Fragmentalism// A way of thinking that breaks down reality into smaller parts, often associated with reductionist modes of thought.
Father often touched himself while he sat alone on his bed. His right palm went up the left shoulder, climbing down with the same pressure. Then the left palm returned the favour to the right arm, shoulder. At times, he stretched both arms together and clapped loudly, not in appreciation but exercise. Thumb touched thumb, index finger touched index finger, little finger met little finger even if most quietly amongst all. He’d massage his legs often, at times with oil, other times without. I don’t remember if he cracked his own toes the way he cracked others’. That uneasy sound, that quick release!
Father hugged another like he was wrapping a human in a gift sheet. His hugs were long, dug-in kinds, felt. His skin, much-wrinkled in the seventh decade of his life, rarely received another’s touch upon will. Barring a handshake or occasional hug. Intimate touch, perhaps, zero. I don’t know about it though.
After father left us, one winter as I visited elder sister, something came to the fore. A sound, a rhythm, familiar, yet distant, lost. As I sat idle on a chair, half lost, half glum, badi didi casually caught hold of my leg. And began to beat it with her palms. Her hands were swift, the sudden pain from this unfamiliar touch bringing me back to life. She repeated the same for the other leg. That unforgettable moment, when my body felt like percussion, making sounds that soothed something within. When father massaged the legs, he’d do something similar. Beat the body, tap it in a way that it woke up from its slumber. Cupped palms, closed fists, always tolerable pressure.
**
When the eyes can no longer see, we call ourselves blind. The ears lose their ability to hear, and we turn deaf. When the nose can no longer smell what’s around, such restlessness. A tongue without taste buds is just saliva. But when touch becomes almost non-existent in life, we neither cry nor make a fuss. We accept it as fate and gradually forget what it feels like when fingertips caress the arm. Do we mourn the death of touch enough? Allow ourselves to grieve its going away.
Guilt, fear, morality, force, compulsion, conditioning, commodification, ageing—sighingly rip off signs of humble touch from our lives—the kind between pleasurable and offensive—that neither peels, nor heals—just is.
A hand on the head. Cupping of the face. A finger that nudges the nose. Earlobe pulled. Hand spooning the back of the neck. Collarbones softened with a finger scroll. Armpits as hideouts. Cracking of well-oiled fingers. A gentle palm holding space for rough elbows. An arm around the waist. Head on the lap. Grab of the feet as a show of affection. Rhythmic massage of the calves. Slow fingers playing harmonium on cracked heels. When was the last time someone walked on the path between the toes? Fleeting forms of touch, recharge points.
***
Lost in thoughts
finger touches the eye
burn quenches thirst
taste of tears
reminder of touch that was
**
Hospital room, June 2014
A dead body. A woman in her fifth decade of life in loud tears. Sobbingly she repeats, “Now can I touch you?” Her life partner of 30 years left suddenly without saying a bye.
Home, March 2025
Eleven years on, the voice, the words, still ring in my head.
“Now can I touch you?”
Are some fates written like that? Passed down?
Warning or curse?
**
“The body remembers, the bones remember, the joints remember, even the little finger remembers. Memory is lodged in pictures and feelings in the cells themselves. Like a sponge filled with water, anywhere the flesh is pressed, wrung, even touched lightly, a memory may flow out in a stream.” – Clarissa Pinkola Estele
Three years ago, in an all-women play on stage, I saw domestic violence survivors touch each other aimlessly, with a certain unknowing, but awareness. Fingers strolling on the skin, a path to nowhere. An important journey. What do tears have to do with touch? There were no tears on the day, a man more than double my age violated my body, introduced it to bad touch. It must have felt good to him, but how, why? I felt nothing except for confusion, and shame, years of shame. Touch can be a monstrous river, a flood. Even decades of loving touch cannot clean the filth the flood leaves behind.
