The Wind From Far Away

Why There Are 395292 Andheri Wests

I picked up Italo Calvino’s Marcovaldo a couple of days ago, and was struck by the beauty of its first sentence:

The wind, coming to the city from far away, brings it unusual gifts, noticed by only a few sensitive souls, such as hay-fever victims, who sneeze at the pollen from flowers of other lands.

I love how, in the space of a sentence, Calvino zooms in from the broad view (the wind from far away) to the specific image of a hay-fever victim sneezing because of pollen. Small things are the whole thing, and the protagonist of this collection of stories, Marcovaldo, is all about the pollen — while the book also gives us the wind.

The sentence also tells us something about the world. The wind contains multitudes; we can only perceive some of its gifts; we don’t see what others see.

I may sneeze because of pollen, and you may not know why. (Even I may not know why.) Or an outsider could come to my town and see things that are unseen to me, even though I live here. I could have normalised everything good and bad about this place; an outsider could see it with different eyes, and could make me see it differently.

These are differences at the level of an individual. I have lived in Andheri for all of this century — but no one sees it like I do, even someone who has lived all these years here as well. Google tells me the population of Andheri West is 395292. Well, I tell you that there are 395292 Andheri Wests.

The Monster Who Appears, Appears in Different Places

One Saturday in December, I saw Hirokazu Kore-eda’s great film, Monster. The film begins with a sequence of events from one particular point of view. You get invested as a viewer, start feeling for one character, pass judgement on another, feel emotions. Then the perspective shifts and you get the same story from another point of view. You are like, Oh. Then it shifts again, and you get a third point of view. Once again, you realise, nothing is as it seemed.

This sounds like Rashomon, but there is a subtle difference. Kore-eda said in an interview:

I feel that it’s fundamentally different from Rashomon, because in Rashomon, each character, when they go back through the story again, they actually end up being a different character within the film, within the story, whatever specific story it is. Whereas with this, the people don’t change, but the monster who appears, appears in different places. So when I was directing whoever was acting in that particular scene, I would say to them: “You see the monster behind this person, this is what’s happening.” So it was a very different way of approaching it.

You’ll have to see the film to get what he means — and you should. For me, the central theme of the film is not that we remember things differently, but that everything is unknowable in a fundamental sense. We can never know the whole truth, but we can tell ourselves a story that can capture some of it — though even a selective capturing is a falsehood.

In an earlier post, I wrote about how we are strangers to each other. I would add that not only can we never truly know each other, we can’t even truly know what happened between us. All events are inexplicable. That we often remember shared events differently is not only due to the unreliability of memory, but also to the complexity of life.

This calls for humility. Let us not be too certain of ourselves. Let us not be too judgemental of others.

Let us also not deny the ways in which others see the world, even if our own gaze is different.

That Extra Layer of Awareness

It turns out that I am writing this post on Women’s Day. At one level, it feels absurd because women are half of people. Why a special day? What about the rest of the year?

At another level, I’m happy it exists because it gives us all a chance to surface things that went underground, that got normalised and are unseen. And there is much that men don’t see about the lives of women.

Women carry an extra layer of forced awareness about the world that men are not even aware of. I don’t feel wary when I walk down a deserted street at night. I don’t look around me when I enter an elevator to see who else is there. I am writing this in a Starbucks right now, and in all the thousands of hours I have spent here, I have never been conscious of anyone’s gaze on me.

As I wrote in an essay years ago:

Men don’t get this because for all of us, our gender is not a factor in our everyday lives. I don’t need to question myself or alter my behaviour because of my maleness. Women carry the burden of their gender in everything they do: while commuting, while expressing themselves in work meetings in rooms full of male egos, while going out for evenings walks, while deciding what to wear, or not to wear. What might be a trivial event for a man – someone puts his hand on your thigh while explaining something – can cause great discomfort to a woman, and much self-doubt. (“Am I over-reacting? Did I do something to invite this?”)

To back to the metaphor I invoked at the start of this piece, women feel the pollen in the wind around them.

Nationalism and Denial

You would have heard the recent news of the Spanish vloggers who were attacked in Jharkand recently. The man was held at knife point and tied up; the woman was raped by seven men. They made a post telling the world what happened. The government asked them to take the post down. The police got into action and arrested some of the culprits.

Everything about this was appalling. I want to talk about two kinds of pollen that made me sneeze.

One, nationalism. For many, this was not a law-and-order issue but a matter of public relations. The nation must not be shown in a bad light.

In response to a tweet about another such experience, the head of our National Commission for Women tweeted:

Did you ever report the incident to Police? If not than you are totally an irresponsible person. Writing only on social media and defaming whole country is not good choice.

It tells you something about the times that many people think that narrative matters more than reality. How the country is viewed by others matters more than what the country is. This is crazy and delusional. Even in politics, the facade always crumbles — though it does take time, yes.

Two, denial. Many people deny that India has a misogyny problem or a rule-of-law problem. This is nuts. You have to be blind to feel that India is a good country for women. Pretty much every woman in this country has been harassed in some way or the other in their lives. If you are a man in India, ask the women in your life if they have been groped in public places or felt violated. Ask — and listen.

How much of this blindness is wilful? I don’t know. I don’t know which kind of blindness is worse — the knowing type or the unknowing type.

Let’s Coddiwomple

Via Sukhada, allow me to present the word of the day:

CODDIWOMPLE — To travel purposefully toward an as-yet-unknown destination.

I love this. This sounds similar to my new mantra, which I shared with you in an earlier post: Playing to Play.

I urge you to coddiwomple. “Travel purposefully.” Movement and purpose. That’s all we need. The right destinations will come on their own then.

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Illlustrations by Simahina.

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