A Love Of Boys.

The world talks about women. But I'd like to talk about boys.

I love boys. I realized again two weeks ago that I absolutely love boys. I am in love with their slow lope, their fast drive, with their easy limbs and stretched out chests, and their slouched shoulders. With the way they talk to women and the way they talk to each other. The way they talk about women. The way they are affected by women. The way they smell – of testosterone and too much cologne. The way they preen – hair products and creams. Their quirks, their dreams. The way they want to grow up, and never stop having ideas for when they do. How boys self-destruct. How they go into their shells and how they hurt but never tell. How they're always up to no damn good. I like that I needn’t put on a show with them. I like how boys put themselves first, and I know there’s a lesson to be learnt there. How they are particular about the peculiar. How they protect and guard – both themselves and me.

I have been in love for so long with the easy nature of a group of boys in sync with each other, that for a long time as a teenager I thought I wanted to be one. I wanted so much to partake of their banter and baggy jeans, their heavy metal and ‘makeuplessness’. The way they sat around in groups of three and five and seven and ten and made a sport their lives. The way they committed to the perfection of it, equal parts enthusiastic exhilaration and healthy competition. The way they smoked their cigarettes on still summer evenings, dangling them between fingers then dragging on them from between finger and thumb. They’d hang them from between their mouths, the cheap brand, and lean down to tie shoelaces, or drum on their thighs. They’d strum at guitars in driveways and on rooftops. The way they caught with gymnast wrists a key chucked, a ball thrown, a can of coke, mid air. A whole world of male bonding that I became privilege to, fell in love with, and put up a house in.

And so I learnt their guarded ways. I learnt that they say everything except when it means something. I learnt how there is a whole 'nother boy inside every boy that does drugs. That there is a different boy under the skin of every boy after two drinks. That they don't understand women so they hurt them, and when they do they discard them. And when there is one, then there is nothing and no one else. That they're always looking for a yes...always looking for an out, always looking for a mountain to climb, a place to fly. That for every boy who is arrogant there are two who don't know how much they're worth. And then every once in a blue blue moon in an electric cloud sky, there's a humble boy. I learnt that boys sing in the shower, talk in their sleep, dance with left feet and take watches off when they play ball. They speak stupid and talk rough, but always with humor. What a blanket of humor their lives have. And then they talk about love – always under the guise of that humor. That everything that isn't humor ends up in songs – writing them, listening to them, belting them out drunkenly while cruising around town. I love how boys don’t care…and my god how they do.  

I love that the fabric of their tee shirts is soft and worn, second skin. The tiny holes in the cloth they won’t give up. Boxer shorts/ aversion to creases/ favorite sweatshirts/ the sound when he sneezes. How they like kisses and how they forget everything but then remember that one thing. And sometimes you meet a boy who remembers everything but says nothing. How they hurt and are quiet. How they dispense of hurt. Boys’ hands. Boys’ sneakers. Boys' sarcasm. Boys’ bed sheets. Boys when they lie awake at night, not sleeping, playing the same song over and over again. Stupid tattoos in secret places, beautiful tattoos that mean everything. How it feels like their whole world has stubble. How much boys eat. I love that I have met boys who have given me pieces of this world…access to it. Gentleman, assholes, pained souls, dreamers, humorists. Layered, complex, idiotic, exasperating, gentle, invested, devastatingly beautiful boys. I love them. I love them from their terrible hair product that leaves your fingers sticky, to their awkward shirt collars and elegant collarbones. I love the sweep of their spines, the belly fat they despise, the armpit with signature scent, the tear duct that claims to never have wept, the tried-to-grow-a-moustache but it didn’t work lip, scars-from-bike-accident legs, forgot-to-cut-them toenails, scared-it’ll-never-be-big-enough penis, don’t-like-that-patch-of-hair body part, hate-my-family, hate-my-bedroom, hate-my-past, hate-my-home but so damn proud contradiction. All of it. I love it because it is enough. It is so much. And it has been and always will be enough. And now you know it.

