Shiva Ratri, the night of Shiva

More than half of the world knows what Christmas is (just a guess, I could be wrong), but very few knows what Shiva Ratri is. To me it tells something about the “multi-culturism” and “secularism” of western countries. It is a fact that the history, the ways of life and even our festivities are often enforcements of the conquerors and the oppressors. We all still remain the players of colonization, some as oppressors by declaring their ways as being the right way and the civilized way, and some of us remain oppressed. Pushed down, shamed and silenced only to speak when we praise the oppressor. If you are already thinking how did I stray from Shiva Ratri to colonization, trust me am not straying, there is no other character in the Brahmanical culture than Shiva who understands colonization, appropriation and assimilation.   

Shiva, the man wearing tiger hide, a garland of snakes,  living in the lofty Kailasha, meditating and smoking ganja and befriending the social outcastes, the lowly animals (his another name is Pashupati which literally means that), and the ghosts always was an attractive personality for me. As a kid I would hear stories about Sati, Shiva’s wife, the daughter of King Daksha from my great grandmother. How she went against her father’s will to marry Shiva as she loved him, and how to punish her, Daksha organized a huge puja ceremony inviting all other Hindu gods, but Shiva. Sati still came home alone, thinking she did not need an invitation to come back home. What awaited her was her father’s rude words for marrying the lord of the outcastes, she could not take the insults and ended her life right there. Shiva hearing this came from Kailasha, with his animals and ghosts and outcastes, and ran havoc on Daksha’s palace killing him. Then took the lifeless body of Sati on his shoulder, and danced, the dance of Kala, time, his Tandava dance started to crumble the whole universe and Vishnu had to come to rescue as it was not yet time for complete annihilation.  As I sat next to my great grandmother absorbing the whole story, my 3 year old self did not actually see the class struggle and did not question was it just the class that made Daksha do whatever he did? Back then to me the most important was the Tandava, the dance of time.

As I grew up I heard more stories about Shiva, when the gods and demons churned the seas to get the nectar of life, first came the halahal, the poison that could kill everyone. Shiva did not participate in this churning process, but to save all he drank the halahal, the poison running down his throat, turned his throat blue, he tied a snake around his neck to stop the halahal going further down. Thus he became the Neelakantha, one who drinks the poison to save the rest. As I was fascinated by this story, I did not see the effort of even gods to exploit the earth to get the treasures hidden deep down, the first story of drilling the ocean perhaps? I did not question why did Shiva not join the churning team? Was he protesting in silence, was he left alone to protest?

The next story came when I was grown up, and was doing everything possible to “change” my sexual identity. I read the story of Shiva, in love with another god Vishnu in their Mohini form. Vishnu, the gender fluid god could be anything, a man, a woman, everything in between or nothing. I did not see hetero flexibility or a queer love story back then, as those two characters were still gods to me, and not something that I could be.

I guess I left the most important story about Shiva, the destroyer. But not because that might hurt my Brahmenical tradition, but because I wanted it to stand alone as an important testimony of how colonization works. Shiva was not an imagination of a Hindu sage; he existed long before the Vedas came. I remember the picture of the seal from Harappa and Mohenjo Daro that I saw in school, Shiva sitting in the “lotus position” with his Trishula, the trident, surrounded by animals. No one yet knows what was the religion of that civilization, though the Right wing Hindus are trying to push that it was a Hindu civilization. They are the triumphant majority now in a land that I call home, and they will change the history very soon. They will erase the existence of Shiva as someone who predated the Vedas, who persevered from the nomadic, tribal, mountain dwelling traditions, who be friended the outcastes in a religion where caste is the most important element. Maybe in another couple of years no great grandmother will tell their impatient great grandkid the story of Sati, as that might spark a question, was Daksha so cruel just because Shiva was the lord of the outcastes? Was it because he still was pushing the Brahmin status quo, to be accepted as a tradition in the overwhelmingly puritan and agrarian Hindu civilization.  Maybe no one will ever question why did Shiva sit still when the greedy gods and demons plundered the oceans, was he on a Gandhian hunger strike? Maybe not Gandhian as Gandhi too was a Hindu, maybe Gandhi stole Shiva’s plan of hunger strikes and then erased that story from history so that a Hindu can claim it.  And I fear for sure they will never tell the love story of Shiva with gender fluid Vishnu or Mohini, as that is definitely not the story that they want the queers of the land to hear. The Hindus have strangely joined the league of hate the gays with the Christians and Muslims in India, already ignoring this queer love story. So I write the story of Shiva, a man, not a god, who withstood the often passive and more than often not so passive aggression of Hindus, telling us  of people who lived in the mountains before the caste dragged them down as unpaid laborers and divided them. I wish that Shiva, the lord of the outcastes, the lowly animals and the ghosts, a happy birth day.

something that i lost

Am attending a writing workshop for last couple of weeks, and last week one of the prompts was- something that you lost. After we wrote down the loss, the next prompt was to write about the loss from five senses (see, smell, hear, taste and feel).  I always try to hide the biggest loss of my life by making it appear funny or shadowing it with other losses. But as the prompt was given, it seemed time for me to mourn.

Something that you lost

My family and my ability to trust without questioning.

I saw my mother walk out with two suitcases, her life in that house for more than thirty years boxed in two suitcases.

The house ever since smelled of rotten flowers, no other smell not even of our childhood.

For a month after my mother left, I stayed back. Every evening I will wait for my father to come back, expecting maybe he will ask “did you eat?”. Simple words but would have helped in taking down some of the anger and disbelief that it was finally happening.  The words never came and the anger turned into solid and cold hatred.

My taste, appetite for family, family bonding, to keep the family together died.

