The girl who taught me to masturbate

I guess I wasn't surprised when you passed away. The last few days of your life at the hospice had been excruciating and we knew it was only a matter of time. It felt like we were waiting for you to leave. And quietly, I might have hoped you passed away sooner than you did.

It's a year since your passing now. Almost, by the Gregorian calendar and already by the tithi count. And it has been an eventful year. There were birthdays, anniversaries, travels, nakhtyas. In most of them, no one really remembered to talk about you. We didn't even talk about you on your dakila to mark one year of your passing. It was as though we were all in a hurry to get past the rituals. 

Poonam di asked me to bring the khasali to Gurju four times, even though she could see I had already placed one before him. She asked the same questions multiple times--as though it was her way of not mentioning you. Kamla Maley just sat on the bench in the terrace watching Gurju perform the rituals, the midday sun shining bright over her, casting a halo formed by the smog of a polluted city sky in the background. She sat. Without saying a word. 

The rest of us chattered. About things of no consequence. About travel plans, about people abroad, about politics, the government securing monopoly of state adverts for Gorkhapatra Sansthan. It was a day like any other. It was not very different from when we did the pooja to mark 45 days of your passing. Except, people didn't weep this time. No one.

Before leaving, I went to the Dhukti room to say hi to your photograph. I stood there and teased you for a bit and then those tears came. I felt embarrassed. I didn't want to be the only person crying that day, so I went down the stairs quickly and out the house. I left.

Today, I was trying to masturbate. I had to stop because you showed up in my mind's eye. When we were pre-teenagers, you had told me: Have you ever tried rubbing your thighs together? It's so much pleasure. 

And just like that, you had taught me how to masturbate. 

But today, I had to stop because the 11-year-old you appeared in my head and tried to teach me how to do it and it was like I could no longer remember all the other times I'd known to pleasure myself. I sat on my bed and wept. 

Gathering

I stole this image from NYT because I coveted that moment (I forget the name of the photographer, so in that sense, this makes it theft )--I wanted to be a woman standing in a random street, just after a storm, gathering fallen leaves. I found enormous comfort in that thought.

Lately, I've been unsure about everything. Everything. And yet so comfortable in becoming this woman who's a hermit, living everyday inside my parents' home, cooking, cleaning, eating, sleeping, reading, writing nothing worth reading. That's me. It's like all the awful things that happened to me in life were leading me to this moment of quietness. Maybe death is like that, too?

I often think about the horrible things that happened to me. I am probably not past the abuse in my marriage, the gaslighting in certain relationships, the sexual exploitation by men who claimed it was stemming from love. I haven't gotten over those things and I think sometimes that writing about them might help. Perhaps if I write about how frightened I was that afternoon when he parked his scooter outside Gyanedra's residence and called me a bahunphile and how I was coerced into going to his friend's house to have sex. It was the beginning of something horrible. How is it that even for women who are educated and wise and who know good from bad, it often ends up becoming just the physical fear of a man. How come?

 

wastefulness

How does one expect to get any work done with a cat sitting on your chair, occupying over half the space and a dog sitting at your feet, tearing a random something to tatters? Yes, my space is heavily compromised as of now. 

I thought the perks (if any) not having children was that one would get to work in peace. But I must have been quite mistaken. Having pets is no different. My clock revolves around these two-- BabuBagh and LunaMoon--pet, feed, check on them between work and repeat every hour. 

Heigh ho!

I have been able to get very little done recently. I feel like my head is pooled in stories but none have been written. And in that sense, I wonder if I'm starting to become like my mother. Am I? 

Trapped somewhere far

Meera, like her name, belonged in only one place--to herself in a far flung idea of herself trapped somewhere.

When periods came, she would bundle up her mother's old sari and clutch it between her legs. For underwear, she had learned to cut her father's or brother's old trousers and alter it into something that fit her. No one offered to buy her any knickers. She was the invisible one in the family. After polio stuck her when she was four, she could no longer participate in the games her siblings played. And her parents didn't think it was necessary to send her to school.

