After Long

 May 14, 2023

It is not normal for me to be at my desk at this time on a Sunday. Normally, I would be finishing my two-hour karate class, and changing my belt from black to white for my kobudo class. But this morning my body was still feeling the effects of the vertigo attack from Thursday night. The blood vessels in the brain felt constricted, the head ached; and bright lights, loud sounds, strong odours, and movement, most of all movement, still made the world spin. There was a huge feeling of guilt and at another time, in another year, I would have acted out of that guilt pushed my body and gone to train.

Since November, it’s been a time of bad health, sudden injuries that don’t heal, emergency visits to the specialist or ER. The months have rolled into each other and though I struggled to separate the days and make them meaningful I have often surrendered to something spinning me along pushing me quickly through the weeks with not enough time to sit back and reflect. Each day has felt too much. That general confusion about the body persists. There is fear that this is permanent now. That all that will be is a decline of the body as I age. But I also know, not sure how, that this is a phase and though there is decline this huge disruption for months is an anomaly. I feel like I will find a new balance if I treat my body right. 

But I didn’t open my blog to write this. I haven’t written a blog post since December 23, 2022. Stress reduces the flow of expression in me, in many. 

I opened it to write about a story I read. I hope one day I can write such a brilliant story and at the same time I hope I never have to. 

The story is one I read for a fiction class with Claire Keegan. It’s, ‘Going to Meet the Man’, by James Baldwin. 

The protagonist in the story is a white cop who cannot get an erection as he lies with his wife at the end of a day. In the story there is a memory told in vivid and almost unreadable detail of his parents taking him for a ‘picnic’. They take the young boy to watch a nigger (hard word to read and to write) who’s been accused of, but not tried for (it was a time when killing a black person was not illegal) rape. The man has been strung up by chains, over a fire, and he’s lowered and raised to prolong his agony as a crowd of white men, women, and children watch, rather cheer this on. The man’s suffering is described as is the almost joyous uncaring of the crowd. As the boy watches sitting on his father’s shoulder, the man is lowered, his scrotum grabbed, by a friend of the boy’s father, and his genitals are cut off. Then he’s dropped into the fire. The boy says that in that moment he loved his father more than he ever had. It was a defining moment of his life. Somebody in class suggested this as a rite of passage that the boy loves his father for bestowing upon him. 

As I read that story, I felt a huge fear. My mind was in the past when this was ok in the USA, regarded then as the epitome of freedom and liberalism, and it was in a dystopian future where such a thing could happen in an increasing polarized and Islamophobic India, apparently the mother of democracy according to our PM. 

Already, though public lynchings in India are not ‘allowed’ by the law, Muslim men have been lynched, videos circulated, and shared over and over, mostly by vigilante groups with ties to the government ruling at the centre. I have looked up reports and the number of lynchings is certainly more than four in the last eight years. But the NCRB — National Crime Records Bureau — says it does not maintain statistics of such lynchings, and it is hard to find conviction records of these vigilantes though everyone, including the cops, know who they are. 

It already feels like a sport, and I fear one day it will be a picnic to take one’s family to. 

The little white boy in Baldwin’s story grows up to be a ‘nigger’ hater and though when he is an adult it is illegal to kill a black man, he has no qualms about beating a black man to an inch of death, even using a cattle prod on his testicles. 

Mob violence in India which has received sanction by lack of conviction or even arrests will affect all of us one day, though today is not yet that day. 

A little boy or girl witnessing this, watching how his or her ‘people’ sanction something will struggle to make sense of right and wrong and come to some decisions about the world. Many will grow up like the protagonist of that story but there are young people whose struggle will lead them to know that it is wrong. Who will turn to justice and compassion instead. Hope such young people outnumber the others. But who really knows on what basis children and adults make these choices. 

            Right now, people don’t seem concerned about these lynchings instead what is trending in India is a film called ‘Kerela Story’ about girls being radicalized by ISIS. There are four known cases of young women in Kerela who were radicalized by ISIS, yet this film was advertised by saying 32,000 young women were radicalized in Kerela. It is propaganda, it is Islamophobic, it is supported by the party at the centre, and it has made a huge amount of money since release. (I am certain that if a film was made about the lynchings it would be banned, boycotted, and/or someone would file a defamation case against it.)

            India will have elections next year. I’m interested in seeing how much the Polarising Quotient of the ruling party will work. Hoping it is now giving diminishing returns, but I don’t know. 

            I still feel uneasy about missing training today but glad I could sit at my desk and try to again find words to write about things that I feel strongly about. Exercising the 'writing muscles'.