Issue 4: The Editors Speak
Cover art by Uma Bhojraj (@umirayeah on Instagram)
2020
I often feel nostalgic for the year 2020. It’s been barely 2 years since the world stopped spinning on its axis momentarily and everyone had to shutter themselves as a result. Even though my concept of time has not fully recovered since that seismic shift in how we function, I still find myself yearning to wake up in my pre-pandemic room.
I oddly long for the moments I would spend binge-watching the shows I always said I was going to (but never did) and playing the games that were once resigned to a dusty fate on my Nintendo Switch Lite. I was jobless and subsisting on my paltry savings, yet, I was surprisingly accepting of it all. Like the rest of the world, I partitioned my days into manageable segments to keep my sanity going and my body functioning. Some blocks of days were dedicated to sieving through my belongings, holding things close to my chest to sense if any joy remained. Other days were spent trying to put together a home workout station in a corner of my room as I tried my best to adhere to some form of fitness to combat the sedentary life I was too comfortable with. And once every two weeks, I’d clumsily slip my fingers into the finicky parts of a disposable plastic glove, suit up with a face shield and mask to head to NTUC at midnight to gingerly shop for groceries. Everything felt like an infraction during the circuit breaker.
Nostalgia is often tethered to the effervescent warmth we feel when reliving the past. Last I checked, 2020 was an inferno of anxiety, weight gain and depression naps. The cards were undoubtedly stacked against me but everyone else was equally in complete shambles. That made 2020 redeemable. Everywhere I looked, all of us had our necks bent and strained as we desperately licked our wounds. The clueless glaze in my eyes was justified. The haunting helplessness was justified. The pat on the back for taking a shower – everything was justified because we were all collectively struggling in our bedrooms. Every bad thought that swirled in my mind was rationalised through the lens of the pandemic. I miss pinning the blame of any inadequacy I had on the virus. I miss the normalcy of feeling like utter shit.
Right now, I can only accept that this is how (my) mediocrity feels like. I’m still sitting down with my hands interlaced, thumbs circling around each other at a tolerable pace as the rest of the world speeds up their post-pandemic jog into a sprint. We’re back to how nobody waits for the traffic lights to turn green before they cross, to how aunties shove past me for the reserved seats, to how every little mistake is singularly my fault because there simply isn’t any other wave of crippling disease to offload my blame to. So, what do people like me do while everyone we know reverts to their old habits of moving forward unflinchingly?
We try.
Despite how deviously stacked Life’s cards can be, we just have to keep trying – be it enthusiastically or reluctantly. I believe our lineup of poets have successfully showcased the many shades of trying we have adopted in our lives. In Subash Kumar’s ‘Choke’, we see how one’s attempt at resisting brown machismo can be clouded with our own internalised flirtations with it. Akash Mattupalli’s ‘Diwali’ encourages us to confront why we try to educate others on our larger-than-life customs despite their essentialised and stereotypical perceptions of our community. For those who have been miles away from your family, Meghana Vinai’s ‘food therapy for cold college days’ encapsulates everything we have tried to feel closer to home, even if it means ruining a rice cooker. In contrast, ‘What To Do When Your Girlfriend Is In Love With Birds’ by Roohi Ghelani reminds us that sometimes, you don’t have to try too hard with your loved one – just be there and be present. Kiran Kaur Dhaliwal’s ‘If looking is loving then gazing is grieving’ depicts how we try to find our value through the idols we watch while ‘Dead Tongue’ by Tarini Tilve is a gory prose poem of the lengths we go to just to fit in.
All in all, I’m thankful to have these poets help me remember the value of consistently trying. Yes, I still look back on 2020 from time to time, missing the ease of living in my room despite the anxieties that lurked just beyond my front door. Mediocre or not, I’m still here and I’m still trying to look ahead, far beyond the splay of Life’s cards.