Agistri, Greece

You can taste here the salt on my skin, carried across by the breeze, deposited in places even whispers have not found. Hair matted into octopi locks you can plunge a palm into and be lost forever. My lips crack in the heat in a smile and between them is always a festive straw transporting Malibu lazily to my mouth. Ice clinks at the bottom of the glass and euros scatter on the small wooden tables that fringe the deck chairs. I turn to lie on my stomach, feet dangling at the ankle, book splayed at a forgotten page. The days are long and languid and we laugh, heady from sunshine and the intermittent coolness of dipping between the aqua sea. Constantly drowsy, mellow and sensual. My legs brown and their skin grows smooth in the heat. Toes trap sand. These Greek boys hang out, with smiles that transcend language. Barefoot we cross the island and eat with fingers sour fish bathed in olive oil. Lemon scented summer.

The tall blonde girl with perfect blue eyes, the bride-to-be and I: we walk up the hill at night. The sky above us is dark and violet like the squid ink in our bellies, the island below quiet save for songs somewhere in the distance. We walk to the 17^th century chapel and stand in the courtyard giggling like schoolgirls, white wine drenched mouths, skirts whipped by the wind. Then we tumble into an embrace like three children. The stars are like pinpricks promising dawn. I am reminded now of how the girl who is to be a bride in 24 hours, ten years ago would walk me at night, just like this to English graveyards. How tame we have grown with time. From grave hopping to wedding shopping.

It is always cocktail hour here. Suspended minutes. White tulle dress billowing in the wind…a dolphin lost at sea…counting ferries on the horizon…the days melt into each other and one day I reach into my bag looking for those sunglasses that everyone says are perfect and I bring out instead my phone. I stare at it like it is an indignant seashell after a trip to the beach. Picked up at the time so lovingly, now simply a reminder of another place, covered in sand around the edges. I put it to my ear and listen for waves but I find none.

Remove the turquoise bikini, string-by-string, and you will find the tan lines like scars showing you where I have come from. Where I must go back to. But for now let’s forget. For now let’s pretend all that exists is this perfect balance of heat and breeze…this glow and the smell of jasmine under my balcony window where white curtains flutter diaphanous, and the door is always open, like two knees falling away from each other. “Come in,” they say. And outside the balcony at night on the right the moon rises as pale and yellow as the roses on the trellis. In the distance the next island glitters like a younger sister going for a prom. On this balcony there is a painting that is always is crooked, and there is always a towel drying. At dawn I stand very still, a silhouette against the light beam, and I bury my face for a moment in that very towel. You know the smell – of citrus and love, yesterday’s sunscreen and today’s sunrise…someone else’s cigarette smoke and the pine-flavour the air boasts…olives, mosquito repellant, flowers, muscle, salt. This…this is Agistri…and I no longer know how to say no.

Travel Odd/ Travel Free

I’m not sure when the 'odd-travel' bug kicked in. Maybe it was post my board exams when everyone went to Goa, and I was hauled off to Bangladesh as a treat, by my hippie mum and ayurvedic-reflexologist aunt. “It’ll be so much fun!” They said with excitement as I sulked over the un-ringing landline, thinking of my friends donning bikinis (!) on beaches. Despite my whiny apprehension, it was fun. It was a whole lot of fun. We spent a few days in Calcutta and then made our way across the border by bus. We caught a boat and then floated down the rivers of the Bangladeshi Sunderbans for days…lying dreamily on the top deck watching bruise-like sunsets, buying fish from tiny boats going past, trekking barefoot through mangrove forests, chasing tiger paws, listening to Jim Morrison renditions early morning. I was 15 with a terrible “boy cut”, braces and baggy jeans but I’d never felt cooler, and when I got back to school I knew I’d been somewhere better. I’d been off the beaten track…

This year, 12 years later, my aunt, mum and I took another trip. This time we chose to explore the Kingdom of Sikkim. Once again we flew to Bengal (Bagdogra this time…my mum and aunt are both half-Bengali which may explain why we cosmically route everything through there), and took the road across the border at Rangpo. What followed were the best ten days I’ve had in a long time. Craggy peaks, Changu Lake surrounded by snow, yaks with woolen orange horn warmers, a million orchids, rosy cheeks, the Dalai Lama, ancient monasteries and baby monks skipping past us at every step. I came back misty-eyed, breathing easier.

