Merely Strands

 March 12, 2024

 

I had the worst vertigo attack I’ve had in a long time on Sunday. My sinuses were already messed up because of cat-fur while I am cat-sitting, and then I got soaked in the rain while crossing the street to the bus stop after karate. I didn’t realized the rain was as heavy as it was, and the street was as wide as it was, and didn’t open my umbrella. My hair dripped, my gi pants dripped and I shivered through the half hour ride in a cold bus. And even on it I felt the slight dizziness and disorientation that precedes these attacks.

At the cat’s home I stood under a hot shower and then dried my hair with hot blasts hoping to stave it off. But I couldn’t. And I spent the rest of the afternoon and evening, sitting absolutely still, a scarf around my head to cut out noise and light, and to keep all the pieces my head was fragmenting into bound together. My body felt chills, it sweated, it wanted to find a position of rest but each spot felt heaving-ly uncomfortable. 

The fragmentation of the self that this year has brought feels similar. As I live in other homes, which feel almost like other cultures, I feel more lost to parts of myself, but I don't feel like have the 'scarf' to keep them together. It is the intense wanting of a stability and perhaps it is also an expression of the alienation I feel from the changing culture of my country. 

When the Ram Temple my mum and I spoke about (written about in the previous post) was inaugurated some people called it a civilizational moment. I shuddered when I heard that but many rejoiced. 

This moment of moving towards declaring India as a Hindu Rashtra felt ominous of physical, structural, and psychological, violence and breakdown of what I would call civilization rather than the beginning of one. But it was definitely a moment that everyone in India was focused on, a pivot point, just as the breaking down of the mosque was a turning point in India’s history that has lead to this point where one man, a once in a lifetime charistmatic ‘strongman’, holds all the power in a land of 140 crore people, and still gets away when he calls it the mother of democracy. An autocrat can of course set the terms of what he will call the country he is ruling over. It is his domain today and he enjoys it to the fullest, taking trips he couldn’t when he was a young child, wearing designer clothes for photoshoots in various locations, and yet convincing the people of the land that he hasn’t taken a single holiday in the ten years he’s been PM.

While I was in Bombay I met a group of friends, those I often meet to chat about the changes in this new very religious right leaning country. One of the two Muslim women in the group was so agitated. We must do something she kept saying, we can’t let these stereotypes about muslims flourish. But many among the rest of us felt all we could do was wait it out. Indians were on a high brought in by the opium of religion but eventually the high would recede and the stark reality of everyday existance — employment, food, shelter, even freedom — would return. But then what? Then who would try to rebuild the land into one of less inequality and of more people employed gainfully and not dependent on welfare.

Vertigo leaves days of feeling abnormal in body and mind in its wake, and this time I fell and hit my head against the wall when I woke up to use the bathroom at night. The headache and nausea are unbearable even today. The moving around from home to home this year had been unbearable. I return home this Sunday, with no long stays away from it planned for a long time and feel in this a bouquet of hope. Of grounding, settling, of stopping the spinning of 2024.

My own hopes and happiness have often been tied up with the state of the world and particularly with my own country. It has often been a sense of, how can I be happy, why should I try to feel normal, if the country is going through a churning. I don’t know how this will factor into the hope and life I want to move towards. There is fear of these other levels of being adding to the layers of responsibility and guilt, to the personal fears about survival, that I already feel. 

It is Tuesday and according to the rule I made for myself I had to write a blog. It is a messy, fragmented post, written in the post vertigo, possibly mildly concussed state. It is practice and I know there is a connection between these different strands I blow mildly on to this page, but if I try to find the connection my head hurts. So for now I leave it unfinished.