IT IS IN YOUR SELF-INTEREST TO FIND A WAY TO BE VERY TENDER

Ever since Becca introduced me to Jenny Holzer’s aphorisms from “Survival” (1983-1985) I haven’t been able to stop going back to them for moments of fiery inspiration. In the heat of one of the most tender, jellyfish points of my life since I was a child: I crave focus. And only in the severe, black and fertile way. I want to feel my own stares and I want to use spit, carefully. I don’t lech at others, but there’s certainly this leopard instinct building inside of me. I shamelessly work on my Frida Kahlo gaze. I have this compelling desire to be striking, to sort of assault people with my presence.

I fear I am becoming several people who disagree with each other

I don't use blankets when I sleep

I eat food and pause to look upward, as if someone were there

I'm an imitation of Zora, Langston, Foucault on Power

I leave my hand on my breast

I wonder if I'd like to be choked

The day and night make no difference to me

I catch my heart reflected and it looks fresh and pulpy

I want to hold peoples arms and say that I like them and mean it

I watch my fingers drum on things

I brace my stomach like it needs protecting

I smoke, because I don't need to run

My skin is a loaded metaphor

and it makes me feel close to things

I think someone unknown is in the room with me and I close my eyes peacefully

I clench my thighs with magnetism

I go crazy for rock music

I think wearing khajol gives off my comfort with death

I agree with sewer smells

I know things will not stay the same

I am okay with this life

Catherine told me that a professor, er Jamaica Kincaid, once said to her something about how people know you’re a writer when you become involved with them, therefore they should expect betrayal. I’m not even going to pretend and disguise my egoism like that. So, this is me being dedicated to me, but at least an honest me. I left Hyderabad six days ago. I left with my hands in someone else’s hair. I left hands like a gardener’s and sounds I’d only ever heard my mother make when she expresses discomfort. I left the Mesozoic period that is HCU, dried up tamarind trees and once precarious boulders slumped together. I left lying together nude and bathed in blue morning light. I even left Chandu. I left the people whom I felt it so easy to care about. But everything except the Chandu bit isn’t anything close to abandonment. I don’t think you can just do that. I am moving to Mumbai this week to work on possibly the project of my diasporic dreams. But I think I’ve made it clear to most that I have a particular fondness for the boring things in life. So Hyderabad, this is only the beginning of my infatuation with knowing you as I do. And even from Delhi, I don’t know, but I’m beginning to think that I might just have to let my stunning leopard leap.

molested on the train from Delhi to Hyderabad

I wrote this after my first trip back from Delhi in early April. I wrote this to get un-lost.

"So I'll do what I can to put the past few days into perspective for you, working back and forth as it does for me right now. On Wednesday evening around almost 11 pm my train left from Delhi to come back to Hyderabad. I had gone on Sunday in order to get my visa converted in order to stay in India until the beginning of August. On the train, I had the uppermost bunk on the left side of the designated compartment. The piece of technology that divides me from the person in the other compartment with the same bed (the uppermost bunk on the right hand side) is a blue metal fence, which until now I thought only held a sliver of open space at the top. Around what I think was 1 or 2 am I woke up to the person in the mirroring compartment attempting to grope me in my sleep, as I swatted away their hand. Even though it was only a couple of days ago, I've kind of lost the ability to describe it much after that. Something that I do remember, and probably so much so because I still feel it while I'm writing this now, is this feeling of dread, and I felt it really pitifully. After waking up to that I immediately stiffened and put together whatever it was that I had to put together in order to register what was going on. I really want to tell you that I flipped the lights on, that I slammed that piece of shit fence between me and him and woke everybody up in order to ask him what the fucking idea was, and still I know that I deserved every single one of those moments. But what happened was is that I buried myself further under the blanket and sweat myself clammy, knowing him to be so-fully-there and unwavering, but still keeping with this veiled reasoning that not actually placing eyes on him would allow this situation to remain in a hallucinatory state. Though from the way that I kept my eyes transfixed on the barrier between us, glancing between it and the alarm cord beside my head which stops the train, quietly fishing in my pockets for my lighter, and just the overall discretion I was using about the whole thing, well, I could say a lot about that here but I think you probably know something about ambivalence. And so the rest of the 28 hour train ride was kind of like that, caught in the anticipation of something that already happened and of course knowing that that didn't stop me from being sexually harassed again. Waking up in the morning on the train, the other compartment was empty and a perfectly decent train ride ruined. Outside it was cloudy with a come rain or come shine temperament, but I guess I was feeling pretty adverse to most things at that point so I just stayed up in my bunk and placated until it was 5 am the next morning and I was waiting to get off at Nampally station. And if you can believe it, after all of what felt like an immensely dull moment as I got off the train and heard the auto driver speaking to me, I saw myself kind of sad about having to go. I didn't necessarily feel healthy about all this, though I did feel humanly about it, for whatever that's worth. I guess you could say that something important had happened for me there and I'm sure the cognitive forces are at work with that."