Independence Day- Yes, I am Late.

My Dearest Reader,

Happy Independence Day, whatever that means to you. I ought to say it and so I did. I want to say it to myself, except, I don’t think I feel free. 

I feel as enslaved as I did last year and the year before. I feel enslaved to the same thoughts, desires and expectations that held me, hostage, for long during my time in active addiction. I feel shackled by the same familial ties that held me down, as the people around me took turns in the savagery of identity politics against me, for more than two decades.

Yet, I feel free.

I feel free to eat what I want, sleep when I want (not with whomever, not yet), and I feel free to love myself. I may not be doing it as much as I’d like to, but I feel as though if I decided to love myself and no one else for the rest of my life, I would be okay with that decision. Such is the temptation of the comfort of solitude.

This Independence Day feels different. It is the same, yet it is different. I am wearing the same clothes. I am eating the same food. Yet I am breathing new air. I am free but I am not. The hatred in my country is more accessible than I am. The people jarring each other, torching homes and businesses, all in the name of race and religion, feel freer than I do. 

Those people are free. They ought to be. After all, their grandfathers fought so hard for them, to exploit their right to freedom, speech and arms while repressing others.

I, on the other hand, find myself engulfed in the thoughts of some other desires today. They are not jarring, yet they do me harm. They are impossible, but they are difficult. They bring me pain, they bring me hope. Perhaps, my grandfathers did not fight as hard.

I envy hope. I, sometimes, despise hope. Hope is that flame that does not kill the moth attracted to its light. It instead keeps it confined in the never-ending fire, and it just can’t seem to escape it. You would want to, but once you become hopeful, you lose control. You go as mad as you can chasing the idea of something better, perhaps someone better. 

My mind has lost control. It wanders into the valley of hopes of desires as if it was meant to be there from the beginning. It craves love, affection, and commitment.

A young house broker helped me get this flat. His arms, his jaw. I see it. The teeth glisten with a dim glow of smoke. The eyes beam with the struggle of an incomplete college education. He confirmed he dropped out. I asked him, why? He said, Inglis muskil hoti h thodi (English is a bit tough). But the hands, they speak volumes, of the food, he helps provide on his family’s table with his real estate job (that’s what he calls it). The legs, I can only imagine those calves, when they kick the pedals of his motorcycle, honking the gong of his handle on the vehicle of his destiny. 

Do I want that? 

The blue-collar smell of sweat and hookah? The old Delhi whiff of stiff muscles and toned abs?

I have been on that bike. I held onto those abs while I was sandwiched between my roommate and him as we roamed around looking for a place to live. His number is saved on my phone. His profile picture on WhatsApp has him in the middle of an old Haryana farm on a bale of hay. 

Do I want that hay? 

Do I want to get smacked on top of all of the dried grass and sweat amidst the shade of a banyan tree? Or a mango tree? Neem, if the family can’t afford toothbrushes.

Or perhaps, I want a particular college professor. I met him on a dating app. I don’t know what he smells like. He lives on a shore far away in the city of dreams. 

He teaches cellular biology and he supervises master’s students through their theses. We talk about books and I hear the wedding bells ring. He has light green eyes and a taller stature. He is young, late twenties. He has the blood of the Punjabis, yet it is Marathi that he speaks better. He lives with his parents and his younger brother. He refuses to share their picture. 

I reckon he is scared that I just might see a future. I think he sees the hope coming and he pulls back. 

We speak almost daily and we speak for really long times. He complains about his boss and I boast how good free coffee is in my office, it is quite literally the only perk I have in that place. He got sick yesterday, with a sore throat. I thought this was the sexiest he ever sounded. I told him that. I said, “You sound sexy. Sexiest you have ever sounded.” He said thank you and then he asked for a leave to eat his dinner. My heart dropped a little.

But I let him go. He was sick. And he is not mine.

A Copy of The Blind Assassin rests in front of me, next to a dry cup of drunken tea. My best friends are asleep in my bedroom, caught in each other’s embrace as I write this. It was almost noon, and I made Poha for breakfast. I think I am hungry. The towel rests on the cloth stand, waving slyly to the wings of the ceiling fan. My basement flat is being lighted by an old tube light and my feet are falling numb. I think I am happy.