Every time I’m back home from an ‘odd’ trip, once I’m through with Phase One of reminiscing, I put up a whole bunch of photos. Yup, I’m the girl that bombards you with an album full of sparkling blue water, cute kids, location-specific fauna, meals from afar and swoon-worthy scenery, every time I re-enter Delhi. And every time I do, I get a lot of comments on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and the other numerous noisy portals I use to communicate with the world. People write to me saying, “Those are beautiful,” and “wow,” and what not but most, most often I get this message: You’re so lucky.

Now here’s what – I won’t for one second tell you I’m not lucky. Because I am, and I am eternally grateful to God, the Universe and a guy called Nauriyal, who all changed my life in some way by making my main means of income travel. But I’ll also say this, that the Facebook album is a lie. Well, half a lie. It’s true, you only get to see the good bits. But there’s a whole different album and diary that you haven’t seen. For every luxury trip to the Maldives there’s a trip to a place like Digha. For every journey by business class, there are so many on three-tier trains that arrive in village destinations at 4am. And for every meal made in a French kitchen, there are five in a row that taste exactly the same as each other. My Spain album had a generous amount of pictures of me kickboxing with hot men on the beaches of Barcelona, but it didn’t tell you that we slept an average of 3 and a half hours a night, got in trouble with the police, got food poisoning and STILL shot a record 8 episodes in 10 days. There’s always a flipside…for instance, the Andamans are gorgeous, but they’re also a prime place for spiders in your teacup, scorpions in your shower and snakes slipping past your feet (all three did happen).

I began to notice that a lot of people confused ‘good’ travel with ‘luxury’ travel, too often. That a place is only worth oohing over if Anthony Hopkins was the last person to have slept in your bed (yes, that was at Tony Robbins’ resort in Fiji – Namale Spa). But that’s not true. I took one of the best trips of my life when I agreed to travel the Himalayas for someone for a month for a tiny (really it was TINY) amount of money. Because it was the Himalayas. Because a small compromise may be the richest ticket you ride. And by limiting your idea of great travel to “fancy-ass travel” you cut down your options (of course), but you also cut down how you see the world. If you won’t take a train, if you won’t trek, if you won’t live in a tent, if you refuse to walk, if you won’t eat from a street stall…you wont do a hundred other things either. And those other 100 things are all something you want to do.

I asked a few friends to come with me on certain trips. The non-luxury variety of trip. I promised it would be fun, and that all they had to pay for was their own travel there…in some cases, even this was taken care of. Some of the people I asked were the ones who had most mailed me complaining about how “dull” their lives were and how “lucky” I was. It was surprising then when most of the replies I got went something like this, “But where will we stay?” or “Do they have good food there?” Some even went as far as to say, “But I’ve heard there’s nothing to do there.” Of the ones who did come along, it was very few who saw the trips for what I did – as an opportunity to get out of the city, explore a weird (and maybe wonderful) new place, get lost, forget yourself and come back refreshed. There were consistent complaints about a lack of booze shops, the quality of hotel, the shitty restaurants and the bad service. This was small town India we were traveling and tiramisu was unfortunately not on the menu. I was disappointed. In fact, I was disappointed enough to blog about it here…something I haven’t done in a long time.

No adventure comes clean. Adventure is not easy. You cannot view the entire valley if you don’t climb to the top of the mountain. So here’s what…you can cry over dirty sheets, ugly hotels, cockroaches and musty rooms; you can complain about not enough food options and a tear in a towel, and that’s okay, but are you willing then to miss out on secret beaches, hidden treks to spectacular viewpoints, random gems, meeting beautiful strangers and being the first person to step foot in a new place? I have used the worst loos and I have gone hungry for hours on end but I have also dined on foggy hills with baby monks, and had them walk me through secret forests…I have eaten cherries fresh of trees that weren’t aware they had sprouted them yet. I have swum in freshwater lagoons so lonely, they have wept and turned to salt on seeing me. I have thrown up for two hours from seasickness then jumped into freezing cold water anyway, to have a shark grab the cage I’m in and shake me around like a leaf. I have wandered through Haryana’s dry hinterland for hours to find a mosque in which there was, housed and nurtured by a priestess, a temple and a gurudwara. It’s not hard to ignore the discomfort for a bigger dream.

