For After The Times We Live In

And, the second part of that story you once read.

Yesterday, I was speaking to a friend who was narrating her ordeal of looking for a job in The Times We Live In. She was listing the reasons why she hoped she will get this one particular gig. “It’s close to the Metro station, near my favourite café, I can walk to Mandi House, and you know how lovely Delhi is in July…”

I looked at her as if she was speaking an alien language. For one, we were talking on a Zoom call and my lousy Internet meant that she looked like a pixelated painting. But mostly, because I couldn’t recognise, or even imagine, the life she was talking about. She was talking about a life belonging to Before The Times We Live In. And suddenly, I struggled to remember what it was like to walk in a city I love, without a fragment of fear of being infected by a deadly virus. I realised that our reality has become so overwhelming — pandemic, potential war, crashing economy, breakdown of every institution in a democracy, unemployment, riots, activists being arrested on a whim, police brutality, you don’t need me to do a recap, do you? — that it has hit our capacity to imagine. To imagine a life which is firmly After The Times We Live In.

This is why I decided to dust off the despair and inertia, and restart this newsletter again. Because I didn’t want “imagination” to be added to the list of things we might lose, or might be irrevocably altered forever, thanks to The Times We Live In. (Other suspects in the list: dine-in restaurants, job security, a stable economy, travel, large weddings, concerts etc.)

Of course, this tiny newsletter is not by any means the last bulwark against an assault on imagination, and indeed, many writers are using the pandemic to reorient their imagination to describe all kinds of better worlds. But if maybe, I can write about what’s happening in the world once a week, and you can read about it by digging up this email in a crowded inbox, thinking about After The Time We Live In, won’t be so inexplicably alien.

I last wrote to you in March 2020; which on the calendar is a little over three months ago. But in reality, it feels like the email was sent in a different decade. We were on the brink of the world changing forever, and we had a premonition that things were disintegrating. But we probably couldn’t have guessed by how much. I wrote a story then. Or at least, started one. A story about a song Vividh Bharati, one name called Archana, and three women.

You can read the earlier part here. What follows below, is a continuation of that story. Since this was never a fiction newsletter (cue old subscribers going, “Did I sign up for this?” which, fair), if you’re interested only in the links of the week, scroll below the story for them. We’ll be back to regular programming soon. (After the next edition, to be specific. I did promise a three-part story. Thank you for your patience.)

Vividh Bharati

“Yeh geet ki farmaiyish ki hai Akola, Maharashtra se Archana ne...."

A shriek interrupted the calm dismembering of the tomatoes in Archana’s hand. She rushed to the radio kept in the corner and increased the volume until the house reverberated with Geeta Dutt singing “waqt ne kiya kya haseen sitam…” Archana couldn’t believe it. The song she requested was on the radio! The woman had actually said her name! She rushed to her phone and dialed Ajit’s number, hoping fervently that he was still on his way to work and had listened to her name being uttered on the radio. “

“But would he like it?” She kept her phone away. She knew Ajit wouldn’t think of this as miracle. He’d think of this a personal jibe. A public declaration of the private shame of their crumbling marriage. He didn’t know that she’d been calling the “Subah Ki Bahar” program for weeks — just one more chore to do after cleaning the kitchen and before she took a plate full of vegetables to the dining table to cut.

He also didn’t know why she had chosen this song, out of all the songs in the world. He hadn’t heard the applause in the auditorium after she sang this song; she, just at the end of her college life, flushing with joy, as she heard the ringing applause reassuringly tell her what she knew — she was going to be a famous singer.

“No. For Ajit, I am just his wife.”

But it hadn’t always been like this.

When she’d first met Ajit, he was standing on a chair in an open-air amphitheater in their university in Mumbai giving a fiery speech. Or at least, she thought it was fiery. While she had ostensibly moved to Mumbai to do a Master’s degree in social work, she was rarely in college to properly judge the quality of student speeches. For Archana, Mumbai meant only one thing – her chance to become India’s best singer. Bolstered by the words of her music teacher back home, and enchanted by the applause she got while performing at her college farewell, she was determined to give her dream her everything. Standing in the heat for auditions in Aaram Nagar, bunking classes, travelling across the city and staying up all night to catch up on academics was a small price. Everything else was secondary.

“Who is this guy?” she’d asked her only friend, Ritika as they both watched Ajit now passionately holding forth on the need for a sexual harassment committee on campus. “What! How do you not know Ajit?! He is … the guy!” Ritika’s excellent descriptive skills notwithstanding, Archana was intrigued. As the speech ended, she went up to Ajit and holding the pamphlets he had given her asked, “So, what is it that you do?” He asked her if she wanted to walk with him for a cup of chai.

That one cup of chai marked the beginning of a relationship which neither had expected. Both however, had different reactions to their fate. Archana resisted, knowing that her dreams would not be able to withstand the vortex of a loving – she admitted this much to be true, he did love her– relationship. Ajit was more than glad to go along with what he thought was inevitable – an MBA degree, a partner he loved, and soon, a marriage.

As she put the pressure cooker on the stove, the dismembered tomatoes now joined by peeled potatoes, she replayed her “pre-marriage” conversations with Ajit. It was a term Ritika loved to use, and she loved to mock at. “What is pre-marriage, yaar? It’s not like people become aliens as they take pheras. Pre or post, Ajit knows me. And he knows I won’t give up singing. Nor would he let me.”

