“No, the madness in our home, like the rest of this country, lies in our search for a strongman. In our home, no man is strong enough.” “No, the madness in our home, like the rest of this country, lies in our search for a strongman. In our home, no man is strong enough.” The Lucky Ones: A Memoir by Zara Chowdhary (Crown, July 2024). Cover design and illustration by Arsh Raziuddin. Artist Ahmedabad AUTHOR · AUTHOR · AUTHOR 19 Oct 2024 th · BOOKS & ARTS REPORTAGE · LOCATION How to Grow Flowers in a Bedroom By the end of March, there is no place to breathe in C-8. Papa has forbidden us from standing by the windows. He monitors how long we stand on the balcony, whom we look at, what we’re thinking. Inside, it feels like all air is finite. We’re trampling over one another for space to think, to be. Our silences have gone up our nostrils, come out our mouths, run out the door into the elevator, and fled. Our words now dance on the riverbed, mocking us from afar. We will never be free. Every room in this home is tainted by violence. Papa and Amma’s dark bedroom with its single small window, the kitchen with its deep sink and cloistered shelves, the laundry room, where I hide and write in a diary, the mori or dishwashing bathroom behind the kitchen, where only Gulshan is sent to clean our muck, Dadi’s room, with a view of the street but also Dadi’s fuming mouth. My parents’ room was where Misba and I hid each night during drinking time. We would hear loud, animated conversation outside—glasses chinking, something crude said, some laughter. Then the voices would always grow louder, angrier. Something would be thrown, something smashed. Then Papa would storm off to the bathroom. The door would be slammed. A moment of quiet. In my earliest memory of a night like this, when I was barely three, Amma came rushing into the bedroom, Phupu close behind her. “Rukhsi! Don’t just walk away . . .” Amma turned to close the door on her. “Zahida apa, please. Please.” Her voice wobbled. “Just please let me be.” She came around and sat at the edge of the bed. There, sitting a couple feet from my mother, I felt it for the first time: my mother’s burden shifting, growing, moving restlessly inside her, welling up in her wide, honey-colored eyes. But Amma squeezed her eyes shut and pushed it back in. I remember inching closer to Amma, placing tiny hands on her hunched shoulders, attempting an awkward hug. I remember Amma taking my tiny palms and shaking me off like a wet leaf stuck to her clothes. “Please Zara. Leave me alone.” I felt my own burden sprout, a tiny seed of helplessness. “Kidhar hai Rukhsi?” I remember my father slurring, demanding to be told where his wife was hiding. Please don’t tell him, Phupu, I prayed in this, the worst game of hide-and-seek ever. I remember Phupu’s deadpan voice telling him. I remember how he threw the door open, exploded into the room. “Bitch. Come back outside!” Then I remember Papa’s eyes accidentally meeting mine instead of hers, ready to fire, locked on a target. My eyes are wide and big like hers but dark like his. And yet for the first time I see my twinkle-eyed, smiling father—who tickled me till I collapsed giggling, who scratched my knee till I fell asleep—towering over me from the foot of the bed, glaring at me and seeing not his daughter but a limb that has grown from this woman. A part of her. He spits. “Do your drama. Brainwash the girl against me.” He rumbles, his mountain body barely holding back its rage. I sit there frozen between these two. The woman who won’t let me touch her, the man whom I dare not approach. All I want to whimper is I love you both . I remember Amma finally shaking out of her trance, then standing up and walking out of the room, hoping to draw the fire away, to spare me. I remember Papa turning to look at me one last time, hate in his eyes slowly melting into inebriated confusion. The fire and its first victim walked away. I remember Amma coming back later that night to call us to dinner. “Come on, girls,” she says in that shaky voice, not letting me look into her eyes anymore. When I hesitate to leave the safety of the bed and go out where the plates will tremor like me, she looks at me with complete emptiness. There is no love there, no joy, no life, only exhaustion. “Please, Zara,” she repeats. I quietly, guiltily get off the bed and follow her. I know then that there is no running, no saving myself. I can never leave. Not without my amma. “Arre, no two states of this country can stand each other. Everyone is fighting over food or language or rivers. We have four in this house!” we learn to say, trying to normalize or exoticize our home’s dysfunction for ourselves. It’s true. Dada is from Punjab in the North. Dadi is Gujarati. Amma’s mother is from the mango coast of western India. Her dead father is from the South. We blame the diversity for the disturbance. Too many stories in collision with one another, no shared tongue. But it’s also very not-true. Amma said yes to this marriage dreaming she’d learn to dance the garba, a dance she’d always marveled at from a thousand miles away. Phupu can cook herself any cuisine in the world, but she rushes to the table first when Amma is frying dosas. Dadi hates the mention of Dada’s family in Pakistan’s Punjab, but she pushes Misba and me to dance in front of the guests to every Punjabi bhangra song played at weddings we attend. “Tumhaare khoon mein hai yeh,” she reminds us. It is all in our blood. Amma and Baby Zara. Courtesy of the author. No, the madness in our home, like the rest of this country, lies in our search for a strongman. In our home, no man is strong enough. Dada is haunted by how he failed. Papa withers under the burden of his own mistakes. The women become