I can’t help but think of Plath and Woolf. Did they ever feel content? I mean they must have had to. I write one blog and I feel so content that I almost don’t write another for months. SO content.

Speaking of Plath, I always wondered if she had a lower body temperature. That would really explain the oven. 

Plath frightens me. Seldom are the days when I don’t imagine the reality of her life intertwining with mine. Yet, I think I am still hopeful. 

I still give into the flames of life and I demand to be free. I aim to please and I wow to love. The desires will come and go. I shall stand here and wait for the shores to meet the sand and the waters. Maybe one day, I will also know. One day, these men won’t just be mentioned in my rather insignificant writing. One day, I will be truly loved. I won’t just look at my friends and think how unlucky I am. I will think how grateful I should be. 

That’s the day I will indeed be free.

A New Beginning

10 June 2023

Dearest Reader,

I hope you have been keeping well. My apologies for the very late update on life. But the exams are finally over and I successfully defended my Thesis yesterday, and now I am just another one of your plain and simple Harshi again- unemployed and probably homeless in a month. And I can’t stop having horny dreams.

It all started yesterday morning. There was no water. We live in a very lower-middle-class neighbourhood, with emphasis on the lower, and I was dragged out of bed by Kudesh (my father) to get my buckets filled. 

But it wasn’t the hurt of the rims of the janky bucket that was on my mind. It was this dream that I’d had. Just before I woke up I was in the middle of this dream. It was my father’s room. There was a knock on the door. The delivery guy had come with the groceries. I took in the package. I offered him some water. He drank a glass and asked for another. It had been a scorching sun, so I understood. I poured him another. Then he just asked for the bottle, and I was like, damn! That’s some thirsty ass delivery boi. But I am a gracious host and a good woman, so I gave him the bottle. 

I did not think what he would do next would affect me this deep, but he started pouring water over his face, and out of nowhere he took me by the waist and dropped me to his knees. Our lips touched in the most mundane way and I could smell the atta-chawal ka godown ka smell on him. 

And that’s when the knock on the door came and I was woken by the nagging voice of Kudesh.

I moved on. I filled my bucket. I made my breakfast. I made Kudesh’s lunch and I started watching my Netflix show. 

But then it happened.

There was another knock on the door. This time, I was awake.

It was a delivery boy. It was a big basket delivery boy. Gasp. And the dream instantly washed over my face all over again. 

I offered him water. I was literally having a hot flash of a good amount of horny and disgust. This man was nothing like my dream. There was no ruggedness. There was no height. He wasn’t even tall enough that I could deem him a short king. And yet, I was still having my hot flash and disgusted myself with the thought that as ugly as he was, I still would be that girl who thought about it.

In other news, Never Have I Ever dropped their final season and we finally got to know who won, Ben or Paxton. Don’t worry, I shall not spoil the ending for you, though I will say Michael Cimino’s character felt a bit forced. I mean it was hot and sexy, and poles apart from Cimino’s portrayal of Victor Alvarez in Love, Victor, but it was a bit predictable to see our leading lady finding the Big O with a handsome and dangerous bad boy. But you know what, it’s okay. You get yours, Devi. Good for you! 

Who am I to judge? The only penis I saw in the distant past was a guy who pretended to be just to lose his virgin tag. I can’t believe I fell for it too. Like usually, it is me who is always like, oh no, I have never done this before. Do you think it will hurt? I do it to see if they will be nice and caring. He did it to simply get laid. And then they ask us why we think that men are the worst.

But I don’t think I slept with him because I was completely enamoured by his looks or his intellect.  Believe me, even on the most lenient scale he’d be Sore Four against my Weighty Eight. I blame my best friend for telling me that dating down would increase my chances of finding a good and stable boyfriend. Apparently dating half as good guys is still not good enough for me. 

This past month, I have been running around Delhi and NCR, trying to find a job. I thought laying down for an average Joe would take my mind off it. It used to work. Back in my late teens, when I was frolicking from one party couch to another, it was working. Not every guy I slept with was my drug dealer. Some of them were pimply nerds who were so far back in their closets that when I gave them the go-ahead they couldn’t comprehend the how’s and the why’s. Why should they have? I was such an easy and tragic lay that they would get in as soon as they got their chance. They were so grateful. They worshipped me. I liked that. It made up for all the hurt and bruises of the guys I actually liked. 