I am leaving, it's early summer, but the morning is not as unbearable as it usually is for most of the time, perhaps some mercy from whoever created us. I have wrapped up my birth, my sisters’ birth days and weddings, my mother’s life in albums, in couple of furniture. I look at my father, the way I have always, trying to find validation, love and affection, wishing to see a longing to keep the family together. I see nothing,  a blank face and a pair of eyes, perhaps a bit of bewilderment, it finally happened.

I did not exactly see what I was looking for, maybe he did not show. After all I got my stubbornness from him. And I ceased to look for how he felt, how I feel. But the longing strangely stayed.

I loved the smell of “rajanigondha”, every year on my grandfather’s death anniversary we had lots of rajanigondha. I never met him, but I always loved him. My aunt’s used to tell me I am like him, as I always tried to keep the family together. But then they changed their opinion. Since the boxes were packed, we never did anything on that day, other than silently acknowledging, Feb 29^th 1952. I don’t remember buying rajanigandha again.

I hear him speak now, about me, about my mother. How he is proud of me, how he loves us. How he wants to visit me. My anger creates an inferno which burns every emotion that am left with. His words do not count any more.

My taste for togetherness has died, the longing persists though. Can things still exist after they die?

I am just letting myself feel in small bits, I know the feelings will come back one day. The dam has to break and there would be a devastating flood. But not yet, not now.

I can see him breath, however shallow, but i see the movement of his chest cage. Or is that the heart-lung machine? After all the doctors told us he is not there. It’s just the machine, perhaps it always was just a machine, yes just a machine. That will justify all the heartlessness.  I look at my mother, her eyes are blank, is she mourning for something that never was? Or maybe it always was, I did not see it. She asks me, “am I finally a widow?” my sister flies in, reluctant. She never liked baba. But as she stood at the hospital cabin door I saw horror in her eyes. Did she see the skeleton of our childhood spread in front, entangled with tubes and wires? A last desperate effort by the family and society to bring some flesh and love perhaps?

I smell the pesticide he swallowed since then whenever I am scared.

Is poison really bitter? He loves bitter food though, me too. Is the love of bitterness in our genes?

I was just 26.

Karma, the favourite word for the “white yogis”

In addition to yoga, samosa and butter chicken, karma is another wide spread word that white people love and use. Especially the ones that claim to “eastern mysticism” as they can do a head stand. I have always wondered what if English as a language picked up Sanskrit phrase like “sharatchandranibhinana” (one with a face like the glow of autumn moon), so that when I am flirting with a gay boy next time, instead of just calling him cute (really English? That’s the word I have?), I can just tell him “you are sharatchandranivanana” (the word is gendered). But certainly this language was not created, neither “took” words from other languages to suit the romantic pursuit of a brown gay man. So before I get distracted by the colonial plot of looting languages, let me come back to Karma, the word in question.

There is no one single way one can explain the concept of Karma as it is encountered in several traditions from the subcontinent. But in my humble opinion it means if you do shit, you get shit back. But the getting shit back is not tied to this life, it could be for eternity you are doomed.  This does not sound unreasonable, as long as you do not define what “shit” constitutes of. That is where the cunning of the person who coined the word and the concept (at least in Hinduism) comes in. So shit is defined as doing anything that will challenge the status quo of the caste system. You are getting kicked by the Brahmin, or anyone above you in social caste fabric, just take it and earn good karma as that is what you “deserve” at the first place by becoming born in a “lower caste”. But the moment you resist, say no, kick back or god forbid kill the kicker, you are gone. Your karma will drag you down the whirlpool of several lives of more rigorous oppressions. Of course all these are made up theories to up hold Brahmin supremacy, but it has been so nicely planted and forced and whipped into everyone who was born in that triangular piece of land, we take it very seriously.

Now knowing what karma means from one of billion other perspectives, I ask all the white hippies with or without dreadlocks, what is your fascination with a concept like this? Can you trace back when and by whom this word made an entry to our beloved English language? To my simplistic mind I see a direct correlation between white supremacy and the love of white “liberal” people for the word and concept of karma. When the white Evangelic came to a land that I call India now, declaring a never announced crusade to civilize us, to get the darkness out of our minds and hearts and purge the land of anything that stood for being brown , they had to have a conviction that they had the divine right to do so. In fact it is a reality that the message and emphasis on karma in one of the most famous books that the present government of India is trying to make the national book, appealed to the “orientalists”. It gave them not only the permission of the holy trinity to kill, rape, oppress and divide the  different shades of brown, but for a rare moment it seemed the uncivilized Hindu gods also looked kindly at them and said yes, it’s your karma now to be the rulers and them the ruled.  And they went on praising, translating and spreading this book to such an extent that other than Kamasutra, Bhagwat Gita became the only other modern Hindu identity in the world at large. They just saw how efficiently this concept has for several thousand years have maintained the status quo of Brahmin supremacy, and how just even their colonial arrogance can learn from this one simple and often considered benign word and concept. Hence as they shoved the cross of divinity in the wide open cleft of social inequality and injustice, they looked at us and said it is your karma to submit now. The magical word did its godly trick and since then the only sound that the white people have enjoyed from us is the sound of submission and sound of pain. The moment that tone changed or change to questioning or resistance, they have thumped karma on us.

To end my essay, I must emphasize that the story of thumping karma-submission and the story of rebelling against it are age old and intertwined. There has been no moment in history since caste and karma were created by Brahmins (funnily Word also knows to respect this word and auto corrects to capitalize the “b”, white and Brahmin supremacy hand in hand to maintain corporations) when people did not resist. The lack of evidence for such rebel is an act of conspiracy done by my caste, which efficiently knows what story to tell and which art to present and preserve. So as I resist to white supremacy, it is impossible to do so without resisting Brahmin supremacy, caste and karma.