dictators when they become divorced or widowed. There is no room in C-8 Jasmine for grace. So we huddle in Amma’s bedroom each night, telling each other stories, making up imaginary ones in which we live in forests by little streams, just Amma, Misba, and I. There is a tape deck in the room, a wedding present for Papa and Amma from his friends the Reddys. It’s his prized possession. Papa takes us every Friday to Law Garden, where in the evenings a man sells pirated and original audiotapes from the back of a converted Tempo Traveller: albums of every new and old Bollywood movie, as well as collections of ghazals, devotional Sufi and bhakti music. Papa never buys pirated. They will spoil his deck. If ever his purchases turn out to be fakes and the tape spools out and jams the player, he goes back and fights with the tape walla, calls him a dozen names. And then buys three more tapes. He buys Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan for himself. Some mornings he plays it after his shower and raises his hands and hums “Allah Hu, Allah Hu” as if temporarily possessed, energized, tentatively tethered to a faith he doesn’t understand. This is the only grace I see. I watch him, his soft beer belly rising and falling, the depression dropping away like the seams of his semitransparent cotton kurta suspended around his heaviness. Since the riots started, he hasn’t played it. But one Sunday, bored out of his mind, he opens the deck up and cleans the head with cotton swabs and Dada’s eau de cologne. When Misba and I shut the door of Amma’s bedroom that evening, we look at each other conspiratorially. We switch on the tape deck and allow ourselves the same grace. Grace is the only language Misba and I know to speak in. It has been our shared tongue as sisters since before we ever learned how to talk. We don’t yet know what it means to save each other, but we know something happens when we dance. We feel redeemed. We have done this each evening from the moment we started to walk, from the moment we recognized our world burned like clockwork each evening. We insert our favorite tapes one after another, hits from 2001: Lagaan, Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham, Dil Chahta Hai, Aks, Lajja, Nayak, Pyaar Tune Kya Kiya, Zubeidaa . We haven’t watched all the movies. Papa takes us to the theater only for the big ones. But song after song we go, moving and making the movie with our bodies. Through the moods and bhavas and rasas of each song, we make up steps and build facial expressions, we construct entire lives and love stories filled with heartbreak and mischief and sublime joy. Amma slips into the room in between dinner preparations to watch us. A few times, Dadi and Phupu peep inside too. Apa sits on the bed, arms folded, her grim mouth slackening into a smile. There is nothing to dance about right now. But in C-8 Jasmine, there seldom is. Dance is the only way Misba and I know to transcend this reality. When Amma comes in to watch, I watch her back, as she leans her tired body against the linen closet, her smile building from her thick lips to her honey eyes. Soon she’s clapping with our every shimmy and shake. She lets out a soft hoot. This is all she can do. Dance is teaching us what she can’t, mustn’t. That we have power. That as long as we have each other, our souls will be okay. She watches us bloom amid all this smoke, gracefully stretching into life, grateful we are hers, thankful we are alive. ∎ Excerpted from The Lucky Ones: A Memoir by Zara Chowdhary (Crown, July 2024). SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Essay Ahmedabad Memoir Childhood India Pakistan Conflict Nationalism Feminism Non-fiction Excerpt Resilience Domestic violence 2002 Gujarat Riots Multiculturalism Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

ARTIST, FILMMAKER Vinay Ghodgeri VINAY GHODGERI is a visual artist based in Goa, India, who works across painting, photography, and film mediums. His artwork has been shown at group exhibitions in Auroville, Pune, and Goa, and his illustrations have been published in Kyoorius Design Magazine ’11. He is currently working on his directorial debut, a Marathi language feature film, A Shadow Rising . ARTIST, FILMMAKER WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

JOURNALIST Anumeha Yadav ANUMEHA YADAV is a journalist and researcher who works on labour, and the effects of social and economic policies on working-class and rural communities. Her work has been published extensively in The Hindu, The Indian Express, Al Jazeera, The Guardian, and Caravan , amongst others. JOURNALIST WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

ARTIST Ikroop Sandhu IKROOP SANDHU is a graphic novelist based in Dharamshala, India. She studied Philosophy from LSR College, Delhi, and Animation from Vancouver Film School. She is the author of Inquilab Zindabad: A Graphic Biography of Bhagat Singh ARTIST WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