**
The night of Awkward Hand, 2019
Our bodies entwined
reading each other
like a long-lost poem
spaces between
filled with balmy silences
your touch, gentle
like the tip of the pen
that caresses paper
undressing the mind
of its undergarments
and in the middle of
all the calm and chaos
the awkward hand
lies sunken in the armpit
waiting for the night to moan
**
So much disappears by touch: a bubble, a ray of light, true love.
A bubble leaves water when it bursts, diminishing light brings comfort to the eyes, extinguished love offers the strength to remain in desolation.
How many things are born just by touching? A plant, a water fountain, hope.
One night, when breath felt heavy, the sky felt closer than earth, I grabbed the terrace railing. Both dreams and stars hurt the eye from a distance. This was it, the final attempt. But the sky shut its gates, flying isn’t for every season. Out of nowhere, the toes, feet, heels now sunken into the floor, began to float. Taa-Thai-Tatta-Thai. Left then right, then left again. This novel touch, this rhythm, this unfamiliar tapping of the floor knocked at the frail heart. When did it become an antidote to melancholia? After that, whenever heaviness tried to pass, like stones in the body, I touched and tapped and turned my body into percussion. Sense of touch plus sense of sound, a match made in heavens of loneliness.
**
In one part of the city where I live, on the last Saturday of every month, a few people get together for a workshop. The idea is to touch parts of themselves that have been invisible or untouched for long. This is metaphor, not physics. For next few hours, in aloneness and together, they reintroduce themselves to the idea of touching, being touched. Sitting back-to-back, speaking to one another only through touch. Working in partnership, and observing the other’s response to the most unobvious touch. Think, finger gently drawing a vertical line on the horizontal wrist. Foot touching foot while laying on cold mosaic floor. Grounding, grounding, so much grounding. When all fails, does touch rescue?
**
I once touched a dead cat. It was in the kid’s play way. I wasn’t a cat person back then. With a sheet in hand, I tried to lift its body to move to an empty plot. No burial, only dumping. Dead bodies can be heavy, what do they try to take back with them? It lopsided and in a fraction of a second my hand met its very warm belly. Felt as if hundreds of marble-stuffed cotton balls lay inside. I’d never forget that moment. The worst kind of warmth, the worst touch. A year later, two abandoned kittens found their way to our home.
**
Cats are cute. They have no use for words. Only tender touch works. At their will. They would not have drawn my attention, if not for their fondness for touch. Unlike popular opinion on distance and detachment, they adore contact. Rubbing, clawing, Jumping, licking, cats are official cuddlers. Morals makes little sense to them; they trust their body and function purely out of instinct and needs. The cat does not know how long its tongue is. It has neither bothered to measure it nor felt the need to. But when it starts to stroke itself with its tongue before falling into a deep sleep, it appears as though branches have sprouted from its tongue. Human hands are so long, yet when there is a need to lovingly stroke oneself, they disappear, starting to look around to borrow someone else’s hands.
Did humans possess cat skills before polished communication got them? It is a grave time for touch. Tall walls of manmade things and language; defined sophistication and structures. A formal handshake, a friendly side hug. Sudden, unintended brushing of the fingers, jitters. Bad touch so much, like giant wildfire. Even when there is no bad touch, there is the fear of bad touch. Boundaries, walls, extra-protected zones, human bodies are forts that even the most cherished cannot invade. Good touch, in anticipation, hides in a closet waiting to come out someday.
**
The pigeons on the neighbour’s chajja (window shade) sit together as though conjoined. Are they meaning to make their own space or co-sharing, it is difficult to say, for their bodies appear one. They are not making love, it is evident. Yet there is touch until they part ways. What did they say to each other with that touch? Which thesaurus can answer my query. At the park, a girl and a boy who appear like they don’t owe anything to the world, sit in embrace. The boy with phone in one hand, other hanging around the girl’s shoulder, is leaning on her and smiling at the screen. The girl, her body bent from his hand’s weight, has a phone clutched on to one hand, the other is simply touching his arm for no reason at all. They appear in conversation and contact without any visible show of affection. Been long since I saw such a way of touch.