Here’s a story… I took a boat ride out to sea one day in Orissa. The boatman told me for 500 rupees he would show me something special. I wasn’t sure I wanted to do this but I had an hour to kill and it was hot. I took a look at the boat and found it grubby and mouldy with a floor full of slime. “It’s worth seeing,” he said half-heartedly. I felt a bit sorry for him so praying what he wanted to show me wasn’t a knife or his nether regions, I trusted his kind face and set off in his boat. He began rowing and I noticed we were heading towards an island just off the mainland.  When we got there I hopped out and scanned the beach…I found there wasn’t a single footprint on it. He got out of the boat and began walking…I followed him and he walked me down the sand to a point where the river met the sea. We stopped finally and he breathed in the salty air. “Look,” he said, “how even though they’re both water, one is one shade of blue and the other is another.” Then, shaking his head he said, “ How is it, that this one doesn’t turn to salt…and that one doesn’t become sweet.” It was special indeed. I had a feeling while standing there that we may be the last people left on Earth. Sighing he began to walk on…I thanked him for showing me something special but he shook his head and pointed further up the long beach. We walked for a while, silently, no sound but the water, the wind, the shuffle. In the distance I saw a shadow, and as we approached it he said, “I found her here yesterday, but she’s gone now. The fishermen injured her…idiots.” On the beach, quiet and sad was a huge Olive Ridley Turtle, still majestic even in death. We sat there a long time quietly, nameless to one another, and mourned in the breeze. Then almost at the same moment we rose and walked back to the boat both affected forever by what we had shared in that long moment of sadness.

There is adventure knocking at your door at all times. But adventure doesn’t wear a pretty summer dress and smell like roses. Adventure is what takes you to the perennial valley of flowers. The choice always hovers. But it’s yours to make.

The two images here (above and below) show aspects of the same locations. The ones above are the ones I showed friends, the ones below are the meals I ate alone at each place, and are images I chose not to share.

Below: the stunning Buddha statue that HH Dalai Lama inaugurated while I was in Sikkim. Right next to it is the loo I used between the inauguration speeches. If only I could have captured the odor!

How do I explain?

I’ve been wondering how to explain to people, to men, what it feels like to be a woman in India. I’ve been struggling with it. I had begun to write something a few months ago but abandoned it in frustration, thinking, ‘I can never explain…’ With the events of the last month bringing this very issue to the forefront of national and international discourse and certainly to the frontier of my life, I realized with some urgency that the time to complete this piece was NOW. But I still struggle with the words.

How do I explain what it is like to be painfully aware of every movement your body makes? To be aware that you can’t raise your arm too high if your armpit isn’t shaved…that’s not a problem men have, is it? Or to not know how to sit. I can’t slouch because it isn’t ‘feminine’ and besides my top might slip too low and show some cleavage. But I mustn’t sit too straight either because that’s suggestive, isn’t it? Or is it aggressive? I’ve forgotten now what its fault is, but there was something. And my legs – does a real lady cross them or not? If my knees fall away from each other for a moment in relaxation, is that an invitation? How do I even begin to explain that you can never know what it’s like to walk down a road and be looked at only for your gender and have every inch of your visible and invisible skin crawl with the gaze of hungry, glazed eyes as they ravage you. It makes no difference whether or not I am beautiful or sexy or in a salwar kameez or mini skirt. One option apparently makes me easier to rape, the other makes me harder to. One option makes me invite rape, the other option lets rape gategrash. Frankly for many women in India, waking up invites rape. But I will still get looked at – just because I am a woman. As a woman I never walk out of my bedroom without checking what I have on. Even if I’m just roaming around the house, getting breakfast or reading a book on my couch, I am incredibly aware of whether I have a bra on under my tee shirt, or whether my shorts are too short, or whether my hair is untied and provocative. Every moment, marked with exhausting self-awareness.

Maybe it is that self-awareness that has made us the more introspective sex. I asked a male friend the other day, “Why do you do this to us? What have we ever done to you?” And he said, “You make us feel so insecure.” It’s the most honest thing I’ve heard in a long time. Because rape, let’s face it, is not about sex. It’s more about assertion than insertion…more about humiliation, domination, and at the bottom of it all, insecurity. Beneath the insecurity though is a lack of education and awareness that a society that’s organized on the basis of institutionalized bigotry and barbarity has failed to give its members.