The story of the Spring Revolution in Myanmar can be told through the footwear—the strewn, tossed, bloodied, abandoned—that is tied up with both the iconography and reality of brutal state violence. Piles of flip-flops amidst the debris, military boots stomping the ground: both are “central characters” of the Revolution. FEATURES Whose Footfall is Loudest? The story of the Spring Revolution in Myanmar can be told through the footwear—the strewn, tossed, bloodied, abandoned—that is tied up with both the iconography and reality of brutal state violence. Piles of flip-flops amidst the debris, military boots stomping the ground: both are “central characters” of the Revolution. Thawda Aye Lei Never in my life did I think that flip-flops could be fascinating. Only after a memorable incident entailing a particular pair of flip-flops did I begin to pay attention to them. An incident, yes! The one that will stay with me my whole life. It made me realise that certain footwear could carry more meaning than just “footwear”. It happened after Amay passed away. Before she drew her last breath, Amay had been struggling with lung cancer for nearly three months. At the time, we were living in a small town. Hoping that we could still save her, we sent her to a hospital in the city. We buried her there when she died. Without Amay, our journey back to our small town was desolate. My heart felt empty, as if there was nothing left for me to hold on to. Everything around me went pitch dark, as if I had been pulled into a black hole. When it was decided that all of Amay’s belongings would be given away to needy families, I acquiesced. I didn’t want to cling to her stuff—after all, I had lost Amay as a person already. Even then, something that belonged to Amay was discovered unexpectedly. A pair of flip-flops. Under Amay’s bed, lying still and quiet in the darkest corner as if they were hiding, were a pair of her flip-flops. They must have been separated from Amay when she was taken to hospital. When I looked at them carefully, I saw that the soles were worn out and the heels were ragged. Amay was a frugal woman who always budgeted carefully and spent wisely. Apart from a new pair of flip-flops for some occasions, she wore these worn rubber flip-flops on a daily basis—when she did household chores and went grocery shopping—for many years. If the straps were broken, she would replace them with new ones herself. If only one strap of her flip-flop was broken, she would keep one new strap for later use. After several years of daily use, Amay’s toeprints were imprinted on the flip-flops. Tears started rolling down as I looked at them. These flip-flops showed me beyond a doubt how Amay went through hard times in her life, and how she endured pain and suffering. That pair of flip-flops I inherited from Amay would stay with me for many, many more years. Since then, I’ve been drawn to stories, memories and lives that could be revealed by well-worn flip-flops. We might change clothes every day, but a member of a low-income household, who could barely afford an extra pair of flip-flops, had to rely on the only pair they had. Flip-flops were a poor person’s comrades-in-arms on a thorny road. Flip-flops gave them strength. They were as close to them as their own skin. “My flip-flops are my fortress!” poet Hla Than declared. After the military coup in February 2021, I collected more intriguing stories of flip-flops and their owners. A small, underdeveloped country suffering from economic asthma under COVID-19 was hit by a rogue political wave. This spring, the future of the nation became as blurry as the spring mist itself. If someone looked far into the future, they would only see a parched land. The military claimed that the 2020 election fraud made the coup inevitable. Prior to the election, “The Sound of Heels,” an election campaign song by the National League for Democracy (NLD), was very popular. It became the NLD’s triumphant anthem following the party’s landslide victory in the election, but it vanished into thin air after the military seized power. The song was dedicated to the State Counsellor, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, leader of the NLD, to whom her supporters referred as “Amay”. The song was about how her efforts gave Myanmar, an ostracised society under long years of military rule, a chance to step onto the world stage. On 1 February, the clack-clack of heels were silenced by the bang-bang of military boots. Before long, the whole country was completely under the boots. The voices of mourning mothers, the tongue-clicking of dismayed youth, the moaning of farmers out of their stubbled fields and workers out of their factories got louder and louder each day. “Join the CDM now!” As soon as the rallying cry put people on alert, all those different voices merged together—ineffectual whines turned into battle cries reverberating across the sky. If someone had ever questioned whether footwear could be frightening, the answer would have been “yes” if they were military boots. In the first week of the Spring Revolution, civil servants joined the CDM en masse. The main action of the CDM was that no employee should go to work. In some political cartoons, military generals in jackboots trampled doctors, school teachers and workers. “Stop going to office, struggle out of the dictatorship!” was the slogan of the strikers. They warned each other that if people continued to work for the military state, many precious lives, beautiful things and human values would be smashed under the boots. That’s how footwear became a central character in the Myanmar Spring Revolution. There was more to come. Within a week of the coup, thousands of young people took to the streets. In response, the military hired a group of jingoists and staged counter-protests. Some anti-coup protesters started shouting that they were out on the street on their own volition, and that they had not been paid by anyone. To drive home the point that they were from well-to-do families and that they could not possibly be bought, they came to the protests in expensive outfits and shoes. This, however, only highlighted the dire situation of most of their fellow protestors, who couldn’t afford fancy outfits. There were messages on social media condemning some affluent protesters for talking down to people from underprivileged backgrounds, including those hired by the military. In opposing tyranny, people simultaneously learned to smash any form of discrimination based