I think one of the reasons I am envious of Devi’s ending on this show is the fact that she actually ends up with her high-school nemesis/sweetheart. Who knows if ten years down the line that remains, but today, here and now she has the love of a sweet nerdy boyish short king, and that is enough for her. 

I keep thinking about the guys that I went to high school with. There was one who would grab me by the throat and whispered slowly what he would do to me if I ever told anyone anything about our ‘union.’ Then there was the one who was rumoured to have the biggest joystick in the class, and as impressionable as I was, I played right into sitting on that. There was the one who tried to kiss me because it was a dare. I resisted because I actually liked him enough to not have our first kiss forced through the binds of a dumb game. He did not speak to me ever again. All because I refused his machismo in front of the class. There are countless others, some I slept with, some I simply let inside to numb myself, some because they got me drugs, but none, who I would ever end up with. Even ten years from now, I can’t conjure up a reality where one of these guys would actually turn out to be nice enough for me to say hey maybe this time it could be different.

That’s simply not the reality I live in. I am bearing witness to other women in my life who are meeting people on apps. They go on dates. They get nice gifts. Then three months later, they have a Love Actually-styled anniversary. Meanwhile, I will still be here. Sad. Depressed. Lonely. Still at this computer, either applying for jobs or looking at a teen romance, just to force my brain to dream about something nice and easy for a change.

It is not just the romance in my life that fades away like that. My friendships are something similar. Not all of them. Some are nice and reliable when they can be, and I am simply grateful for that. But most are filling the quota of a sort. I am the other to them. To the rich, fair-skinned, 5-years long relationship vala boyfriend-wielding woman, I am simply the Other. I am there to fulfil a purpose. I am the cute funny Queer sidekick who tells the sex jokes so that they could chuckle and act with coy glances showcasing their modesty against my peculiar shamelessness. They misgender me, tell me It is hard calling you Harshi when we have always called you Harshit naa, it takes time babes. So yeah, I am grateful for some nice and somewhat reliable friendships that I have, because I don’t actually think that it would get any better anytime soon. I still talk to strangers with kindness. I still make an effort, not because I am hopeful that this one conversation might turn into a friendship of a lifetime, but only because I don’t want my disappointments and resentments to change me. 

Perhaps there is another way to navigate this loneliness. I am not the only Tranwomxn here who is finally coming to terms with the realities of our lives in India. Our bodies have been a site of fetish if not conflict. My body will always offer a sweet vacation to the guy who is too afraid to do anything that might mess a little with his good and perfect, and most of all, accepted family life. I will simply be an island of respite, never the land of homeliness. I shall provide the hearth of shade and sensuality, yet I must always let it go whence it leaves. So, perhaps, maybe there is another way. I can’t say that I shall close the doors of my heart forever, to the tourists and the one-nighters. I can’t promise that. But, maybe there is a way of limiting my expectations. I can choose to live in the moment. I shall accept the disappointments and I will let the resentment slowly pass through me. I want to love, and I want to feel good, but I don’t want to wait for a guy or a nice friend to do that. I am choosing to do it myself. I will get a job, eventually. I will find a good home and people, who will need and love me just as much as I do them. But until then, I shall keep this tiny little heart safe from further bruising.

And I will always have you, my reader. You won’t leave me now, would you? I apologise for such a late entry, I shall do better from now on. So, here’s to a new beginning, not of loneliness but of solitude and self-love!

08 March 2023

Happy Holi, my dear reader. I hope you are well. I hope you all the best things that one could or should wish another human on a day like this. I wish there are some people out there, as I look through this channel gate of my mother’s house, wishing me the same. I wish that the gods above are listening to those wishes and thinking of letting me have some.

