildest gust of imagination. and in that moment something beautiful is born - a bawling infant of the virtual! we forge a new kind of friendship that nuances the ways we receive, and respond, to art, as love.

this is our new home, then, our long dark teatime of the soul: a courtyard filled with dandelion dust, and falling things, where perhaps the dharavai (serialised) evening might come for quiet repose. perhaps our worries - in this age of anxiety - might turn into air, and rest invisible in the oblivious companionship of dreams. for these are not thoughts, tai. these are phantasmagorias that we gently caress into the world. to me, this was the epiphany of your missive about friendship and ‘bad’ friends - an object does not need to have a heart, to love. we form relationships with objects that are imagined as ‘inanimate’ things - ‘the city…. a tree’, a book, a place, an idea. we relate, not to the exoskeleton, but to the person that lives inside the object, and forms the mythology of its unfolding story (like the way Phoebe forms connections with furniture from a flea market, or with her grandmother who is reincarnated in a cat).

is it not in the story, at the end of the day, that we find life?

i thank you for these reflections, tai, and for, perhaps inadvertently, sprouting this train of thought. thinking reflexively about our practice is also a kind of praxis, and, for me, a way of negotiating the contemporary, and our place, in it. this is impossible without the thriving chemistry that our readers bring to these pages, oftentimes as writers.

perhaps there will be an opportunity to turn this comradeship-in-dream into a project - a tapestry discourse on nostalgia; a study about relationships and 90s kids, Zee cafe and “we were on a break”, jane fonda and ‘hum naye geet sunaye’, about ‘chaddi pehenke phool khila hain’ and Movers and Shakers, and (permit me to take a breath at this point) about the ultimate unboxing video aka milind soman’s greek god bod

#justsaying:

:)

(thankyou alisha chinai) for Made in India

we find that, in the last analysis, it is desire - glorious engine that runs on eros,
life-affirming, and always moving - that bounds our wandering; our friendship, our solace, even our nostalgia. it is desire that dances to the music of words, crackles between the pages, and slips unnoticed as a stolen kiss between lovers in a crowd.

and just like alisha chinai turned desire into a reckless patriotism, we turn our love, through writing, into an imagination. nothing could be more anchoring, than the homeland of this imagination. no map could outline its sacred geography.

and so we must continue forth, with our quills. not because we must, not because it is work, but because we want.

gratitude and love,
aranya

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hope you, and your loved, are finding meaning in this tumultous time. do write to poetly@pm.me if you have any questions, queries, or comments. i will write back as soon as I find the space, and the time.

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