on wealth or class. Day by day, the revolution gathered strength. It soon turned into a nationwide protest of people from all walks of life—rural and urban. Their footfall echoed in the streets. Now street surfaces seemed totally covered by an array of flip-flops and shoes that it would be difficult for anyone to gain a foothold there. Spring was in full bloom. On roads where fallen ones would be laid to rest, columns after columns of rallies continued to march over and over again. One of the non-violent protests was known as “Lace your shoes up!” In the early days of the Spring, security personnel seemed uncertain about whether they should use force against protesters. They tried to push the crowds off the roads, saying the people were obstructing traffic. The youth reacted by making their protests mobile. They moved around in small groups and continued to protest. They crossed the road when the light was green. They stopped when the light turned red. They shouted rally cries. As soon as they had the chance, they sat on the road, lacing up their shoes at a leisurely pace. Policemen watching them were speechless. In the following days, there were “harvesting onion” and “collecting rice grains” movements. Loose onions and grains of rice were deliberately poured out in the middle of a road so everyone could help pick them up and put them back in the bags to annoy the police. Spring flowers of a variety of colours were seen everywhere. New and creative forms of revolutionary activities shone here and there. Some people found fault with these kinds of protests. Young people were not serious, they said. Others pointed out the generation gap. Older people did not understand the state-of-the-art techniques of young people. In reality in the early days of the spring, people of all ages managed to build mutual trust and solidarity. They were full of energy, enjoying the calm before a storm. The fresh, green spring would soon turn into a fully-blown parched summer. The intense heat made wall tiles rise up and crack. A heatwave also pervaded throughout the democratic movement. The forces, standing up hand-in-hand against the junta, were hit with a bloody gust. A volley of gunfire across the sky set a flock of roosting birds on a chaotic flight. A group of soldiers and police chased down the protesters who were retreating into a neighbourhood, and beat them to death like blood-starved beasts. Even the black asphalt road began to weep, blood streaming down all over her face. After blood was spilled, the style of people’s revolutionary art also changed. Each time a group of people were chased by guns and batons, dozens of ownerless flip-flops would be left abandoned on the street. Some flip-flops were upside down, others in the gutter, and many of them unpaired. And yet most of them looked well-worn. When the security forces were gone, people picked them up and organised them in pairs for their owners to come and collect them. The abandoned flip-flops didn’t look great but they could be invaluable to their owners. In this way, I learned, rather accidentally, that flip-flops had always been important witnesses to our revolutions. In the 1988 uprising, flip-flops were scattered everywhere on the road. In the 2007 Saffron Revolution, there were many flipflops drenched in blood. Following the 2015 student protests, hundreds of flip-flops were on the road again. There was even a shoe charity campaign in 2021. It emerged after some people began to question on social media what kind of shoes would be most suitable for protests if they were to escape from violent attacks. A number of shoe donors came forward. In some places, many pairs of “used, feel free to take” shoes in various sizes were on offer. Some people who owned extra pairs of shoes shared them with their comrades. They exchanged metta in sharing shoes. They looked after each other. They became more united, realising that people were cut from the same cloth. On top of physical violence, people also suffered from psychological warfare by the regime. The longer a revolution dragged on, the more volatile revolutionary morale could become. And yet, crackdowns notwithstanding, most protesters decided to continue with their struggle. Some bid farewells to their parents and friends. “In the event that I am killed I donate my organs to anyone in need,” some people wrote in their wills. “Don’t push this person any further, / at land’s end / my flipflops are my fortress,” read the last lines of a poem by Hla Than. People prepared for a last-ditch fight. Oaths—that they would not back down no matter what—were sworn. They glued pictures of the coup leader on the roads and marched on them. The senior general’s face was smeared with hundreds of footprints. The murder of protesters became more commonplace. The number of martyrs multiplied every day. People shed new tears before old tears dried on their cheeks. They were placed under curfew. Internet access was restricted. Arrests and detentions under various charges became more frequent. People felt less and less secure. There were no more grounds for them to take a stand, so it seemed. They became afraid of nightfall. What they feared more probably was the nightfall over their future. One day I saw a photo of a pair of slippers on social media. “These belonged to a mother. They were left during a protest.” They were white and size 37. The straps were white, but not pure white. The left and right slippers must have been thrown into disarray when the wearer was attacked. There was a line of blood on the pavement that stained one of them. I learned that the owner was a 50-year-old schoolteacher. She was shot to death at that spot by the military terrorists. A bullet that hit her hand took