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The Boatmen Sing

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  We are living, as it were, at the membrane of metaphor and memory. In fugitive anticipation of the boatmen's songs, of arrivannce, hotel stationery and the daily crossword. Unsurprisingly, my writing is an act of infidelity- I skim and skip my way around your words, through your memories and moments of being, and hold myself accountable for their suspension. As a mnesic trace...as remnants for my part of the world, where the aromas of coffee, slow-cooked curries, and cinnamon from the avenues and alleyways of your home town are a contested inheritance. An inheritance of loss, almost; the affective residue of the unsalvageable past kept alive by the cities they inhabited in their displaced condition.  Perhaps this is also why I find it easiest to insert myself into the urban text, into the home as an ethnographic self, because it is here that my performativity is most ‘at-home’ with its self-made otherness.  Perhaps this is why, between field notes and narratives of memo...
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Redeeming the Confessant

  I think this article was initially meant to focus on the affective geographies of street food pantries—coffee, bagels with blobs of cream cheese, and, on some days, samplings of Haleem, Chicken, or Mutton Kebabs sold from kiosks basking in their (seasonal) elite authenticity at Zakaria's iftar bazaar. Or perhaps, on the many afterlives (and deaths?) of Roland Barthes' A Lovers Discourse floating on the summertime river, abandoned on my favourite writing table, beside empty takeout boxes, and papers on Arabic and Persian metres. My lover fascinates me with stories of a (now) lost monsoonal in Dhaka- the baking of bátasá and Sandesh by women in frayed cotton sarees, silently inherited (and discreetly shared) culinary codes, worn wooden spoons, and the time-placeness of the sensory home. I follow the contours of her story and find myself caught up in the strange intimacies of an unfamiliar quotidian, the transactional undercurrents of he...
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C/O Salim Manzil, Kolkata

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  For the first-time visitor, Kolkata's Chitpur Road, now Rabindra Sarani, is a raid on sensation, sense-making and signification. The reflexive ethnographer disentangles herself momentarily from the traffic congestion outside the 'Badi Masjid, ' as the muezzin starts sounding the call to namaz on the microphone. It was almost time for the evening prayers- namaz-i-maghrib- and men ( namazi log , as one of the officials pointed out) were already making their way inside the congregational prayer hall. Birds circled about the mosque's two minarets breaking into the menacing Calcutta skyline as the first rak'at  rolled onto the terrace where I was standing.  From a window adjacent to the courtyard of the masjid, we sighted a man participating in the congregational prayers from his own room next door.  We waddled across the traffic-clogged crossing towards Zakaria Street, past an assortment of meats on a charcoal-burning grill, vendors displaying Islamic decorative ...
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Homegrown Archives

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 It is always a little challenging to rationalize the archival peril in recovering the domestic scene of a late Thursday lunch- tiger prawns cooked in coconut milk, bowlfuls of steamed rice and a detectable raw mango pudding sourced from a generous neighbor- to, in other words, fall back on the generative function of a memory-system grafted on shifting home-city geographies to narrativize and subsequently revoke what I suppose is a spatial amnesia about the sense of being 'at-home.' The affordances offered by these long-disbanded homescapes open up a rogue space of archivisation- of objects rarely behaving appropriately in the operational space of the archive, evading arbitrary categorizations, slipping ever-so-often into a lover's songbook, into the last verse of the predawn azaan wafting across the empty fairground. Occasioning the turbulent rupture of self-history and self-mythology. Self- reference , even.  Not unlike its truant dweller, my 'provisional' homelan...
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Qissa-1

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Back home, the curious selection of cutlery in which tea gets served has always been, for me, a subject of great intrigue. Very seldom does one find themselves holding a proper tea cup; paper cups are the usual, and on rare occasions, you might spot someone drinking straight out of the electric kettle (which does resemble an oversized coffee mug, to be fair). How does one talk of 'home'? In my hunt for a definition, I keep falling back to these peculiarities- on an assortment of landscapes, soundscapes and their associated quirks, rather than  the situated physical space  of a conventional suburban, single-family  home and its  sub-ingredients. Perhaps the lucid interval of a dreamless medicinal slumber- the comforting fiction of normalcy, the rapid, unmappable erosion of  memory  and cognition. The memorial excess of a keepsake journal- bus tickets to first dates, conference schedules, and lengthy hand-written notes- the necessary, logical instability of f...
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Kolkata, India Santiniketan, West Bengal 731204, India
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Clockwork Orange

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"W e had undefined spaces to live our childhoods in, as long as we were home by dark"  The blue notebook, half-filled with attendance policies, dress code policies, and cell phone policies, the 'late fine' slips, and the cleverly concealed rubber bands that kept our saggy socks in place have synthesized into a dyschronometric actuality- three lectures punctuated by four treks to the tea-shop, a four-minute lunch of frozen grilled cheese and a near-empty conference room at sundown forcibly- and spitefully- cutting short the valedictory speech. More importantly, this cataclysmic shift to a disaggregated, nebulous  time -web was followed by a more extensive understanding of the temporal standardization that the entire organizational culture of the school system relied on. And one that I had somehow managed to flee from, in the three-and-a-half hours of cassette-hunting that was effectively squeezed in between two classes. Clock hours and calendar days have gradually fade...
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Language as a Witness

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  "Language is my whore, my mistress, my wife, my pen-friend, my check-out girl."  An extremely dubious claim, that one. Or so I believe. How does one tame language- how does one make language tremble with desire? How does one fish out from its universal inadequacy, the artful conceits that ornament the utterances of war-mongers? How does one filter language into white squares of grief, and how does one stretch it across 1.5 million acres of mutilated life-worlds?  Language is a refugee camp supervisor; language is a discarded relic of identification buried in the rubble. Language is the misplaced  nuqta نقطہ   that turns aab آب into aap آپ, disrupting- while also equating- life-forces.  Language is a unresponsive lover; language is the matchmaker of disjointed signifiers. How do you discipline language; how do you make its unruly metaphors line up to form the defining sonnet of an epoch? The word, out here, is the overlord. Patiently overseeing the twist...
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