And no one spoke to her about what she should be doing during periods or what they were about. Her elder sister, Laxmi showed her how to bundle up cloth, then tie a string around her waist and knot the ends of the cloth on to it so it stayed in place. But cloth was always scarce. If her mother discarded an old sari, she and her sisters had to compete for their share. And sometimes, when children in the extended family out grew their iicha cloth diapers, a tatter of pretty print from a frayed cotton sari would land in her hands. That served as period cloth.  

Meera liked to fold the period cloth neatly after they dried in the sun. They went into a corner of her trunk to wait until another month. And until then, she forgot about them, ran household chores, cooked for her family, fetched water in the ghaa, but before that she would polish it with ash until it shone like a gold pitcher. That was her job. To fix everything in the house, to take care of everything, to look out for the others. It sometimes included picking up her siblings' books and piling them neatly on the table. 

Meera, for everyone but not herself. Trapped. Far away.

 

No longer unmoored

The day was warm and blue, like the sky above us. Warmed by the sunshine and blue like calmness, trust and serenity Google talks about and not the kind that makes you sad. My heart felt so full of gratitude for the day and for you.  

I watched you walk into dappled light and look some pictures of you on my phone. It's how I want to think of us for the rest of my life. Walking with me towards open spaces, your big, soft hand holding mine in it. You cribbing about how I have no peripheral vision and how inattentive I am when walking on the road. And yet, and yet, smiling, holding my hand.

People often tell me I've been so unlucky in life. Then I think of the clarity you have brought me and I know they can't be correct. With you, I sit moored. 

Life of a perimenopausal woman

The body is a sacred place. It is a place of love, joy, pleasure, rest, restlessness, anger, anxiety, sadness, pain...of heat, of cold.

My body has been in shambles recently. I had experienced hot flashes when they put me on hormonal therapy after my surgery in 2023, so I had a taste of what it feels like. But who knew the trailer was only the tip of the ice-berg and the real show is much intense? 

I have difficulty writing these days because I cannot remember spellings accurately. During a meeting two weeks ago, my mind shut down. I could not remember the names of my colleagues or of the programs were working on. For a moment, I wished I could just disappear rather than have to make a fool of myself. But the names didn't come back.

There are a dozen other things I currently feel. My skin crawls, my ears ring, I get itchy spots, and I get terrible hot flashes and I break into cold sweats. My body is either on fire or on spikes. And when it gets cold, the night feels freezing. One moment I'm on the verge of burning, another moment, I sweat profusely.

I finally know what was happening to other women my age, when I had seen women wiping themselves off with tissue until the eyeliner smudged and the lipstick smeared across one cheek, or fanning oneself with whatever she could lay her hands on. She was struggling like I struggle now. On some occasions, I feel like my system is shutting down.

Mamu has been talking of these experiences for years now and I didn't even realize how hard this must have been for her.

I missed two periods this year. Last year, I missed one. In a few years, I will be 50 and I hope that the missing of periods will at least be a gradual process until then, instead of being something like hitting the wall.

Perimenopause is lonely and scary. I keep wondering what's going on inside my body. But no one knows. The body is sacred and the body also keeps its own secrets. 

Here's what we need to know.

meltdowns get more frequent

it tends to build up slowly and then breaks into a million little things and then it cracks open and you feel like your brain is about to burst open and then you break into sweat and tears and of course it makes you look pathetic because you will cry and you will end up in distorted expressions, disheveled hair, snot jamming your nose and you wailing like a child and people will just stare at you and wonder why you're behaving as you are and will try to make excuses for you or tell you to shut up, but you don't know how to react to that because something just cracked open inside you and there's no way to shut it down this quickly because closing it takes time and energy, and energy just got spent in crying and sobbing and standing before everyone, making a fool of yourself and becoming the horrible, evil person who cries so easily and weeps over the rearrangement of things, things are just objects, item, non-living things, but things that are important because you have come to rest some comfort in those things being there and so when someone moves them, it stirs feelings of instability and all you can do is cry and know there's no hold over it, and then you come back to it later, feeling guilt and heaviness and shame, wonder if you should run away or stay or run away and never come back, your loved ones will understand or won't, or they will hurt and hate you and all you can do then is to think about them and stay, stay even when you don't want to, stay even when your mind cannot, and then you will Google, show then a link on what an autistic meltdown means, but they think you are being dramatic and besides, the article is too long to read, and so you pick yourself up one more time, like you've done for over fourty-five years of your memory, you carry on, a little less whole than last time, a little more brittle, a little more smaller than ever, the body imitating how the heart feels