But as it turns out, the hyphens were needed. Before he formally asked her to marry him and move to his hometown, Archana had laid down her conditions before Ajit. She would work after marriage, mostly in one of the NGOs Ajit’s family managed. She would continue with her singing lessons. And she would continue to try to be India’s best singer. Ajit had agreed to them all, though he was wary of the music reality shows he now envisioned as being a part of his happy marriage.

What eventually happened is a cautionary tale so old, that even now Archana can’t believe she is its protagonist. They moved to Akola; Ajit’s grandmother fell ill and needed someone who could take care of her; the file with her CV was pushed to the back of her almirah and later, thrown away; there were no “respectable” music teachers from whom she could learn and what was a bahu of a “respectable” family doing singing anyway; the closest she came to a singing reality show was when the family watched TV after dinner every night.

She didn’t resent Ajit, though on some days, she was surprised why not. He had tried. Just not hard enough. And how could he understand the desperation of a dream unfulfilled? “We all have to compromise, Archu. I also want abs, but ab nahin ho raha toh theekhe. We don’t become everything we want in life, no?”

“No, we don’t,” agreed Archana as she shut the lid of the pressure cooker and walked back to the radio to see if she could listen to Geeta Dutt again. “I just never wanted to be only a wife. Someone else’s wife.”

“Yeh geet ki farmaiyish ki hai Akola, Maharashtra se Archana ne...."

Archana slowly leaned away from the mic, gently pushed up the dials, and her voice faded away from her small studio – and was replaced by music on the radio stations of the hundreds listening to her.  

“Who is she?” she asked Kabir as he poked his head in to ask if she wanted coffee.

“You haven’t heard Geeta Dutt? What kind of RJ are you?”

“Shut up. And yes, I want a cup. But from your stash. Aaj Nescafe waali nahin.”

She took out her phone, and immediately saw a notification popped up. “Archana! have news! Call me! Love you!” Years of friendship with Mita meant that Archana could decipher her best friend’s life developments through punctuation. All those exclamation marks could mean only thing.

Mita had said yes.

Archana wanted to punch a wall.

(To be continued…)

Links of The Week

1. Dr. Anand Teltumbde is still in jail. And India is still a democracy. (Or that’s what we say.) In this piece in The Caravan, his daughters, Prachi and Rashmi Teltumbde ask us why we are silent in the face of blatant violations of human rights.

"Imagine one of your loved ones was arrested without irrefutable evidence and kept in humiliating prison cells without proper food, clothing, sanitation facilities, hygiene or comfort—conditions that challenge one’s very existence. Wouldn’t this violation of human rights and dignity be sufficient for anyone to raise their voices?”

2. We are in the middle of an “unlocking,” despite COVID-19 cases increasing every day. But what does this “unlock” in a continuing pandemic look like for small-town India? Especially newly-displaced migrants who depend on daily wages for survival? This report from Bhagalpur in Bihar by Dipankar Ghose in The Indian Express tells you.

“At the chowk’s centre is a statue of Manjhi, one of India’s first recorded tribal freedom fighters, who was hung by the British for his irreverence, as folklore says, right at this chowk.

Das chuckles, “Manjhi may have died fighting for our freedom. But here we are, at a labour mandi. A market where we sell ourselves for Rs 200 a day. Hamaari halaat itni kharaab hai ki hum bolte hai, humein khareed lo. Nahi toh bhuke rah jaenge poore din (Our situation is so bad, we put ourselves up for sale, saying we will go hungry otherwise).”

3. As a lover of Chinese food of all kinds, this ode to the cuisine from Nisha Susan in Livemint hit too close to home. I miss, among other things, garlic noodles and fruit beer at Fa Yian in Connaught Place, which I think is the best Chinese food in Delhi.

“Send me the garlic chicken of Bengaluru’s Frazer Town and lemon chicken of Delhi’s Dwarka and the delicious red gravy of something I ate in Kolkata’s Park Street in my vegetarian decade. Send me the Chinese pretend-chicken-mostly-soya I ate everywhere in those 10 years.”

4. I’ve been reading romance novels to deal with the instability of everyday world, and baffled at just why it’s a genre that’s looked down upon? Despite well-written, engaging and funny stories? Andaleeb Wajid, whose Indian romance novels are truly some of the most fun I’ve had reading, sets the record straight in Huffington Post India.

“I did enjoy reading other genres such as crime and mystery but romance was my first love. When I started writing, it seemed natural that I would bring romance into most of my books, but the English Literature student in me kept looking over my shoulder constantly, like I was afraid of being ‘found out’. I wasn’t alone, I found later.”

I am sure most of you by now have read about the horrific custodial torture and deaths of P Jayaraj and his son, J Bennix. But in case you haven’t, this timeline of events from Megha Kaveri in The News Minute is essential reading.

That’s it from me. Just a shout out to those of you who messaged and emailed about the newsletter when it was on hiatus — your words meant the world to me.

As always, if anything here struck you or you just want to say “Hi,” hit that “Reply” button. If you know of anyone who you think might enjoy this kind of thing, ask them to subscribe and share the newsletter.

I will write again soon. (No, really.)