Anindita Sengupta

“We shall disallow travel and the mingling of songs”—this line from Jeet Thayil’s poem ‘Rules for Citizens’ makes me think about the Gay Pride Parade. Because travel is of so many kinds, much of it disallowed. At this year’s Bangalore Pride on Sunday, there was much mingling of songs as well.

Travel. There was a boy I’ve met a few times. He always struck me as attractive but on Sunday, he was wearing shimmery pants, an open jacket, long hair. His eyes were lined. His skin was cinnamon. He looked beautiful. Sexy and scared and triumphant all at once. What is the distance, I wonder, between that person and the person he is forced to be most of the time? For him, how far was the journey from home to Town Hall, really?

Mingling of songs. At the centre of the march, there were flags, drums, raucous songs. All kinds of identity bits spiralled around it: hijra, kothi, double decker, bisexual, lesbian, queer, straight. The frail, the firm, the defiant, the inured to injury.

Gay pride is really about the freedom to be — and love — who one chooses. Sexuality (and love), like gender, is a continuum. Where we fall on this continuum like feathers on a clothesline, nobody can know. How strange and sad it is  that there are those who insist on legislating, moralizing, straitjacketing and politicking around it.

Even stranger that some do not believe that this is an important freedom. In a world where the pursuit of money is slavish, where we’ve beaten the environment to death with our appetites for material things, what can be more important than privileging, for once, other things like identity and love?  It’s what (barely) saves us.

And it was fantastic to see evidence of this on the streets. The parade was noisy, large, full-of-itself, serious and fun all at the same time. Just as it should be. How wonderful it would be, how colourful and joyous, if such freedom existed every day. The city could span its different stories, instead of relegating them to niches and corners, muffled and trussed. It could become all of them.

*Cross-posted at Ultra Violet

Sankey Tank is rather pretty if one can forget about the crowds and look at other things.

Dobby and a very rumpled A in the background.

They both started getting quite grumpy about being asked to pose.

And finally ignored me altogether.

I’ve been in a sea-craving blue funk lately. I’m sure it’s ridiculous but there are times when I feel physically claustrophobic because I’m eight hours inland. Anyway all my moaning and bitching will find reprieve over the long weekend when we drive down to Pondicherry. Cheered by the thought, I’m able to appreciate Bangalore for all its other pleasures: the Pomegranate tree in my garden which now has two or three near-ripe fruits on it, the flourish of Anthuriums which seem to have sprung up overnight, squirrels furring up the neighbour’s mango tree.

***

Also, the cat has birthed a litter in the tiny space between my garden wall and the neighbour’s house. The kittens are small and downy, coal-black with green eyes like their mother. The wall is high enough to protect them from Dobby, my resident lion, but I can easily pop my head over it when I want to look at them. The worrying thing is that their mother is getting more adventurous in her forays for food. Not only does she saunter through our garden (risking Dobby’s wrath) but the other day, I came into the living room to see a whisk of black tail disappear through the back door. She had been rummaging about in our kitchen.

Dobby’s almost had a stand-off with her on two occasions. So far, she’s been too clever for him.

***

And the other day, we had an unexpected visitor.

I have an uneasy relationship with bats. Growing up in Bombay, many mornings I woke up to see one suspended from the ceiling fan above me. That’s never happened to me here. (Do bats prefer 6th-floor seaside apartments to ground-floor flats?) But I’m not quite over the creeps of opening eyes to a winged rodent hanging over my prone body, my mother whispering tensely, ‘Don’t be scared. Move slowly.’

Bat Conservation International has a lot of reassuring information on bats in buildings but I suspect few people would be okay living with bats as tenants. This doesn’t take away from our fascination with the creatures, of course. In fact, the myth-making (Count Dracula, Batman) that surrounds them is quite dependent on our unease and a certain sense of awe.

One of the things I find interesting is that bat wings are structurally very close to the human hand. They even have thumbs, clawed ones. I think this is one of the things that we find least appealing about them — their bony wings as opposed to the fluffy, feathered versions on birds. But this also makes it easier to co-opt them into our myths. I don’t think a superhero with fake bird feathers would work quite as well.

Not snow geese, these. But beautiful all the same. Or at least, i think so. I’ve always liked geese despite their honking and their ill reputation as silly creatures. I think it’s because of ‘the ugly duckling’, one of my favourite fairy tale characters when i was little. Anyway, these were pets at one of the resorts where i stayed. They recently bred goslings, and grown-ups and babies were all having a jolly time in the green-brown pool.

And here is the poem ‘Snow Geese’ by Mary Oliver. Clearly, she likes geese too.