a letter to my sister, who is slipping away

My dearest Preeti,

I’ve spent the last seven days crying round the clock and wishing for your peaceful departure.

What kind of sister wishes for her sister to die? What does that make me? A monster. But it is true. For a week now, ever since I heard, I’ve been praying for you to slip away peacefully, quietly. It would be a reflection of your life in a way, you know?

 

I cry as I write this and crying seems to have become my coping mechanism to deal with your going away. I wanted to write to you while you’re still here so I can talk to you in my head, even if you are already slipping into a coma and can no longer read. So, here I am.

Maybe I will ask Pratish to read this to you while you sleep.

Yesterday, on the video call, I watched him pat your forehead, ask you if you want water, rub your legs. You lay there unaware of us. Or maybe you were listening. We will never know.

I put my lips to the image of you on my phone and kissed my phone several times, knowing it was my phone I was kissing and you were out there in the hospice, just waiting. I can never kiss or hold you again.

 

From across this great physical distance between us, I do not know what any of us can do to bring you comfort. But here we are, fighting among ourselves over what’s good for you and what isn’t. As if we know what you want. We talk about what should have been. As though that would change anything about your illness.

When you came home in 2023, I had told you to come back. I had said we would live our lives together as two old, single ladies and you had said you would, for a moment, and then said it was too late. You had built a world for yourself in London. You said London was home.

 

I wonder who is part of your London home. Who is in that world of yours, I will never know. All these years of sketchy conversations, I’ve wondered who your friends are. I can barely remember you talking about your friends. I remember your cats though. Five of them. Your babies.

It is only now that I know why you had to give them up. It wasn’t because you were moving. It was because cancer had started gnawing at you and you could no longer care for them. And yet, you loved them. Like you had loved Jimmy, all the way until it was time to put him down.

I know that pain, you know? Coz I had to put my Goose down too. Again, what kind of mothers put their babies down? I guess mothers who are left with no choice but to let go. Love is also letting go, my friend Priti says.

Ever since I found out you have been at the hospice, I’ve been playing scenes from our childhood in my head. I see you in your school uniform, mostly. Neatly ironed white shirt and the grey skirt wrapped around her thin waist. What a looker you have always been!

And your hair! You have the blackest, silkiest, shiniest hair I ever saw. It was your beauty! And then you came home to us in 2023 in a wig. Your head, like a mowed lawn. I asked what happened and you said you had been on radiation therapy for bone TB. You lied. You didn’t say it was cancer. You didn’t tell me you had undergone mastectomy when you opened your suitcase and showed me a bunch of 36D bras for me to take. They’re your size, I said, not mine.

How was I to know your bras no longer serve the same function for you? That they’re now a sign of something that has been lost.

You didn’t tell me you had been sick. I know now that you were trying to protect me from grief that was hurtling our way.

I know nothing about you, Preeti.

Poonamdi still tells me you have jaundice. How am I to make sense of anything?

Last night, after our call, I started hyperventilating. Seeing you lay there wan-looking , bleary-eyed, has been really hard. Every call, I see you grow more distant. And something has been breaking in me these days as I think of how you’re no longer going to be around. The sister who calls me baby, gypsy, darling, Pabhi. No one has such names for me in this world. No one.