For a long time, I have thought about the existence of an almighty person or persons up above the stars. I mean, that just sounds like I am thinking about aliens but I am not. I mean, technically gods are kind of aliens. We don’t see them, we don’t hear from them physically, and we rarely have any solid proof that they exist. Then, why and how is this institution that we call faith still running so well? I mean, they have got all kinds of branches too. There is religion. There are cults. There is India which has somehow morphed into a religious cult in itself. In the West, we still got Christianity and Atheism, well, let’s not forget Yoga. True inclusion only happens when we include the slim waist girls with their perfect necklines, neon yoga mats, and the workout but very ethnic and exotic-looking headbands, chanting naa-maa-stay and saying how spiritual they have become. Then you have your witchcraft people. All kinds of covens and packs, and herds. You have the political parties, fighting about countries and who the land belongs to, giving reasons on national and international platforms. And it is all being done in the name of god. So, I will ask you again. What is god? Where is it?

As many of you are aware that I only write from my own experiences. Well, when it comes to god, I haven’t had the best luck. I do believe in him, her, or them, all of them. I do believe that there is someone out there or up there pulling the strings. I wake up at 4 AM every day. I brush my teeth while I try to shake off my depression listening to either Jazmine Sullivan or Lizzy Mcalpine. I know, right? They are both so different in their artistry, yet that is what I am doing these days. Then I make my way to the kitchen, and I warm a litre of water. I give a glass to my father. We will call him Kudesh (Ku means bad, and Desh means a country in Hindi; you can also think of him named after kuda, which means sheer garbage). Simultaneously, I start making my lunch, and I put on the new utensil on the stove to make him his morning tea. I look at the clock, it is almost 5 by now. Now, if it is a little cold, I switch on the geezer. Only for ten minutes, because in ten minutes Kudesh will probably shout, ye itni der se chala rakha h. Bijli ka bill nhi ata (switching it on for so long, do you even think of the electricity bill I’ll be paying). Ten minutes. It is never more than ten minutes.

I make my lunch and I make his breakfast. I get the water, and I run downstairs. I close my doors and I get in my bathroom. I take off my clothes and wash my body. I wipe off the water and I shave my face. I look in the mirror and I fix my face. I put on my clothes and I get out to go to college. I come back home, and I make dinner. I eat my food and then I walk for twenty minutes.

And that is my day.

It is mundane and it is ordinary. 

It seems nice and it looks fine. Now, you won’t see any difficulties there. I don’t think it is difficult at all. Probably because I am used to it, but it is not that hard.

What is hard is the first ten minutes of every morning. What is hard is accepting the fact that I depend on the right album or the right song, or the right artist to make my day not sad. And 4 out of the seven days, probably even more, I fall apart in those ten minutes. 

Then this is what happens. I don’t get up at 4 am. Kudesh doesn’t get his water and his tea. Now that I have not done my morning service to him, I don’t have any right going up and making myself lunch. And if I am not allowed upstairs, I don’t get hot water. So my options become, cold water, or no shower, No shower, it is.

I shave. I always shave. Now, I don’t have hot water, you listen. So the shave is not going to be comfortable. It is going to require double or even triple attempts. But I will get it. I always get it. All the nicks and the cuts, I hide with the foundation, and the orange sticks and concealer, they will, and they always do, come back to haunt me the next day. But I carry on. There goes Monday. Tuesday. A Wednesday. Thursdays are nice. And finally Friday. By Saturday and Sunday, I am done. And I am exhausted. I have not done my research for my dissertation. I don’t have any real friends. And I hate myself so much because I spent another week doing literally nothing to improve my situation, and then in all that self-hatred and denial, I sleep or watch something on the OTT platforms to numb myself because hating myself is not the option. 

I start out with something sexy, some good nice rom-com stuff. Then I move on to either Hannibal or The Big Bang Theory. Again, I KNOW!!! I am weird. Eventually, I will end up watching an episode of Mom with Anna Faris and Alison Janney, and that will remind me to get my own butt to a meeting because by this time I am sweetly reminiscing about the time when I had drugs and sex in my life. And no ma’am. We can’t go down that rabbit hole, so I get to a meeting.

I share. I force myself to share. I SPEAK ABOUT WHAT’S TROUBLING ME, MI PADRE, MI HERAMNO, MY DEAD MAA, THE SOCIETY, THE PATRIARCHY, TRANSPHOBIC WOMEN FOR MY TEACHERS, MEN WHO ARE ALL PIGS, and then I will see my own faults. I will admit them. I will begin a new day. I will begin a new week. I might do good, and I might slip and fall. But I will get up and I will do it all over again.