her life as she had a heart condition. “She wasn’t feeling very well when she went to the protest,” said her daughter in an interview. The alleged “2020 election fraud” brought dishonour to members of the education department who had overseen the polling stations. That’s why she believed that it was her duty to protest the coup on the front line. Before she left home, she had comforted her daughter that the security forces would go easy and not use violence against school teachers. Sadly, the gun barrel does not discriminate—it was loyal only to the finger that pulled the trigger. One bullet after another shattered our dreams. Karl Marx’s slogan “Proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains,” echoed loudly among the masses. The daughter wept violently over the slippers left by her fallen mother. This reminded me of how I cried whenever I saw my amay’s flip-flops. What of her? Would she become interested in footwear too? In revolutions, footwear is often prematurely parted from its wearers. The group in military boots stood firm, determined to put an end to the civilian resistance. The people had no weapons, nor sturdy shields. Their flip-flops wore thin. Even then, the hot, bloody roads couldn’t be worse than hell. No one seemed to mind the intense heat under their soles. With or without footwear, their way out of hell would be an arduous journey. ∎ Endnotes : Hla Than’s poem was translated by Ko Ko Thett. This essay appeared in Picking Off New Shoots Will Not Stop the Spring: Witness Poems and Essays from Burma/Myanmar 1988-2021 , edited by Ko Ko Thett and Brian Haman, and published by Gaudy Boy in North America, Balestier Press in the UK, and Ethos Books in Singapore. Never in my life did I think that flip-flops could be fascinating. Only after a memorable incident entailing a particular pair of flip-flops did I begin to pay attention to them. An incident, yes! The one that will stay with me my whole life. It made me realise that certain footwear could carry more meaning than just “footwear”. It happened after Amay passed away. Before she drew her last breath, Amay had been struggling with lung cancer for nearly three months. At the time, we were living in a small town. Hoping that we could still save her, we sent her to a hospital in the city. We buried her there when she died. Without Amay, our journey back to our small town was desolate. My heart felt empty, as if there was nothing left for me to hold on to. Everything around me went pitch dark, as if I had been pulled into a black hole. When it was decided that all of Amay’s belongings would be given away to needy families, I acquiesced. I didn’t want to cling to her stuff—after all, I had lost Amay as a person already. Even then, something that belonged to Amay was discovered unexpectedly. A pair of flip-flops. Under Amay’s bed, lying still and quiet in the darkest corner as if they were hiding, were a pair of her flip-flops. They must have been separated from Amay when she was taken to hospital. When I looked at them carefully, I saw that the soles were worn out and the heels were ragged. Amay was a frugal woman who always budgeted carefully and spent wisely. Apart from a new pair of flip-flops for some occasions, she wore these worn rubber flip-flops on a daily basis—when she did household chores and went grocery shopping—for many years. If the straps were broken, she would replace them with new ones herself. If only one strap of her flip-flop was broken, she would keep one new strap for later use. After several years of daily use, Amay’s toeprints were imprinted on the flip-flops. Tears started rolling down as I looked at them. These flip-flops showed me beyond a doubt how Amay went through hard times in her life, and how she endured pain and suffering. That pair of flip-flops I inherited from Amay would stay with me for many, many more years. Since then, I’ve been drawn to stories, memories and lives that could be revealed by well-worn flip-flops. We might change clothes every day, but a member of a low-income household, who could barely afford an extra pair of flip-flops, had to rely on the only pair they had. Flip-flops were a poor person’s comrades-in-arms on a thorny road. Flip-flops gave them strength. They were as close to them as their own skin. “My flip-flops are my fortress!” poet Hla Than declared. After the military coup in February 2021, I collected more intriguing stories of flip-flops and their owners. A small, underdeveloped country suffering from economic asthma under COVID-19 was hit by a rogue political wave. This spring, the future of the nation became as blurry as the spring mist itself. If someone looked far into the future, they would only see a parched land. The military claimed that the 2020 election fraud made the coup inevitable. Prior to the election, “The Sound of Heels,” an election campaign song by the National League for Democracy (NLD), was very popular. It became the NLD’s triumphant anthem following the party’s landslide victory in the election, but it vanished into thin air after the military seized power. The song was dedicated to the State Counsellor, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, leader of the NLD, to whom her supporters referred as “Amay”. The song was about how her efforts gave Myanmar, an ostracised society under long years of military rule, a chance to step onto the world stage. On 1 February, the clack-clack of heels were silenced by the bang-bang of military boots. Before long, the whole country was completely under the boots. The voices of mourning mothers, the tongue-clicking of dismayed youth, the moaning of farmers out of their stubbled fields and workers out of their factories got louder and louder each day. “Join