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

The road glistens like fine silk,
grey and silver, an old sari
hung out to dry
on that familiar line
loping into the distance–
my insatiable need for a
different place.

I squint at water,
slide grief and hope
back and forth
across the smoky windshield.

***

This picture was taken from inside the car on a rainy afternoon while travelling down East Coast Road near Chennai.

I was in Malaysia recently, working (well, sort of) at a golf resort in Johor and then holidaying in KL. The first part of my trip went off smoothly but the excitement started when I reached KL. A close friend who lives in KL had left the keys to her apartment for me with her security guard, Stanley. (She was in Africa at the time.) Unfortunately, Stanley was having a bad day (gastric problems, his colleague later whispered to me) and feeling low and scatty. He went home with the keys when his shift changed. So I found myself standing outside her apartment building at 10 pm facing blank stares from the other security guard. Now, communication not so good between these guys. Because when I got him to call Stanley, nothing came up. It took all night and frantic calls from Africa to jog Stanley’s memory. (“Ah, that key! Why didn’t you say so earlier?”)

Meanwhile, I had thrown myself at the mercy of strangers. It’s a long and blood-curling story but it included dumping my strolley with the security guards (I figured it was better to stay agile and inconspicuous and nobody would want a bunch of jeans and some rather snazzy shoes) and taking lifts from various harmless-looking people, including a pizza delivery guy, because there were no  taxis in sight. Not a single one. Anyway, I ended up in a hotel for the night, without being robbed or worse, got the key from Stanley the next day (without killing either security guard) and spent the next two and a half days in relative safety.

I did all the usual things after that. The tickets to the Petronas Tower skybridge were sold out when I got there but I walked to KL Tower (which we are told has the better view anyway), went on a magical bus ride in the rain (the KL hop on-hop off), haggled at Chinatown, walked some 3000 miles of mall floor, and ate. There was something about the city that I found unnerving though. Maybe, it was all the warnings about thievery. Or the quiet swooshing of fast cars on streets empty of people after dark. Perhaps, it was just the way my stay in the city had begun.

Places affect us in ways we sometimes don’t fully understand until later. And I suspect that KL made me a more wary person than I usually am. Logically, there was no reason for this. Key mix-ups can happen anywhere and I would have probably felt as lost in any city if I was alone and temporarily homeless at night. Plus I keep reminding myself of all those wonderful strangers who helped me and did not, in fact, harm me.

But reactions to a place are driven by instinct and emotion, and logic has little to do with it. And emotion-wise, KL was the equivalent of the guy who spooks you on the first date. You may like him more when you get to know him better — but you can never forget that first cringe-inducing moment.

Plus, I have problems with places which don’t have a million people on the street at all hours. I used to find even Bangalore dismally deserted after living 22 years in Mumbai. I mean, I miss Churchgate station at rush hour. You know, the crowd of about two hundred total strangers who look like they may stampede any moment? And then you fall in step and realise the crowd has a rhythm. I always associate that walk with music in my head. Anyway, yes, it’s a good reason for me to not live in many places in the world.

Most of my pictures of KL (Petronas Towers and the like) reflect a starkness I was feeling, a tensing in the gut. Gigantic towers rising into the sky, grey and solipsistic. Cityscapes in miniature viewed from some abominable height. That sort of thing. But these, taken at the KLCC Aquaria, I like.

Here are the long overdue pictures of Pondicherry.

The view from the seafront restaurant at hotel ‘The Promenade’

A Pondicherry cop waddling smartly across the street

Sunlight filtering through the Big Banyan near the Matri Mandir at Auroville

…and another view of the Big Banyan

A bohemian restaurant and art studio called Le Space in the French part of town

A cycle rickshaw parked outside the restaurant as its driver steps into a bar

Magnum-sized bottles at the bar at Hotel de Pondicherry

One the way back, we stopped at Taj Fisherman’s Cove for lunch

…where the restaurant overlooked blue sea and a solitary crow on the beach