Do you know why? Because sometimes, surviving is not about falling into that deep well of despair. It is not about the depression, the anxiety, the sleepless nights, the dead parents, the addict siblings, or the parent you wish would die. It is about that same faith that those political parties, those cults, those yoga-slaying girls, those witches, and all those hypocritical men preach about. My faith looks different than theirs. My faith compels me to sing hymns and worship songs in the mornings, and light a diya in front of my mother’s photo in the evenings. I say my mother’s prayers too. I sing jai ganesh jai ganesh, and I sing jai sarawati namo var de. That’s what she sang, and that is what I sing. I beg forgiveness for being sad and I feel happy when I do that. In those few moments, I feel happy, because I don’t feel alone. Then, I get back to dinner, and there is that. 

My survival is not always about doing double the work to show that I am working hard. Sometimes, it is. But sometimes, it is just getting up and doing the next right thing. One thing at a time. One day at a time. Sometimes it is about having the most mundane, and quite frankly THE MOST BORING CONVERSATIONS about bags and boys with all the rich girls I go to school with. Sometimes, it is about talking to a complete stranger in your department, because that will allow you to not talk to the fake legendary friends who told you that you can always call them, talk to them, because they understand.

And sometimes, it is simply about crushing on a guy who is nice enough because you see him only once every other week, and well, he is that cute Spanish Teacher, who always calls you by your preferred name. That’s surviving for me. That is faith for me. And right now it is what’s keeping me afloat.

26 February 2023

We all fantasize, right? We fantasize about things, people, toys, kinks, death, life, habits, etc. You hate things, you hate people, you hate yourself for wanting these things, but you don’t stop to think why do I want this? Why do I like this, or why do I only want that exact person? And sometimes when you do want something or you do think about why you want a thing you never wanted in your previous life in your past, you can’t stop spiralling.

My dear reader, I hope you are well today. I hope you are feeling joy. I feel joy. At least in a little way. I am sitting at this table with the sunshine on my face, and it is warm and irritating, but I feel joy. 

I was talking to a friend last night after dinner. I was walking on my father’s roof, and I was looking at all the pink flowers on these little plants my mother planted almost four years ago, and I was trying not to sleep. My doctor has told me I can’t go directly to sleep after I eat, and stupid me, I am like listening to this dumb but sane advice these days, you know to not end up in the ER again. So, I decided to call a friend who could keep me up with some banter. I bantered, and she listened. Let’s call her Amelia.

Our conversation started on some topics of me feeling ecstatic about the fact that my father’s nephew finally left this house, and how I am feeling so damn happy that I don’t have to wait around on another addict or an egomaniac of a man. I mean, I literally have two of them permanently in my father and my brother, or at least for the next few months, and I don’t need more. So, we were like talking and talking, and suddenly I remembered this thing this other girl in class had said about my friend. We’ll call her Lyla.

A week or so ago, our last class had just finished. And naturally, when you are in a class of forty-six women (there is a guy too, not to discount him) you grow to say goodbye to people, and you learn to automatically get to the ladies’ room and find your way amongst these young women to a mirror to fix your face or adjust your bra (not that I wear one, and thank god for that). You do these things out of habit. So, there I was, standing in front of one of those mirrors, adjusting my face mask, adjusting my kurti, adjusting Esther (my humble pouch of a tummy that I named after a beautiful witch in one of my favourite vampire tv shows, and I am fully aware of the dramatics here, so like shut up), and my shoulders. I said my goodbyes, I smiled my smiles behind my mask, conversing with just my eyes the sentiments of those smiles, and exited the room. Amelia was exiting one of the faculty’s cabins and hurriedly looked my way and I waved her a farewell with my hand. Another girl, Lyla, had come out of the washroom, with her group of friends, so I waited a minute with them to do the usual chat about the hair or the eyeliner, or make a sex joke, as that has become one of the only things people talk to me about or think of me being associated with. I have given up on breaking the stereotype, so I just play along and laugh a little and go my merry way. 

Lyla noticed Amelia rush down the stairs and she lost herself for a second looking in my friend’s exited direction. A hint of melancholia had settled on her face and she turned around and said to me wistfully, it must be so lonely for Amelia, to not have friends naa. 