With you, I’ve always felt unconditionally loved and understood, even if we didn’t talk so often. I don’t think anyone’s understood me like that, you know?

I sat up till 3am last night, reading our chats. Every time I asked you how you were doing, you said you had many challenges but you were coping well. And you always had nice things to say. You were proud of me.

I don’t know, this letter is incoherent too, like my emotions these days.

One moment, I’m crying, another moment, I’m thinking of the boys who crushed on you. I’m thinking of the poems you used to know by heart. Some of them, I still know from hearing you say them aloud.

The Yak by Hilaire Belloc.

The time you went to Pokhara, I was so envious and I hated you for not taking me with you. You were ten then and it was probably the only time you ever went to Pokhara. I wish now that I could share all my Pokhara lone trips with you-- over two dozen of them.

I’m thinking of the silly things you used to say. You’re the girl who first talked to me about masturbation. And yet, when we spoke in 2023, you said it was hard to believe life had passed you by without a lover. How is it, you asked me, that you had never had a lover? I still have no experience of sex, you said.

Preeti. 

 

I always thought you and I would grow old together. 

I saw you come and live here in KTM. I saw us grow old together. But those are images I was conjuring inside my head. I know you will never grow old now. You will always be 48. You turned 48 today. Happy Birthday, Preeti! I love you so much.

Yours,

Gypsy  

P.S. Had I been in London, I would have brought you some flowers. Here, I've stolen these online.
 

A desk of my own

There really is no competition to that moment when I start my computer and sit at my desk every day. I think it is the single, most happy moment of the day for me. It fills my heart with gratitude knowing I have the luxury of a desk and the time to sit at a desk. 

Maybe it needs to become the reason I wake up every morning!

It's Nepali naya barsha today and the new year's day is supposed to be an indicator of how the rest of the year will pan out. Today is going to be a busy working day for me. And I like it that way.

Except, I find that I am longing for some forest sounds and the smell of trees. If you happen to read this, I wish you those things and a storm to clear the polluted sky. 

Wishing you trees and wild flowers!

 

Bindu's curse

I haven't been able to stop thinking about the story Mamu told me about how Bindu Taama's curse might have killed a man.

When they were little girls, their home in Boudha had pigeons. Baajya had built a pigeon stand on the terrace and the birds lived in little house-like holes on that stand. The family fed the birds grains and talked to them. 

One time, a neighbour came over to ask if they could borrow two pigeons for a pooja. 

When they didn't bring back the pigeons for two days, someone from Mamu's family went over to enquire. And they were told they had sacrificed the pigeons during the ritual, because that was what it demanded. 

When they heard, the little girls-- Mamu and her sisters-- got very upset. They wept. And then Bindu Taama spat a curse. She said: Die! Sheema!

In the weeks that followed, they heard the man who had come to borrow the pigeons had hung himself.

Sometimes, I've done what my Taama did. Muttered a curse in anger and grief.

When my neighbours got together last week to cut down six trees in the hood, I went into a spiral of grief and I hoped the trees would become ghosts and haunt the men and women who had ordered the trees to be cut down. I hoped they would suffer from severe stomach pain and die mortifying deaths. 

The next time I ran into them, I was bowing my namastes to them-- muscle memory. And I wondered what had happened to the witch in me. 

this too has to pass

 my head is so heavy. the medication i am on for my gut gives me strong headaches. am constantly in pain now. what might it be to not be in pain for a few days? for a few months? years? i wonder.

am just going to wait for this to pass. we must all wait.

Thank you 2024

2024 has been an eventful year, starting with walking on eggshells around someone I love deeply, to getting Covid again to flaring up into rosacea. It turns out I have had to measure my life based on medical events. But there's also been a fair share of good times in 2024.

I think this year has started me off on a new journey of self-discovery. It brought me closer to myself as I set off to India, trying to reconnect with myself again. And that is what has been the most important thing I did for myself this year. 

Each one of us owes that to ourselves. The time and the patience to be with ourselves so that we nourish ourselves. The person who understands us best is ourself and the most important relationship is right there too-- with the self. 

