Today I was driving to college and some man in a long golden car decided to reverse randomly. So I had to swerve and drive my bonnet into a tree. I got out enraged, and tried explaining to the relatively harmless man the trouble he had caused me. I didn't want to fight, I just wanted to say something because otherwise this would piss me off all day. Initially he looked a bit worried but when he saw a young girl step out of the car he sighed with relief and drove away to whichever tall glass building he was driving to.

My friend is a transexual. When I met her last, she was a he. She is more woman than anyone I have met or known. In the two times I have met her, I have listened and learnt only as one can from another woman. She writes, speaks, bleeds, like a woman. She is overwhelmed and infinite like a woman with more to her than most. But now she has been dragged to Jaipur and forced to dress like a man. She says its hilarious and is pretending this is her dyke phase. Her mother, wants to force her daughter to be a son. She thought she was fortunate to have given birth to a boy, and cannot believe her ill luck that her initial fortune would fail her. 

Why should all women in Gurgaon not work after 8 clock? What if they work better at night? What if they like being bartenders? What if working at a club is not about being around drunk men and just enjoying mixing drinks? What does legalizing prostitution have to do with preventing rape? Rape is about the exercise of power, not the actualization of a man's desire to fuck. Women like sex. But who would be okay with abuse?
The Delhi Times for today seems to suggest that women in the capital suffer from crime against them because they are 'just not interested' in taking self-defence classes. It seems to say that if we (as i did once) are taught how to fight, then the problem of rape and murder will be solved. Why must the violators be taught anything? Men will be men afterall. 


Why did I grow up believing that being beautiful and being intelligent are two mutually exclusive categories?

I have hi-fived my guy friends when they told me about their boners but been afraid to admit that I had cramps. We are constantly driven away from our bodies for reasons we cannot understand, but which are prescribed. 

I have controlled strong impulses to kiss someone or tell someone I love them because I have to wait for it to be done to me. What if I don't want to be told it to and want to tell it? What if I don't want to be driven but drive because I like it, not because I want to be in control. What if I don't want to get married and have kids but I still want to be bought flowers? Even something as universal as falling in love and having your heart broken has rules of behavior.


All the women I have known, including myself, have had things to say but not said it. They have sung, drawn, thought and lived incredibly but have been too dismissive of their own selves. They have waited for boys to crack the jokes they have already deciphered, explain theories they have already known.

Helen Cixous in Laugh of The Medusa says that the world cannot deal with the infinite passion of the woman. There are no words to describe the depth of emotion of feeling of thought that a woman can sink into. A woman can find her heart racing, wrenching, and exploding but not find the words to articulate it. This is when she is called abnormal, her mind is called hysteric. I'd like to repeat again that this is a lack in the ability of the world, of language, and not of yourself. 


None of this means that I hate men. As most female outbursts are taken as a lesbian realization, or someone who has just been dumped, this is none of that. I also haven't had a bad day, actually one of the better ones. I love men, as I do women. I love the ones who are my friends, who have been, the ones I have been in love with, and the ones I am in love with. I dislike some, as I dislike some women. Personal interaction has nothing to do with gender. I am just sick of walking out of the house in fear, and not being able to scream, laugh, weep, express when and how I want to. 

My new favorite person:


SPELLING

My daughter plays on the floor
with plastic letters,
red, blue & hard yellow,
learning how to spell,
spelling,
how to make spells.


I wonder how many women
denied themselves daughters,
closed themselves in rooms,
drew the curtains
so they could mainline words.


A child is not a poem,
a poem is not a child.
there is no either/or.
However.


I return to the story
of the woman caught in the war
& in labour, her thighs tied
together by the enemy
so she could not give birth.


Ancestress: the burning witch,
her mouth covered by leather
to strangle words.


A word after a word
after a word is power.


At the point where language falls away
from the hot bones, at the point
where the rock breaks open and darkness
flows out of it like blood, at
the melting point of granite
when the bones know
they are hollow & the word
splits & doubles & speaks
the truth & the body
itself becomes a mouth.


This is a metaphor.


How do you learn to spell?
Blood, sky & the sun,
your own name first,
your first naming, your first name,
your first word. 

- Margaret Atwood