I was taken aback for a moment. I thought of myself as a friend to Amelia. She is very beautiful. She has this clear skin that doesn’t require makeup to shine. The girl washes her face with the water provided in the washrooms at Amity, Noida. If that doesn’t say ballsy, I don’t know what will. She has also recently started complaining about these invisible breakouts that I don’t care for. She is so pretty. She has got a nonchalant way of coming in and going out of random conversations; people are never offended by it, and I am pretty sure they all like her. I mean there is this one girl who once told me how she hates Amelia’s way of being chill and well-liked all the time, but then that girl hates everyone, including herself, and makes it a point in every conversation, about how it is the society that has wronged her, so meh, her opinion doesn’t really matter. 

But, when Lyla mentioned Amelia being friendless, it got me thinking about myself. I don’t think I could call people my friends here. Like not that I don’t have friends or the people in my class or uni aren’t my friends. It just means that I don’t know them all like an actual friend yet. I don’t think I know myself yet. These people we go to school with, get coffee with, in a canteen, or in un café, depending on whose daddy is paying, I really don’t know them like that. Sometimes I feel envious of the girls who wait for each other at the gates or in washrooms, or the ones who would only enter together, even if that makes them late to class. Amelia and I aren’t like that. I don’t know what that feels like, to have that much of a person’s life be linked to yours, even if it is just platonically. I am pretty sure if I asked her about this Amelia would say something like Harshi I don’t care. I don’t need that. You don’t need that. Good for them, but that is them, and this is us. Well, at least that’s who I am. Tu apna khud dekh le.

She is quite simply her own person. She has her priorities straight. Sometimes that could come off as rude or cold, but it doesn’t matter to her. Me? I am a little differently wired. I like people. And I like when they like me. I don’t necessarily demand it of them but it does feel nice to be liked, doesn’t it? Even Karen smiles every time we see each other. I also smile back. I mean, it is what it is. We are all these little freaks in our own ways, and it would be so much nicer if people liked and appreciated that about each other. 

Amelia asked me if our conversation might make it to today’s blog when we were approaching the end of our conversation. I am glad she did. Now, it is here. I hope this wasn’t a breach of our friendship, my dear Amelia. I genuinely feel joy when we talk and I hope it is mutual. And I hope, you feel joy, my dearest reader. I hope this week’s entry wasn’t as gloomy as my other entries. I am growing, I think. 

A lot of my Queer friends have recently started on this Hinge app. They are all on there, matching and going on dates. I tried thinking about it yesterday. My father has recently cut off my wifi, so I don’t know if I want to waste my precious 1.5 GB a day mobile data on an app commenting on people’s profiles or sending them messages to keep them interested enough in my tired and restless posterior. I had conversations with two guys this past week.

One of them was from my past, kind of like my first crush. The other one was this cute button I had met during a nice project I did for a national cause. Yeah, she doin it out here. Both of the conversations were similar in their ways and a little different. Similar, because it sealed my fate in those relationships as nothing but platonic. And platonic here simply means they can’t reciprocate what I felt or feel. The old crush chapter closed and I am glad it did. That relationship wasn’t exactly healthy when it existed in my previous life. So, now that the boy I had a crush on has morphed into a not-so-attractive version of a working man with no sense of his life or future, I am glad that I don’t like him like that no more. I mean, can you imagine? Me with one sad-ass penis man with no sense of humour or a decent understanding of grammar in any language? No Fank You. (She said thank you with a mild English accent).

The other guy is chill. He is nice and has symmetrically aligned facial features, which I am realizing is like a certain type for me, but with him, I think there was just this fantasy attached. I fantasize about these knights in their shining armour a lot these days. Sometimes it helps with my depression, sometimes it just contributes to it. So, I am glad that is also done. I don’t need men. I don’t know if I even still like them, let’s check back in two years on my lesbianism. I need money right now. I need a safe place to live. I need air to breathe.

We never know when we start healing. When you face a loss of a parent, a best friend, a boyfriend, or well, anyone, you don’t exactly wake up one day and see a difference. You don’t just go hey I feel real nice today like today is the day I get my shitty life together… Like that doesn’t happen. I wished that so hard for so long. I think I still wish it sometimes. So I hope I notice when it happens, but more than that, I hope it happens. Au revoir, dearest reader. Till next time.