the CDM now!” As soon as the rallying cry put people on alert, all those different voices merged together—ineffectual whines turned into battle cries reverberating across the sky. If someone had ever questioned whether footwear could be frightening, the answer would have been “yes” if they were military boots. In the first week of the Spring Revolution, civil servants joined the CDM en masse. The main action of the CDM was that no employee should go to work. In some political cartoons, military generals in jackboots trampled doctors, school teachers and workers. “Stop going to office, struggle out of the dictatorship!” was the slogan of the strikers. They warned each other that if people continued to work for the military state, many precious lives, beautiful things and human values would be smashed under the boots. That’s how footwear became a central character in the Myanmar Spring Revolution. There was more to come. Within a week of the coup, thousands of young people took to the streets. In response, the military hired a group of jingoists and staged counter-protests. Some anti-coup protesters started shouting that they were out on the street on their own volition, and that they had not been paid by anyone. To drive home the point that they were from well-to-do families and that they could not possibly be bought, they came to the protests in expensive outfits and shoes. This, however, only highlighted the dire situation of most of their fellow protestors, who couldn’t afford fancy outfits. There were messages on social media condemning some affluent protesters for talking down to people from underprivileged backgrounds, including those hired by the military. In opposing tyranny, people simultaneously learned to smash any form of discrimination based on wealth or class. Day by day, the revolution gathered strength. It soon turned into a nationwide protest of people from all walks of life—rural and urban. Their footfall echoed in the streets. Now street surfaces seemed totally covered by an array of flip-flops and shoes that it would be difficult for anyone to gain a foothold there. Spring was in full bloom. On roads where fallen ones would be laid to rest, columns after columns of rallies continued to march over and over again. One of the non-violent protests was known as “Lace your shoes up!” In the early days of the Spring, security personnel seemed uncertain about whether they should use force against protesters. They tried to push the crowds off the roads, saying the people were obstructing traffic. The youth reacted by making their protests mobile. They moved around in small groups and continued to protest. They crossed the road when the light was green. They stopped when the light turned red. They shouted rally cries. As soon as they had the chance, they sat on the road, lacing up their shoes at a leisurely pace. Policemen watching them were speechless. In the following days, there were “harvesting onion” and “collecting rice grains” movements. Loose onions and grains of rice were deliberately poured out in the middle of a road so everyone could help pick them up and put them back in the bags to annoy the police. Spring flowers of a variety of colours were seen everywhere. New and creative forms of revolutionary activities shone here and there. Some people found fault with these kinds of protests. Young people were not serious, they said. Others pointed out the generation gap. Older people did not understand the state-of-the-art techniques of young people. In reality in the early days of the spring, people of all ages managed to build mutual trust and solidarity. They were full of energy, enjoying the calm before a storm. The fresh, green spring would soon turn into a fully-blown parched summer. The intense heat made wall tiles rise up and crack. A heatwave also pervaded throughout the democratic movement. The forces, standing up hand-in-hand against the junta, were hit with a bloody gust. A volley of gunfire across the sky set a flock of roosting birds on a chaotic flight. A group of soldiers and police chased down the protesters who were retreating into a neighbourhood, and beat them to death like blood-starved beasts. Even the black asphalt road began to weep, blood streaming down all over her face. After blood was spilled, the style of people’s revolutionary art also changed. Each time a group of people were chased by guns and batons, dozens of ownerless flip-flops would be left abandoned on the street. Some flip-flops were upside down, others in the gutter, and many of them unpaired. And yet most of them looked well-worn. When the security forces were gone, people picked them up and organised them in pairs for their owners to come and collect them. The abandoned flip-flops didn’t look great but they could be invaluable to their owners. In this way, I learned, rather accidentally, that flip-flops had always been important witnesses to our revolutions. In the 1988 uprising, flip-flops were scattered everywhere on the road. In the 2007 Saffron Revolution, there were many flipflops drenched in blood. Following the 2015 student protests, hundreds of flip-flops were on the road again. There was even a shoe charity campaign in 2021. It emerged after some people began to question on social media what kind of shoes would be most suitable for protests if they were to escape from violent attacks. A number of shoe donors came forward. In some places, many pairs of “used, feel free to take” shoes in various sizes were on offer. Some people who owned extra pairs of shoes shared them with their comrades. They exchanged metta in sharing shoes. They looked after each other. They became more united, realising that people were cut from the same cloth. On top of