**
Love Letter to a Pine Cone
I found you fallen
on a bed of mulch
sitting in meditation
waiting for karma
to take you to heaven
But you were no leaf
winds couldn’t lift you
animals were vary of
touching your sharp skin
birds couldn’t leave
their offspring in your custody
Was it your sadness
that drew me to you
I remember our first contact
my fingertip running over
entering and exiting
your many rooms
Did it tickle your senses?
Aroused, we both were
Layered, we both were
Empty, we both shall be
Thank you for letting me in
For walking me home
You remember how the guard
mocked, seeing you in my bag
I worded forest, walk, hills
She labelled me a researcher,
lover would have been baffling
I am glad we are now
in each other’s company
our tiny heaven, found
we’ll perhaps, decay together
in years to come
what a beautiful decay
that would be.
**
The stretch from the hostel to the cemetery isn’t long. Only hauntingly quiet. Trees in the hills, tall, friendly yet aloof. My walk is in the cold September daylight. It is still raining in the hills. Moss, fresh green, soft; in some places, still wet. I am tempted to go close and touch. Feel its cushion against my skin.
At one point, the wind swoons through the treetops in such a way, it is evident that they’ve recognised a visitor. Do all those who are buried in the hills turn into trees? Stroll at night, when nobody’s watching. For a moment, I feel deep fear. Also, great thrill.
The thing about trees on the hill side is the exposed hangingness of their roots. Either the soil around them has fallen away per nature or sacrificed, for human convenience. Imagine something that has lived in dark confinement for years and suddenly offered light. Beastly. Hurts.
The moss, comforts though. It doesn’t differentiate between a rock, or a wall, or a tree; living or dying, it just makes space, grows, thrives. Palliative care of sorts. How still or lonely does a human have to be to allow moss to birth from it?
I move to the side of the road where it curves, Roots, many and bare, stare back. They want a hug, I can tell. My cheeks have already gone red with the cold winds. There is nothing warm in sight. Certain things vanish upon touch; bubbles, light, love. I turn away, keep walking, on an empty road, uphill, only trees for company. If I am to lose myself, rid of all painful inches of my being, this is the time. But I want to keep walking, living.
The cemetery is nowhere in sight, no clue how much farther it’d be. And then as if out of nowhere, the sky opens. The trees disappear. And as far as eyes can see, there are tea plantations. Short, shrubby, clone like. Predictable. There is a shift in the pace with which I walk. A sense of hurriedness that gets invited by familiarity. Surprisingly, there is no urge to touch the greens this time, not these. Manmade, cultivated, seemingly natural but manipulated.
Minutes later, I find myself standing at a little fence-opening that offers a view of the cemetery. Unsurprisingly calm. I want to jump in, sit near the graves that call to me, read what is written on the headstones, touch the marble beneath which bodies sleep. Apologize. Cry.
Instead, I just sit by the little fence-opening covered by many tree canopies, and write a poem. About trees, touch and the dead.
**
Once I was held by the elbow while crossing the road. Offering the hand would have been akin to accepting the feelings. My foolishness gave me one of my most cherished touches. The elbow-hold, useless yet full of intent. That’s how unique touch can be, when allowed. Aimless meander, April wind; there, also not there. Often, in aloneness, I have touched that elbow in reminiscence. Unbright, unsoft, unworthy of contact. But then, one day, just like that, while slowly strolling around the coarse island, I met its other ill-known half. Soft, delicate, tinier island on the other side. Some boats eventually learn to float without the fuel of memory. That day I learnt the art of touching myself, in soothe, in heal, in companionship.
**
Father often touched himself a lot. Especially when he slept alone, on the single bed during peak summer, sideways, right arm always going over the left. Self-hugs are big now; looking back at this memory, it feels, they always were. Or shall we call them self-holds? Once, on a full moon night, I rested my hand on the midnight moon’s reflection on the floor. The floor, hard but cold, eased something. Something that almost felt unpassable. Everything passes, so did that night, where I slept sideways, my right arm over the left shoulder, tight in a self-hold. I touch myself a lot now.
Images: Babli Yadav