Anindita Sengupta

I’m not the kind of person who likes participating in marches. Most of the time, I’m not sure what difference they’ll make. But in a country where homosexuality is still illegal, the sheer visibility of the gay pride parade on Sunday made it something worth talking about. (It was Bangalore’s first gay pride parade.) And because sexual freedom is something I feel strongly about, I actually stirred myself (and A) post lunch and made it to JC Road where we joined the parade halfway.

Guesstimates of how many would turn up had ranged from 50 to 1000. The actual number was 500, which most of us agreed was not bad. This consisted of gays, lesbians, hijras, kothis and many straight people who wanted to express solidarity. The mood was an edgy mix of defiance and celebration; lots of colourful flags swished in the breeze; and while some faces were masked, others were joyfully bare. The media had turned up in droves and the police were surprisingly un-troublesome. Here are some snapshots…

Cross posted on UV

The highest compliment in my grandmother’s book was “What a sweet girl! She keeps her mouth stitched up.” Of course, in Bengali, this has a nicer ring to it but it essentially means a girl who keeps quiet, who is silent in the face of adversity (and torture and ill-treatment), who endures. I grew up hearing this and, of course, consequently thought of myself as a very bad girl indeed. For as a child, I was what is commonly called ‘moophat’ in Hindi, loosely meaning brash and thoughtlessly expressive. Over the years, I mellowed (—or was made to?) and recently, I have sometimes found myself unable to speak even when it is urgently, desperately required. Continue reading

The mood for period drama struck some time last week and I satisfied it by watching the 1983 BBC miniseries version of Jane Eyre starring Timothy Dalton and Zelah Clarke. Independence is a pivotal theme in Jane Eyre and each reading/watching leads to thoughts on this. Bronte’s concern with this is clear right from the beginning but comes into sharp focus when Jane leaves Thornfield Hall after her marriage to Rochester is abruptly called off. She has to leave him because staying would be contrary to her code of ethics. She sets off into the world with only a few coins and no job. One can only imagine how bereft and alone she must feel at this point. Continue reading

I felt inadequate and a little afraid, without quite knowing why.

Was it her toughness? Her anger? Her warmth? Was it the timbre of her voice? Or the whiplash of her patience? Was it the strength of eyes? The weight of tears? The lines on face or hands? Was it her otherness? Or sameness? The particularities of her life? Or the universalities of ‘their kind’? Was it the imagining of rejections so vast and so wide that no earth can swallow them? Continue reading

(Dearest) Hajira,

I am writing to inform you (regretfully) that you will never be a doctor. Today, when I came to your house by chance (because you saw me passing on your street and I will always remember how I heard a delighted “hi” – you were imitating what I had said while meeting and leaving last time – and looked up and there on the rooftop, your energetic, eager, bespectacled face) and met your brother and asked him if you would work later, he shook his head quite firmly and said that it was out of the question. Continue reading