I couldn’t sleep that night and the morning came too early the next day. I wanted him to protect me from the harm of the daybreak but he wasn’t here with me anymore.
*
Next day the autowallah, taking a right towards Ayodhya, (half the road signs in Lucknow point to Ayodhya) said to me “There is no one poor here in Lucknow, everyone’s rich. Everyone has Lord Ram on their lips and their flags and on their hoardings but where is there anyone who is poor?”
*
I work now at a fashion magazine but I do not know what to make of this thing called fashion when the only cloth that seems to be accorded any regard is the cloth on which there is an angry hanuman looking down at me saying ‘Jai Shree Ram’. This is not how my religion looked at me only a few years ago. Hanuman was never an angry bloke and so wasn’t my boy or me.
*
He was my friend, my confidant, the person who told me that caste, creed, religion and gender were unavoidable and that we as individuals are branded for good or for worse with these credentials the moment we’re born, and he was also the one who then gifted me a brilliantly pink hairband he bought from Mini Sou and called me his girl in a boy’s disguise while somehow brilliantly avoiding the whole ardhnareshwar rehtoric. The next month he was to tell me he didn’t love me so much as he thought he did which was expected only because he had, for me, crossed the limits of a lover’s discourse.
*
He isn’t to blame. I thought as I sat in the auto in Lucknow, months after my fall from Delhi and after I had discussed politics with the autowallah, I returned to thoughts of him and our frienzied purchases at Sarojini where I and his sister had landed on an auto and found him the cheapest coat with a puffed arm and a handcuff that fell short of his wrist by a good inch, I joked looked like his 16th century pushtaini coat that he wore to his amazing poetry performance where I couldn’t help but tell my friends that here’s the guy who I found at the beginning of the year, who had told me with a spark in his eyes that I was as anti national as they come and would only talk to me and me only throught this new year’s party in Noida where I kissed him after and we couldn’t stop kissing after.
*
It’s funny how different one auto ride is from another even though all autos are approximately the same whether they are in Lucknow going to chowk or in Delhi going to my little room of a place where I spent the most dream-caught months with him.
*
And here it was that we tried on all manner of combinations and where I declared to anyone who would listen and scoff that I was a brand Sarojini girl and was mildly proud of it. Here it was that I found Foucault’s heterotopia of deviance that I had read about for a class. And here it was that we put facemasks that would make our faces smell of honey and aloe for days after and which we stuck to my smallest of bathrooms that said: Ladies: steamed and two piece, what to do?
*
So here in Lucknow, I don’t know what fashion is. I don’t buy clothes for the fear that I might buy something I really like and which would make me look like a total goonk in my father’s language and my father’s language is the language of the daybreak. It is that of a somehow angry hanuman who has forgotten the gentle image of Ram and thus forgotten himself.
*
So at times, when there’s sun to bathe in outside on the balcony of my father’s house where I live for the time being I wear the shirt I wore the last time I met him which was here in my father’s home. It was a simple cotton shirt with extra big sleeves that said ‘Sad Bear’ on both back and front that I had bought from a cloth market near the Tunday kababi in Aminabad. I recall sitting in this auto, making my way to Tunday again, and talking politics while I go there that he had said to me when I had worn this shirt the simple phrase ‘fair enough’.
*
As in I believe he meant to say (but didn’t) ‘fair enough for you to wear only what you can wear and send a message across to me who roams the seven seas where he/she/they can wear on an academic’s salary seven kinds of sarees and sometimes even a short-skirt coupled with the most brilliant purple half something and half woolen dreamy sarojini fare’ and that ‘your fashion cry has been acknowledged’
*
So, my dear reader, do not ask Zephyr what fashion is in the city especially as you sit beside him and he’s morose and feels cheated of his gender fluidity by the simple fact that today there is the most ugly fabric adorning every house in his vicinity screaming intolerance.
–Zephyr
Bear Necessities 