As the year ends, for me, it is a start as I embark on this journey of valuing myself. I set people in my life free to go find me when they are ready. Meanwhile, the focus is on me so that I find the happiness that is mine-- the one I bring myself.

Making our own homes

I've spent ten days at Pilerne village in Goa now and it has been nothing close to my expectations, but better. Rubina was right. She always is. 

The last week of November, as Bhavna and Rubina pulled out of the driveway in the rented car, I felt a tear roll down my right cheek. It felt as though all the good times we had had together in Goa was suddenly over with them leaving. But Rubina had repeatedly said, "It's going to be so good for you, this place". And so it has been!

It has been nothing close to my expectations. I've had some unpleasant incidents with men and one with a pack of dogs ganging up on me. Apart from those, it has been lovely to just focus on myself and learn to cook better, to eat alone with great patience, to do the dishes, clean up. It's taught me that I take Mamu for granted. Doing household work is a lot. Cooking is a lot. She cooks lunch for me everyday and I've rarely shown appreciation for her work. I've been sitting here in Shalini's kitchen, thinking about Mamu so much.

I'm also learning that I'm the kind of person who thrives in distance and loneliness. I've been so at peace with myself here. Apart from a few occasions of intense emotions, I haven't had particular upheavals. If they appear, they're like ripples, they pass gently.

Much of the day is spent cooking, eating, working, watching, reading, then sleeping. It's restful. I've fallen so easily into a routine. Also, the thing about places it, it doesn't take much for us to make it our own. Once you put your mind to it, the place you are at, is your home. And so G2 has been my home for ten days now.

And it has brought me good feelings. I don't feel the emptiness here, I felt in Chiang Mai. I had started to find happiness there in my third month, but the first two, were quite hard. A feeling of having removed myself to a great distance constantly gnawed at me. I haven't felt that way here. And I think it has a lot to do with Rubina. Watching how she's turned India into her home always amazes me and I'm full of admiration for how courageous and smart this girl is. Hanging out with her, Bhavna and Smriti has shown me how strong and wise women are and how they can turn cities they like into their home. Smriti has done the same with Mumbai. As has Bhavna with Kathmandu.

When we were teenagers, Smriti and I used to talk about building pretty homes. Smriti was always about pretty cushions and drapes. We dreamed of pretty things from our middle-class homes, with just a few hundred rupees in out pockets we made from writing newspaper articles. But the dreams were always there. And we've actually been able to live them now in our own ways. In different ways, but we have come to live them. 

That's the bit that makes me happiest about my girlfriends. Each one of us, independent in our own worlds, free to make our decisions. Free to pick our bags and hit the road when we want to and just go walk on the beach for long stretches. It's all the grace I always want for us all.

I'm not this

I have had no epiphany. Except, I'm that person who likes sitting at her desk all day. Of late, my head has felt very very crowded and I'm constantly looking for a place to bury my anger. Anger, that's been building up over the years. Mostly from having done so little for myself.

I have started to feel like my life has no purpose. Can eating three meals a day, transitioned by a snack, walking two kilometres and doing a job be enough? I'm grateful for everything, but something doesn't add up. 

Every morning, I wake up to the rainbow on my walls, thrown in by the lights creeping past the curtain and I think it must mean something. There's got to be more to me.

boredom

 there are days when your head pools in blue, not the colour of the sky but navy blue, the colour of distance, nervousness, and a bit of anger. it doesn't take much for the mind to get in that territory. not these days. these days, the days stretch like a chorus-- the kinds that make our insides want to burst into something. but we hold on to a sliver of hope somewhere, the promise of quiet that is set to find us.

a house of my own

I love October skies. And walks around this time are the best. I haven't been able to walk much lately because I've been sick again. But the attempt is to do two kilometres a day. It's not much, but at least it is something.

Another favourite thing to do is to look out of my window at the trees and the sky.

