Monday Afternoon

July 6, 2020

My head is a mess of pressure and denseness. Feels like it is being compressed inwards around the eyes, cheekbones and ears, while something is simultaneously trying to break outwards. There is a band just above my eyebrows till my hair line, that is liquid filled and each time I move even a bit, it sloshes around like a liquid in a glass cylinder, moving one way and then the other.  I try very hard to be still. On Saturday I visited the doctor and was told I had a severe ear infection – might explain the vertigo from last week – along with congested sinus. Came back with a bag of meds and nasal sprays. They mess up the insides even more than the original symptoms did.

I continue to not be able to be present here in Singy. Most of my head, most of the time, is in Bombay with family and friends there. The spouse yelled at me for being so withdrawn and I yelled back. But I feel helpless to control it. Only while practicing karate I enter my body, I hear the words others speak, I control my movements. Something holds me still even as the limbs, my torso, move through space. But I can't be doing karate 24/7, especially when unwell. India’s covid situation is worsening and I wish so badly for some good news. 

I read an article this weekend about what writers were writing during the pandemic. Some were chugging along with their projects, many -- were unable to write fiction during a time that feels like fiction and were -- journaling, others not writing at all but observing the poems forming around them. In some way they were recording in their minds, the events and feelings of this time. 

I find myself still stuck in another time. The time between December and March. When the anti-CAA protests had erupted, in India, and the authorities had begun cracking down. So much has happened since then that those stories are being lost. The only writing I have done besides journaling are a few sketches – character sketches. A policeman, who reluctantly at first, engages in violence in a Muslim locality, destroying property and striking down residents in their homes. At first he is following orders but by the end of it all he is convinced he is doing the right thing, ‘To Make India Great’. Another sketch of a RSS trained youth, at dusk, who is one of the masked perpetrators of the JNU violence. His first taste of the power of terror he knows he can get away with, and by the following dawn he wants more. He too knows he is doing this to make India great. Another, a woman who chillingly convinces her friends to poison a woman just because of a political war of words on fb. Of course, to make India great. The last of a low income man barely on the edge of survival, part of a whatsapp group generated by the BJP IT cell, who is convinced that he must burn down the house of an anti-CAA activist on the eve of Holi to purify the land and yes, make India great again.

I didn’t realise the pattern in these sketches -- how the inner reasoning of these characters was connected to one idea -- till I wrote about them here. I only wondered why I was exploring the ‘other’ in my writing rather than my own experience through those months. I just wanting to get to know the inner states of these characters and wasn't sure where the exploration would go. 

While I was writing this an artist friend sent me a quote -- “I think that one wants from painting a sense of life, the final suggestion, the final statemen has to be not a deliberate statement but a helpless statement. It has to be what you can’t avoid saying, not what you want to say.’’

Going to read a few more quotes by this painter as the antibiotic fogs my body and brain.