In the days following this rape there have been rabid calls for castration and capital punishment. But as the comedian and columnist Rohan Joshi (amongst many, many others) pointed out – castration only creates psychos and capital punishment will ensure post-rape murder. Rohan also pointed out something a lot of us, especially women, have been wondering about. Punishment is all very well, but how are you going to change the very fabric of a stained society? You may cut down a poisoned tree but what of its roots? I don’t have the answer either but as someone who has been jostled on public transport, leered at for 25 years, and told I can’t wear what I want, go where I want, talk how I want or do what I want, I have certainly given it some thought. My answers are in the form of more questions, but that’s only because I’m as unsure of the solution as you. Some may find them simplistic, but perhaps simplifying the problem may help.

To begin with, why in a country like India is it not almost compulsory to have co-educational schools by this point? While the police claim it is the cause for sexual violence I disagree. How many men and women will we raise who barely speak with the opposite gender before the age of 17? The sort of segregated education we still allow only encourages the idea of “feminine mystique” and of women as “the other”. The average Indian boy grows up with two versions of the Indian women – his mother (the perfect wife, homemaker and baby bearer) and the Bollywood beauty (delicate &wife-like or the hyper-sexual item girl). When the women he finally meets as an adult fail to live up to or rather succumb to either stereotype, the answer (as with smashing a new toy that fails to work) is violence, because he hasn’t ever had to view her as an equal who too will inhabit various roles, has opinions and is as human as he is.

In the same vein, why isn’t sex education compulsory yet? The only access boys and girls have to sexual information is pornography, which comes with the burden of guilt and the undertone of filth, not to mention the most obvious issue of all which is that porn most often subjugates women, and portrays rape fantasies as the norm. With the kind of film industry we have, where a Kambakht Ishq will play to packed theatres but a “French kissing” scene is censored, perhaps leaving sex-ed to porn isn’t okay? Is it okay that a Yo Yo Honey Singh is the first place a teenager hears the word "vagina"? Perhaps providing boys with information about a woman’s body – her breasts, menstruation, vagina and ovaries – may lead to some sort of understanding of it and you won’t have a boy puncturing a girl’s vagina with a screw-driver to bring on her delayed period (YES, this did happen). Perhaps showing them a film of a couple making love, rather than a girl being pounded in the woods by three men should be an option? As long as India associates sex with filth, Indian men will treat women’s bodies as the sinning grounds.

And it isn’t simply Indian men who are at fault. I feel ashamed to say that I too have encouraged patriarchy. You all have. When a beautiful woman walks into a party and someone makes a snide comment about how short her dress is, we’ve laughed, instead of telling them to shut up and mind their own business. That too counts as patriarchy, as sexual harassment. And how long before we stand up for ourselves? For each other? When will we live in a culture where we no longer hungrily devour media that survives on creating and portraying drama between women? Where a mother-in-law and daughter-in-law are friends, where we don’t sleep with each other’s husbands, where we don’t shout at our maids because we don’t view women from a different class as our own. When will we allow our daughters to marry who they want, and tell them they can do exactly what their brothers can? I want to live in an India that stops falsely protecting its women by asking them to remain indoors, not wear skirts, and not go anywhere without a man. Where I can go to a gynaecologist and the words  “sexually active” and “married” do not automatically equate, and where a girl does not need to bring in dowry because she earns as much as her husband. Where do I go to report a boy brushing against me, or groping me as a rickshaw rolls by…grabbing my ass? What policeman will take seriously the words “He was walking too close to me” or “He calls me everyday even when I’ve told him I don’t want to talk”?

Instead of screaming for capital punishment, take a moment to think about what you sound like. Violence is borne of fear, and it almost always only breeds more violence. These men need to be punished, I agree, but more than anything they need HELP. Talk to boys, girls. Ask them why, ask them what we make them feel and tell them how we feel. And the boys that do things like this, sure, punish them, lock them up, keep them there, but can our government not organize ways to help them, to reform them, to figure out why someone would do this? A boy doesn’t rape for fun. A boy rapes because he knows no better. Because sex is that alien, elusive thing in the distance and when he feels powerless he combines the two. Men don’t rape because they lose control, they rape to feel in control. Here’s something interesting: not many newspapers are reporting a single disturbing fact about what we’re calling the ‘Delhi Rape Case’. The fact that the reason that horrific now ever-so-vivid “iron rod” was used, was in fact because they wanted to remove the DNA traces. That’s an act of fear, before it is one of violence. You don’t think of this ‘literally’ but there is a reason why we call a rapist a “coward”.

