I feared going to Hell as a child—I knew exactly what it looked like. Against an indigo sky stood a well of fire into which you were thrown while the good souls were whisked away to Heaven by a swarm of farishtey. A small, framed, mass-produced postcard became my nightmare as it stood against the glass-pane of a shelf in our living room; I was certain that I was living my life in deviance. Twenty years later, I experienced a new definition of deviance; I became one of the many strangers pushing from the outside in to enter an upper-caste Hindu bubble in CR Park, New Delhi. Aapka naam kya hai beta? And after I had answered the prospective landlady while withholding my surname: Aagey?
My introduction by name always leads to follow-up questions from my audience: What does it mean? How do you pronounce it? Where are you originally from? I do the labour of holding space for queries, and announcing myself becomes work. Then they are surprised when they hear I’m a Bengali—we don’t exist.
With rising instances of communal pogroms and increasing frequency of policy-changes by the incumbent government, my being is threatened irrespective of the privilege afforded by my class. My parents are worried and angry, and this concern has entered their veins as quiet and dreaded anticipation. As a community, we are threatened against taking up space, and the threat is pulsating and intimate. While home seems like an insulated space of relative tranquility, the television drops daily reminders to the otherwise, and the tension looms like heavy breath over the dinner table after.
I wonder at the absence of religious instruction in my house, the simultaneous but sporadic reminders of the same, and the conflicts they generate and plant in my consciousness—this confusion often renders me incapable of defending myself in situations that pigeonhole me in terms of my religious identity. I’ve grown up in a culture of assimilation, where festivals across religions have co-existed and been celebrated with exuberance in less volatile times when compliance was not an obligation or a means of exclusion. The assimilation also caused very specific erasures of faith; survival and invisibility go hand in hand.
Having spent a few years in Khirkee Extension, Delhi (where my name eluded any variant of apprehension amidst a multicultural demographic), I left for home in Kolkata in March last year. With more time for anxious diversions now, I’ve been trying to piece the last few years in hindsight, expecting them to reveal meaning in reminiscence. My parents are my immediate at the moment, and I find myself trying to navigate their constant presence around my body; I had consciously omitted the memory of their routine vigilance, and the return of the familiar wasn’t pleasant at first. But they also revealed themselves as people to me for the first time, and I found myself accommodating (and growing with) their idiosyncrasies as I would a friend’s.
I often find myself observing my parents’ skin with acute attention; they’re getting closer to how my grandparents look in the photographs. I see the folds and the shadows they cast on each other; the moles are more prominent than they were on taut skin, as if fighting against illegibility. Mom wears a knee-guard every day due to a health issue, and it leaves scars on her thighs. Her hands move to itch that part unconsciously, and applying an ointment on them before sleeping has become a daily routine. She never lets any of her nails grow; I often see her with the cutter and a newspaper, her spine curved in deference to her toes. She keeps her white uniform from the hospital intact, cleaning it with a regularity of rigour. Dad has soft hands, and he often holds mine in his, as if looking for words in tandem with the gesture; oftentimes, it remains just that—a mute show of affection. Sometimes, we fabricate codes and secret phrases for each other as if we were the same age. At other times, I look at the droop of his eyelids; there’s a listless gaze and it betrays a deep concern.
I’ve quite grown into my room as well – this is the longest I’ve occupied it since college. I have spent a continuous 8 months inside it, and the walls have become a comfortable cloister. I like the blue hue, the five-too-many windows on the walls (that my father got made to resolve his claustrophobia with closed spaces), the forgotten binders of photocopies and notes from classes stacked away on the shelves, and the general flood of sunlight. I don’t clean the room regularly and the cobwebs have become conspicuous. There’s death, decay and comfort in the room, as the sound of the azaan wafts in and out every day. The azaan has become a part of my being now; I remember always welcoming its intrusions actually. It is sung five times a day and broadcast through a loudspeaker from the local mosque. The azaan puts me to sleep, but also wakes me up when I’m just about to doze off; it is both alarm and lullaby. It marks time for me as well; I hardly look at the clock anymore. Only the one sung at dawn escapes my attention; my slumber continues uninterrupted, as if the azaan were a harmless, incoherent whisper.
The room also reminds me of an incomplete string of life events, and it occurred to me that I’ve forgotten all my Arabic; no one urged me to revive my knowledge of the language either. A very old woman used to come and teach me the alphabet, in keeping with family traditions where private lessons in Arabic ran alongside school curricula. She was always dressed in a white sari and walked with a perpetually stooped gait. She passed away one day, and I gave up the kitaab from a lack of incentive. That’s how I gave up my practice in Rabindra sangeet as well. When I look back at the things I wish I had completed my training in, it is always because I lost the people that anchored me in the craft. I don’t even remember their faces that well anymore; only a vague sketch of their contours—static, surprised, disappointed.
In my personal journal from 2003 (that I accessed this year from a locked cabinet after causing some minor wreckage), I found a much younger me recounting a dream in simple terms—how there was a riot just outside our house, yet mother insisted that she goes to the market to pick up vegetables for dinner. I felt amazed at the nonchalance of the account, and the casual co-existence of a banal reality and mob aggression in the same liminal space where my anxieties from the time took shape and sound. My home was in danger as a nest would be from a predator; it was a centripetal locus of a pervasive threat of death and displacement. Fed like images by the media (this was a time when the Godhra riots had consumed air traffic), my dream was a foreboding of a reality I had to navigate with my name as an adult. I would be chased, swallowed up and regurgitated in a world that was only happy to reproduce its mistakes; not much has changed after all.
Today, the harmonium sits in a wood box under the bed in quiet resignation from years of negligence. There are no songs, only the spectre of an unrealised potential. Maybe I would be a more cheerful person if I sang, but things have changed; home is only felt as shelter, its gravity a veneer of a guarantee against disappearance.