Always trying,
Jaryl
In Memory Of
This year, I lost my favourite person in the world. After a long battle with a terminal illness, my father took his last gasping breath on a balmy Sunday afternoon in March. In the initial days after his passing, I struggled to sleep. It almost felt wrong to rest. So, I would lie beside my grieving mother in my parents’ king-sized bed and wonder whether he was still with us in the home he worked decades to own. Unable to bear his audible absence, I would distract myself with something quite unlikely: Bridgerton. In particular, the second season starring British Indian actresses Simone Ashley and Charithra Chandran. I would watch the show under my blanket late into those nights, desperate to immerse myself in something frivolous (read: raunchy), unapologetically brown (even if it was quite a rojak representation), and separate from the crushing weight of reality. But, as I soon realised, death is everywhere, especially in stories. In a pivotal episode that a kind friend had warned me about, young Viscount Anthony Bridgerton watches his father die before him. This moment catapults him into becoming the head of his family, taking charge of matters he has yet to understand. His unarticulated, unprocessed grief and the weight of his mother’s redirected expectations (from his father to him) harden him as a result, a consequence he takes in his stride. These are simply the cards he has been dealt with, just as his father was destined to die suddenly from anaphylaxis after a bee sting.
My father was expected to accept his cards too, even if they destined him for undeserved tragedy; his illness had no cure, and the doctors had nothing to offer but a vague prognosis for his demise. As I watched Anthony’s horror unfold onscreen, paralleling my own in some ways, it occurred to me that the greatest betrayal of Life is perhaps not that we are dealt these cards at all. Instead, it is the fact that none of us get to look the Dealer in the eye as they lay them down. We have no way of knowing if they feel immense guilt. We cannot cuss them out. We do not get to ask why, demand a reshuffle, or pick the cards ourselves. Even if we have a nagging suspicion that the deck was rigged to begin with, we do not get to report the Dealer to HR or the equivalent. What remains is an unchangeable bottom-line – we are helpless and must resign to fate.
Yet, while curating this fourth issue “Wildcard,” I have been reminded of how storytelling always finds a way. Through the meadow of our imagination, we can transcend this helplessness. We can interrogate and reimagine these unkind, merciless realities. We can resist these cards, even find ways to toss the entire deck out. We can even tell the Dealer to “Fuck right off!” if that so suits our sensibilities.
Our fiction writers, Yvonne Arivalagan and Anusha K, have done just that – both their stories present protagonists who attempt to resist the cards they have been dealt. In “This Masala Tastes Like Sand,” a young man, over a tense meal of masala thosai with his mother, learns to choose his own cards and speak up for himself. In “Number One,” a young lawyer considers the cards she has been dealt as a racial minority and actively tries to beat the glass ceiling. Acceptance and resignation, while considered, find less room in these stories where resistance begins to rear its magnificent head. But they are not entirely out of the picture either. What emerges is a careful tango between the protagonists and the Dealer, to test the limits and push the boundaries of supposed Destiny.
If we contemplate hard enough, we will find that these stories are not entirely divorced from reality either. Sure, they teach us the possibilities of what can be. But they also give us new lenses through which we can understand life, the living, and the dead as they are. My father might have been resigned to his dying, but he still made sure to exercise his agency. He had long told his doctors that he refused anything invasive. Till the very end, even when he could only communicate by blinking, he stuck to his guns. He wanted to live, but not with tubes sticking into and out of his body. He knew he would rather go if it meant leaving with some dignity intact, and he made sure we all respected his decision too. Even if it broke all of us, including him. He taught us that acceptance and resistance need not be mutually exclusive. Perhaps, there’s a middle ground.
Still, I prefer to imagine that if I ever get to meet his Dealer one day, I would look that fucker squarely in the eye and throw a solid punch. My first ever, in fact. Then, my father and I would bump fists (mine, bloody) and commence our tango instead. After all, it only takes two, right?
Rehearsing my punches,
Prasanthi