If you do want to cut off something, let it not be their heads or their penises or any such redundant appendage. Cut off their arms. Imagine not being able to eat again, or to work, or scratch oneself in public. To never masturbate again and to never, ever touch a woman again. Never hold another woman down. You find me cruel, but my life as an Indian woman is cruel. And it has been helpless, but no more.

To end, you ask me – why THIS rape? Why did you come pouring out for this one? I don’t know. All I know is that this rape sparked the fury of a nation, and if there is a movement that decies it and the structures that enable it, I want to be a part of it. When I went out there I found the critics were wrong – there were women there from every class, every religion, every state and caste and age. There were men there – old and young. This is not my struggle or yours. It is not a “student protest” or “youth movement” or the anger of the middle classes. This is no longer a struggle in isolation. It is ours, and it should not end, until a time comes when we do not just have the answers to the questions I ask, but we no longer recall the questions themselves.

The time is now. Our government may say that India is shining, but that’s just what it looks like from a distance. Come up close, join the fight, march with us in the streets and you will see they think this because they’re looking down from their high minarets. Down here you will see India is burning, and guess what? We hold the torches.

Some days I wake happy.

I don't feel like this today. I wish I did but I feel like my insides are giving way. I'm tired, sad, angry, unhealthy and uninspired today. But I'm hoping to change that. Another morning not so long ago, I wrote the following. And perhaps a time will come when I always wake with that energy. Here's putting a prayer out there...

There are mornings I wake up and the sun is in my eyes, and it blinds me to myself and I think I may really be beautiful. This is not the lament of a bikini model, but the soul song of a teenage girl who has never left me. And it will not be a morning where I will stand at the mirror and curse it for how much it reflects. I will instead reflect upon myself, and imagine my hair falls like mermaid locks. I will envision my skin as a desert of dry perfection, no rain of tears stains this plain. No mirror will show off the scars on my knees and the dents in my thigh; the down on my arms and the awry tattoos taken in haste and paid for with innocence. There will be no compulsive changing of outfits today, as I curse jeans and skinny ankles and dainty feet. Instead on this rare morning I will enjoy feeling ‘wholesome’. Say the world with me: wholesome. Full. A sponge cake with vanilla essence. There are mornings when I wake and I am this good, I am this right, I am a smile in slow motion, a cat after a meal. I am sweet as a macaron, but I am not delicate, no, I have lines and marks and shape and form, and these hips they swivel and the world moves around them. You cannot draw me with a pencil in straight lines. You will have to paint me with a brush loaded with bristles, and every curve, every swerve, makes a woman of me. Say the word again, wholesome. Ripe, lovely, resplendent. My chest is ambitious and my hips are cheeky in their confidence. My thighs pretend to be robust, to match my laugh. I am not salty like a crisp or some brittle breadstick, but sweet like a pudding. I have meringue toes and cherry nipples. There is no frost in this dessert, I am warm apple pie topped with honey and whipped cream. I have not the wispiness of dreams, but the bold, stout, lewdness of reality. Twenty nine years have turned me into a merry Modigliani.

I know men who have a love of this imperfection. Who don't love a woman despite her flaws but for her flaws. Who have embraced the signs of my mortality that insist that I be loved now for I may be lost tomorrow. The words of my past printed on my skin like a Book Of Clues for the attentive lover. The very essence of womanliness appearing in streaks across my thighs, showing they have walked the Earth wild. The creasing of my mouth, saying I have laughed, and eyes explaining how much I have cried. The imperfections will show you a woman who has seen and felt and been so much. Perhaps I am after all finally what I always desired to be - a woman of the world. One who has grown and shrunk and grown again over the years. How my body has echoed my moods.

The sands of time run through my shape and they shout out in an alto, not a soprano voice, “She has been worthwhile!” I will listen to this song of happiness and pretend the whole world thinks like my cocky inner self does today, and tell myself, “Sshhh...You are the most beautiful girl in the world.”