Last week, I went towards Chunikhel. The roads are calm and not at all polluted. And the villagers all know each other so they give me stares or curious looks, which is all fine. I don't much mind it. But it also makes me think if they think of as an intruder. Families like ours who bought their land and changed things for them. We make things expensive and life more challenging for the locals. We're all colonizers when we can be.

There are temples everywhere this side. 

How much we need temples for survival, the Nepali people. We build them everywhere we go. 

And while I'm not into rituals, I do like looking at temples. I find them pretty. And it makes me wonder what someone was thinking when they were building them. And by that I don't mean the people who planned the construction, but the ones who employed hands and head to build them.

Anyway.

It's a Monday today and the best thing to do in life is to sit at my desk, tapdancing on the keyboard.

Stray but important thought:

In the months ahead, I hope to set up my own room where I will write my essays from. That's going to be the focus of my life hereon.

Life on-campus

I've been meaning to post these Hangzhou, on-campus pictures. I love living on campus. And it makes me think I was always cut out for university life. Interactions with students always kicks me alive, like I am both a child and a mother at the same time. 

On-campus life also means walking to your department every morning, and on your way, running into stray cats. 

One time, there was a dead koi at the pool by the awnings under the orange structure.

But what really saved my heart was going back one morning to find the black swans 

had become reunited. They saved me. Like only they knew they would.

men are mean things

What is it about me that makes men want to be mean towards me? In Amsterdam, Kevin lifted me off the terrace floor and tried to throw me down the building. I shut my eyes and screamed. I was petite then. Everyone stared in shock. My classmates. No one interfered. No one tried to protect me. I didn't care so much about the Mexicans but I was mad at Beaver and the Bangladeshis for not stepping in. Why do men think it is okay to hurt a woman for random reasons?

Rest today

There's this image that shows up to one of the You Tube videos-- it is of a person resting at the desk with a book in the lap and a cat up by the window. Here's the image: 

Image by Hyunhyun from Youtube

On my worst days, I've looked at it and listened to the loop and felt held. It's music that holdS you somedays, rather than people. And images of inanimate things. They are capable of stirring something in you. Sometimes, filling you with longing for the animate. 

But today,  have a terrible backache and even though I seem to be thinking about people I love, I want to just be and rest. By the window, at my desk...

Just some unfinished tea

 Dear Germie,

I'm sitting here in a cafe near my home, where I normally come to sit and work from and be alone. Sometimes, to meet friends. Today, to be the invisible companion of a film star (Rajesh Hamal)

I met a friend today, who had a warm conversation with me about the ways he thinks he's weird. And he gave me some examples of how he has small difficulties that can become major-- like drinking water. He has the fear of drinking water. Like I have the fear of crowded spaces.

My fears are abundant-- most of them are related to just being and loving. I've always felt deprived of love even when I was loved to death. But I'm learning now that much of how I feel comes from being neurodivergent. It's been such a revelation!

I wish I was sitting here writing you a nice letter. Instead, this is just me rambling and giving you life updates. I wish you would give me yours. I wish you would use your witch powers to manifest a meeting for us in Malaysia. I've never been to Malaysia. And I haven't seen you for fifteen years. It would be quite nice.

I imagine we would spend every day of our time there talking into the night and then fall asleep surrounded by books and things. That's how our dorm room was back in Katipunan. Books, biscuit and chocolate wrappers and us. Your sprawled on the bed reading. Me, gathered in my corner of the room, writing away on my new acer. You, speaking Taglish and sometimes Visayas on the phone, as early as 6am. Me, stuttering away in Newa once in a while when we got Skype to work. 

Small pleasures that made us whole.

I miss you, Germie. And I miss talking to you about things. About how I'm tired of seeking love. How I wish men came with a sense of loyalty and how I know I don't need men to love me and yet I seek so much. I wish I could tell you: I'm tired of having my heart broken and yet, I offer it to be broken every single time. Maybe it's time to find my own version of Ja.

For now, here's some unfinished tea for you. I miss you.