in which we find, as suspected, i'm a sap

Dear reader,

I'm writing to you from my childhood home in South Calcutta. It's a shabby yellow building with exposed concrete, badly in need of a paint-job, but doomed to continue like it has for the past twenty years, because of mixed ownership. Up in my half-apartment on the third floor, the walls are still the purple and pink that I picked out at fifteen.

IF U READ NOTHING ELSE, PLEASE DO SEE THE LITTLE PARAGRAPH AT THE END OF THIS POST.

I'm here for a friend's wedding. The bride, T is someone I became friends with over the internet through mutually commenting on Facebook posts. She was a batch-mate of my then-boyfriend, and over ten years across Ontario, Buffalo, the Internet, Calcutta, Boston, Bangalore, Pondicherry and Delhi, we became like family. We got our first tattoos together. T taught me how to enjoy beer, fill in my sparse eyebrows and leave a relationship that made me less myself. It's funny to see someone you've known across different eras, dating-scenarios, jobs and life-ordeals get married. It was my first time seeing her husband, L, whom she met after moving to Bonn a few months before the pandemic. They seemed to fit together. When T got upset over a family thing, he was there, understatedly saying how it was too bad. Calming with his presence and empathy but not doing a whole lot. It was easy to imagine them decorating an apartment together, going on hikes and making many hundreds of weeknight dinners over decades. It just made sense.

The night before we flew in to Calcutta (always stressful for me because of family tensions) I sobbed as I packed and told O the story of our friendship. I remembered that vegan yoga dude she dated with a [redacted] [redacted], the boring guy she put off breaking up with because his family of professors was so much fun, the serious relationship in her late twenties with someone she wanted to marry who disappointed her repeatedly, then died. It's been a long journey for our girl as they say. I couldn't believe that it was finally happening for her. I'm so relieved and happy that it has.

Sorry for making this edition about the oft-discoursed subject of accomplished Indian women and their lack of suitable partners, but it's something that plagues my friends and me. We grew up seeing often dysfunctional marriages, turbulent households, and mothers who were halfway between emancipated working-women and dutiful wives, mothers and daughters-in-law. I don't think a lot of my mum's generation had the freedom to experience the full spectrum of choose-your-own-adventure style twenties that we did -- be it in relation to work or love. So we were determined, many of us, not to marry into unhappy relationships, to be independent and have financial freedom, passions and career ambitions of our own, meaningful friendships that largely formed the core of our support system, especially when we lived away from our hometowns and families.

My friends and I are in our mid-thirties to forties. We've achieved a reasonable level of career-success, self-knowledge and skills at this point. Also the requisite hopes and heartbreaks of relationships that ended, sometimes in terribly traumatic ways, sometimes in cruelly ordinary discontent or distance. I know only a handful of people who have no desire for romantic companionship.

This desire for a happily-ever-after, drummed into us by societal expectations and/or the human longing for romantic intimacy, continues to haunt. Some of this can be solved by living close (and I mean walking-distance close) to friends whom you see frequently and share life-chores, trips, doctors visits, crises and finances with when necessary.

Feminism and the desire to live our own lives, no one else's, make it so that we won't necessarily settle. During an annihilating breakup, my best friend Mishtu who had previously dated the same bad man (yes I was messy in my twenties, no I won't ever do it again, yes I'm so grateful she forgave me) told me something I've never forgotten: Better to be in a good relationship than none, but better to be single than in a bad relationship.

So we make our lives good, single or not. We don't take shit. We don't self-abandon. We insist on enjoying and appreciating our lives even in scenes that don't have a romantic partner in them. The room, the cats, the bad film with a best friend, the barging into someone's room when they're asleep and making them make you coffee, scolding a late-riser-heavy smoker into more exercise and sun first thing in the morning. The intimacy of bad behaviour.

My friend A messaged me a picture of a fuckboy looking Delhi boy in a loose t-shirt and a big afro the other day saying, found Slash on Hinge. Run far away, was my advice. She's dated too many younger men who don't know what they want and will make it your problem. I've put a moratorium on anyone under thirty -- not that those people can't fuck you up, but when they do it won't be because of their life-stage. She wanted to go on a date with him anyway. She's been working too hard at her Serious political job, and hasn't had an actual relationship in years. Attempts to date women have fizzled out. She needs a cuddle. And honestly, I get it. Go then, I said, but be careful.

Sometimes we make what looks like the same terrible move on repeat. But what do you do when there are no good options? I tore through Kiran Desai's big fat novel The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny (enjoyed, will likely post on IG after some thinking) and there's a recurring line in that goes, 'Happiness was for other people'. That's the feeling I mean.

 Me? I'm a sap. A romantic through and through. I dream about living a good, big life with the love of my life by my side. I see Fran Kubelik running through the streets of New York to Bud Baxter in The Apartment.

Her cracked hand-mirror, her jaded heart made redundant. Her unhappy years falling behind her. I'm a sap, Auld Land Syne makes me cry. Life wises all of us up, but there's a small, soft part that can't help the dream of a true comrade, a ride-or-die. I guess we never know if our happy ending is coming until we get there. And I don't know either you know.

It sucks that romantic love is, to a great degree, still about luck. Anyway that's why I was sobbing about T. I can't believe she found it. It can always go down the shitter of course, but to get here still feels like an insane stroke of goodwill on part of the universe. To me at least, making it to marriage, with a good relationship, feels like it would register kind of like an enormous relief.

It's hard out here. It's a relief to stop looking.

*

In other news I'm opening up workshops again. Essaying (I) and Essaying (II) will commence at the end of April. The structure is simple: we meet online over five weeks every Saturday or Sunday, to learn how to write good, interesting and original contemporary essays. I taught two batches of Essaying (I) last year and loved it both times. I want to add a layer of complexity, so for those who have already taken the first course and are keen to keep studying the essay form and get weird, we're going to dive deeper and practice more writing with Essaying (II). There was so much I couldn't get to with the first course despite the amount we covered.

I want to read Anne Fadiman and Virginia Woolf and Mary Ruefle, and Hanif Abdurraqib, and, and, and. You get the picture. You can sign up here for Essaying II and email me with any questions at workshopburi@gmail.com.

You can sign up here for the third batch of Essaying I.

I recently taught at the art-writers workshop in Kochi for the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, and realised it's time I returned to the classroom. You can see a bit of that here.

I'm making small gains in being able to manage my triggers around my family. Mostly coming home is like 'Live from 𝙽̶𝚎̶𝚠̶ ̶𝚈̶𝚘̶𝚛̶𝚔̶ Calcutta, it's 𝚂̶𝚊̶𝚝̶𝚞̶𝚛̶𝚍̶𝚊̶𝚢̶ ̶𝙽̶𝚒̶𝚐̶𝚑̶𝚝̶ Childhood Trauma!' This time I've been on no Clonazepam or the milder Alprazolam even though I brought them, and have been largely sober. It's an effort but it's getting more doable with time -- obviously having O with me is tremendously grounding. Still with OCD and intrusive thoughts, the claw of fear and panic in your gut when you're near a triggering situation -- in this case the very setting of home -- is impossible to explain to someone who doesn't have it. So I guess I'm proud of myself for paddling madly under (mostly) placid water the way a duck does, you know?

There's no paywall on this one, but I would greatly appreciate if you'd buy an annual subscription, tell a friend and share. {CLICK ON THE READ MORE/SUBSCRIBE BUTTON BELOW TO DO SO.] We also have individual monthly issues. I got into an exciting writer's workshop this summer but the travel and tuition are way above my pay-grade. I'm trying to raise the money through workshops etc, so if you could spread the word about Essaying I and II above, that would be great too.

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