physical violence, people also suffered from psychological warfare by the regime. The longer a revolution dragged on, the more volatile revolutionary morale could become. And yet, crackdowns notwithstanding, most protesters decided to continue with their struggle. Some bid farewells to their parents and friends. “In the event that I am killed I donate my organs to anyone in need,” some people wrote in their wills. “Don’t push this person any further, / at land’s end / my flipflops are my fortress,” read the last lines of a poem by Hla Than. People prepared for a last-ditch fight. Oaths—that they would not back down no matter what—were sworn. They glued pictures of the coup leader on the roads and marched on them. The senior general’s face was smeared with hundreds of footprints. The murder of protesters became more commonplace. The number of martyrs multiplied every day. People shed new tears before old tears dried on their cheeks. They were placed under curfew. Internet access was restricted. Arrests and detentions under various charges became more frequent. People felt less and less secure. There were no more grounds for them to take a stand, so it seemed. They became afraid of nightfall. What they feared more probably was the nightfall over their future. One day I saw a photo of a pair of slippers on social media. “These belonged to a mother. They were left during a protest.” They were white and size 37. The straps were white, but not pure white. The left and right slippers must have been thrown into disarray when the wearer was attacked. There was a line of blood on the pavement that stained one of them. I learned that the owner was a 50-year-old schoolteacher. She was shot to death at that spot by the military terrorists. A bullet that hit her hand took her life as she had a heart condition. “She wasn’t feeling very well when she went to the protest,” said her daughter in an interview. The alleged “2020 election fraud” brought dishonour to members of the education department who had overseen the polling stations. That’s why she believed that it was her duty to protest the coup on the front line. Before she left home, she had comforted her daughter that the security forces would go easy and not use violence against school teachers. Sadly, the gun barrel does not discriminate—it was loyal only to the finger that pulled the trigger. One bullet after another shattered our dreams. Karl Marx’s slogan “Proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains,” echoed loudly among the masses. The daughter wept violently over the slippers left by her fallen mother. This reminded me of how I cried whenever I saw my amay’s flip-flops. What of her? Would she become interested in footwear too? In revolutions, footwear is often prematurely parted from its wearers. The group in military boots stood firm, determined to put an end to the civilian resistance. The people had no weapons, nor sturdy shields. Their flip-flops wore thin. Even then, the hot, bloody roads couldn’t be worse than hell. No one seemed to mind the intense heat under their soles. With or without footwear, their way out of hell would be an arduous journey. ∎ Endnotes : Hla Than’s poem was translated by Ko Ko Thett. This essay appeared in Picking Off New Shoots Will Not Stop the Spring: Witness Poems and Essays from Burma/Myanmar 1988-2021 , edited by Ko Ko Thett and Brian Haman, and published by Gaudy Boy in North America, Balestier Press in the UK, and Ethos Books in Singapore. SUB-HEAD ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: Clare Patrick (Our) Worlds and (Plant) Wisdoms Kareen Adam · Nazish Chunara A Dhivehi Artists Showcase Artwork by Mahnoor Azeem. Ink collage on cardstock. SHARE Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Essay Myanmar Military Coup Spring Revolution Saffron Revolution Hla Than Aung San Suu Kyi National League for Democracy Amay Sound Low-Income Workers Picking Off New Shoots Will Not Stop the Spring Student Movements Student Protests Incarceration Military Crackdown Military Dictatorship Military Operations Revolution Histories of Revolutionary Politics THAWDA AYE LEI is a Burmese writer who has published four novels and two short story collections. She is currently working as a researcher on gender- and media-related studies for Burma-based international NGOs. In 2021, she enrolled in the PhD program in Political Science at McMaster University, Canada. 24 Feb 2023 Essay Myanmar 24th Feb 2023 MAHNOOR AZEEM is an illustrator, writer, and recent graduate of the Savannah College of Art and Design. She is based in Lahore. Skulls K Za Win 4th Apr In the Yoma Foothills Tun Lin Soe 26th Feb Exhaustion & Emancipation Asad Haider 10th Mar Mahrang Baloch's Struggle Against Enforced Disappearances Shah Meer Baloch 18th Feb Discourses on Kashmir Huma Dar · Hilal Mir · Ather Zia 24th Oct On That Note:

“Formal preoccupations are presumed to be a part of the European avant-garde, even though what form and form can be has been deeply influenced by writings from other parts of the world, and the West's straitjacketed understanding of the Renaissance being exposed to that.” COMMUNITY Origins of Modernism & the Avant-Garde in India “Formal preoccupations are presumed to be a part of the European avant-garde, even though what form and form can be has been deeply influenced by writings from other parts of the world, and the West's straitjacketed understanding of the Renaissance being exposed to that.” VOL. 1 INTERVIEW AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR Watch the interview on YouTube or IGTV. ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Watch the interview on YouTube or IGTV. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Interview Avant-Garde Origins 4th Oct 2020 Interview Avant-Garde Origins Modernism Anthology Traditions Vaikom Muhammad Basheer Avant-Garde Form Auto-Fiction Wendy Doniger Multimodal Stream of Consciousness Rabindranath Tagore Tagore as First Impulse of Modernism Literary Activism Impoverished Histories Contradiction Criticism Intellectual History Internationalist Perspective Performance Art Satyajit Ray Avant-Garde Beginnings in India Varavara Rao Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Author Amit Chaudhuri in conversation with Associate Editor Kamil Ahsan on his previous works, his preoccupations with the banal and the label of "autofiction" that haunts contemporary appraisals of his work. Further, they discuss modernism in India, in particular Tagore's children's books as possibly the first impulse of modernism writ large. In surveying the history of literature and art in colonial India, the consequences of Europe's mistaken claim to originating the avant-garde is a profound ahistorical act, one that patently must be rectified. RECOMMENDED: Sojourn by Amit Chaudhuri (New York Review Books, 2022). More Fiction & Poetry: Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5

COO of Fearless Collective, Tehani Ariyaratne, in conversation with Senior Editor Sabika Abbas Naqvi. COMMUNITY Public Art Projects as Feminist Reclamation COO of Fearless Collective, Tehani Ariyaratne, in conversation with Senior Editor Sabika Abbas Naqvi. Tehani Ariyaratne One of our murals in Rawalpindi, is an image of a [khwaja sira], Bubbli Malik, on a bicycle, and she says "I am a creation of Allah." The mural refers not to violence or trauma, but is a radical affirmation of the [khwaja sira] community. One of our murals in Rawalpindi, is an image of a [khwaja sira], Bubbli Malik, on a bicycle, and she says "I am a creation of Allah." The mural refers not to violence or trauma, but is a radical affirmation of the [khwaja sira] community. SUB-HEAD ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: Clare Patrick (Our) Worlds and (Plant) Wisdoms Kareen Adam · Nazish Chunara A Dhivehi Artists Showcase Watch the interview on YouTube or IGTV. SHARE Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Interview Feminist Art Practice Feminist Organizing Mural Public Space Art Practice Public Arts Fearless Collective Fearless Arts Residency Art Activism Fundraising Future Dream Spaces Queerness Queer Spaces Trans Politics Trans Community Wheat Pasting Sri Lanka Pakistan India Internationalist Solidarity Khwaja Siras Bubbli Malik Queer Muslim Project TEHANI ARIYARATNE is a feminist researcher with ten years of working experience in the human rights and development sectors in Sri Lanka and South Asia. Her research focus areas include women's labor and environmental justice. She is the Chief Operations Officer for Fearless Collective , a South Asia-based public art project with the aim of reclamation and self-representation for women and marginalized people around the world. 29 Nov 2020 Interview Feminist Art Practice 29th Nov 2020 After the March Zoya Rehman 19th Apr Bibi Hajra’s Spaces of Belonging Iman Iftikhar 3rd Jul Protest Art & the Corporate Art World Hit Man Gurung · Isma Gul Hasan · Ikroop Sandhu 5th Jun A State of Perpetual War: Fiction & the Sri Lankan Civil War Shehan Karunatilaka 10th Jan Dissident Kid Lit Saira Mir · Shelly Anand · Vashti Harrison · Simran Jeet Singh 20th Dec On That Note:

ARTIST OCTO OCTO is a self-taught Malaysian artist from Mentakab, Pahang, whose multidisciplinary work focuses on the violent politics of the Malaysian state, creatively engaging his practice in themes of police brutality, statelessness, and urban poverty. His art has been featured in Amnesty International's We Make Our World exhibition and Patani Art Space's Kenduri Seni Patani exhibition. ARTIST WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

And what if they're union-busting but still paying really well? BOOKS & ARTS A Freelancer's Guide to Decision-Making Shebani Rao And what if they're union-busting but still paying really well? ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Not enough "choose your own adventure" content? Leave us an angry note & we will oblige. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Comic Freelancing Gig Work SHEBANI RAO is a comic artist, illustrator, and activist who creates work about race, mental health, feminism, pop culture, incarceration, and more. Comic Freelancing 22nd Feb 2023 On That Note: Dissident Kid Lit 20th DEC On the Ethics of Climate Journalism 22nd AUG

ARTIST Jayeeta Chatterjee JAYEETA CHATTERJEE completed her BFA in Printmaking from Kala Bhavana, Visva Bharati University, West Bengal. Through her practice, she highlights the issues within the domestic and monotonous lives of middle-class women, particularly from lower-income groups living in small towns. ARTIST WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

ARTIST Saara Nahar SAARA NAHAR is currently pursuing her UG in Visual Arts, Painting at MSU Baroda. She responds to the people and places/spaces in her surroundings, attempting to capture their essence. ARTIST WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

WRITER Harshana Rambukwella HARSHANA RABUKWELLA is the director of the Postgraduate Institute of English, Open University of Sri Lanka, and the author of Politics and Poetics of Authenticity: A Cultural Genealogy of Sinhala Nationalism (2018). His work has appeared in the Journal of Commonwealth Literature, boundary 2 , and Journal of Asian Studies , among others. He has been a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Social Studies and Humanities (IASH) at the University of Edinburgh. WRITER WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE