Seeking a home beyond Europe and South Asia could provide, Amrita Sher-Gil wrestled with a duality of being that reflected in her oeuvre. A Spivakian reading of her 1935 work Group of Three Girls sees Sher-Gil as an accomplice in perpetuating the Orientalist gaze she faced while trying to prove her prowess to Western audiences unable to view her art as equal. BOOKS & ARTS Speaking Through the Subaltern Seeking a home beyond Europe and South Asia could provide, Amrita Sher-Gil wrestled with a duality of being that reflected in her oeuvre. A Spivakian reading of her 1935 work Group of Three Girls sees Sher-Gil as an accomplice in perpetuating the Orientalist gaze she faced while trying to prove her prowess to Western audiences unable to view her art as equal. Vamika Sinha Group of Three Girls is widely considered one of Amrita Sher-Gil’s masterpieces. The 1935 artwork has become increasingly popular over the years as a symbol of Indian feminism, while Sher-Gil herself has gained more international recognition and seen an increase in art market capitalization. In the South Asian subcontinent, she has become canonical and even adopted into the Indian state’s official historical national narrative. A major road in central Delhi is named Amrita Shergill Marg, while her works are labeled national “art treasures” that “cannot be taken out of the country.” Sher-Gil’s elevated status, especially through Group of Three Girls , was influenced by the academic boom of postcolonial and intersectional feminist methodologies around the 1990s, which have trickled into the mainstream. A central scholar driving that boom has certainly been Indian theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, whose seminal 1988 essay , “Can the Subaltern Speak?” critiques how Western intellectual discourse perpetuates and constructs the “Other,” or the “subaltern” subject. Spivak insists, however, on the subaltern’s heterogeneity—that it is not a monolith, but endlessly diverse, stratified, and therefore unstable. This idea was clearly a precursor to Kimberlé Crenshaw’s introduction to “intersectionality” in 1989. The term “subaltern” gets bandied about regularly. Spivak’s theory has been elevated to near-pop status in online and academic discourses, but is the subaltern still a useful term? Is Spivak still relevant when her own status as a global public intellectual has suffered the arrows of critiques like caste-blindness and complicity with capitalist pandering? Remember that strange Aesop ad? However, a debate on Spivak as a figurehead is not on today’s table. If the term “subaltern” has been propelled into ubiquity to the point of irony and satirical smirking, we can continue to test its value on different canvases. Today, that is Amrita Sher-Gil’s, specifically her painting, Group of Three Girls . In this work, Sher-Gil transmits a vulnerable period of India’s past, through her privileged Indo-European body, onto the rural Indian women depicted on her canvas. By ventriloquizing lower-class female Indian bodies to express and cope with her own feelings of cultural alienation and dislocation, she becomes a subaltern speaking through another subaltern. Is this problematic or a genuine act of solidarity—an attempt to connect with the pain of others? This Spivakian reading of Sher-Gil’s work attempts to expose a more nuanced interpretation of the painting as a complex ethical problem. More widely, it situates Group of Three Girls as a cultural object both embedded within and symbolic of the fragile, unstable historiography of the Indian nation—once a subaltern state tussling between colonialism and nationalism, on the cusp of partition and independence. Sher-Gil as Subaltern? Born in Budapest to a Hungarian opera singer and a Sikh aristocrat-scholar who was “one of the first photographers of South Asia,” Sher-Gil did most of her artistic training in Italy and France. According to Linda Nochlin’s iconic 1971 essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”, Sher-Gil possessed all the crucial factors needed to achieve success as a female artist: formal European art training, a well-networked artistic family and peer circle, money, mobility and independence, and the mentorship of older, more powerful male artists. But she was also plagued by a crisis of belonging. In Group of Three Girls, three Indian women, dressed modestly in Punjabi salwar kameez outfits, sit in front of a jute-brown background. Their hair is mostly hidden by their dupattas. Their clothes are largely plain, though the material looks gauzy, even diaphanous, thanks to Sher-Gil’s long, languid brushstrokes. Influenced by post-Impressionism , she paints the women in solid, vivid colors. One wears vibrant pistachio green, the other a pulsating saffron, while the final dons a deep vermilion. None of the subjects meet the viewer’s eyes. Their gazes are faraway and downcast, evoking resigned melancholy, or perhaps the strangely beatific expression of the serenity in accepting defeat. The women do not touch or look at each other, as if each was pasted separately in a collage. While the colors and brushstrokes teem with warmth and dynamism, the figures themselves appear frozen, alienated, and emotionally distanced: “together…yet alone,” in the words of art historian Giles Tillotson . A light from outside the image casts shadows on the wall behind them. One’s immediate urge may be to code the subjects as lower-class, oppressed Indian women upon seeing their simple, traditional clothing and mute, passive, and despondent stances. This reading is reinforced by two aspects from Sher-Gil’s previous paintings: first, Sher-Gil’s earlier use of shadows, such as in Self-Portrait as a Tahitian (1934), signified a looming, intrusive male presence, according to art historian Saloni Mathur. In Group of Three Girls, the shadows could symbolize the rigidities of patriarchy, particularly of impending marriage. The painting can further be contrasted with one of Sher-Gil’s earlier European works, Young Girls (1932), in which two women occupy a figuratively warmer space, their bodies angled towards each other, displaying an intimacy and closeness missing from Group of Three Girls. The two “young girls” appear as connected yet distinct people, given how elaborately they are painted, lending their dress, clothes, hair, and surroundings multiple depths of light and texture. In contrast, the women in Group of Three Girls , whose formal depiction is comparatively flatter, become more symbols than individuals. Instead of appearing as a particular group of women bound by a close relationship, the “three girls” become every group of women, isolated but bound only by the circumstances of being Indian, female, and subaltern. Amrita Sher-Gil, Young Girls , 1932, oil on canvas, 164 cm × 133 cm, National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi. But the subaltern itself is an “essentialist” or unfixed concept. Spivak highlights the slippages within the hierarchical, “taxonomic” categorizing of subaltern identities to demonstrate their relational nature—that they are always formed in relation to another individual or group's identity, ultimately rendering them unreliable. In other words, someone may be a subaltern in one context but an oppressor in another. For Sher-Gil, her half-whiteness, wealth, and European elite upbringing lent her enormous privilege in British India, making the rural subjects she painted subaltern in relation to her primarily via social class. Yet in the eyes of the West, up to decades after she died in 1941, Sher-Gil was herself subaltern via race, gender, and geography; she was a less relevant, less authentic woman of color who predominantly painted in and about a Third World colony. A Crisis of Belonging Group of Three Girls is the first painting Sher-Gil produced after leaving Europe in 1934 for a growingly anti-colonial India. Upon her arrival, she proclaimed her “artistic mission” was to “interpret the life of Indians, particularly the poor…silent images of infinite submission and patience…angular brown bodies, strangely beautiful in their ugliness.” Her painting was the first manifestation of this articulated desire to speak on behalf of the subaltern. Sher-Gil would go on to build on this painting’s style and subjects for the rest of her life, depicting Indian women and rural village scenes in flatter forms and hotter colors. Still, her “mission” reads as cliché and problematic today. Seeded firmly and formally in Group of Three Girls , it can be faulted in the same way as Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze’s writings were by Spivak in 1988, who criticized them for making marginalized peoples into a monolith, essentializing, aestheticizing, and further Othering “them”. Meanwhile, the two scholars maintained the elevation and centrality of their Western gazes while assigning virtue to the subaltern solely through their tragedy and oppression. This critique exposes how Sher-Gil denies Group of Three Girls ’ subjects a sense of individuality or agency. The green-clad woman’s hand is cut off from the frame. The red-clad woman’s left palm faces upwards, as if begging or in surrender. Through Sher-Gil’s downward, Westernized outsider gaze, the subjects are only brought together in a homogenizing representation of subaltern Indian women as downtrodden, helpless, and paralyzed. This reading is supported by Sher-Gil’s significant preoccupation with Paul Gauguin’s Tahiti paintings at the time, which she was riffing on in Self-Portrait as a Tahitian . Gauguin’s work itself has been heavily critiqued for his flat, Orientalist depictions of Tahitian women through a colonial, patriarchal gaze. The structure and output of such a dominant gaze play out similarly in Group of Three Girls, where Sher-Gil represents her subjects “in the singular, as archetypes of humanity,” as Mathur writes, “reproduc[ing]…Gauguin’s primitivist gesture.” Amrita Sher-Gil, Self-Portrait as a Tahitian , 1934, oil on canvas, 90 cm × 56 cm, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi. But Sher-Gil was not a complete outsider like Gauguin, as a half-Indian who had already spent much time in India before moving there at the end of 1934. It was both an exciting and painful homecoming. As Mathur notes , Sher-Gil “sought a point of entry into the cultural landscape…from the difficult position of standing partially outside it.” Sher-Gil felt India would offer her more belonging than a racist Europe—a Paris reviewer once diminished her as “an exquisite and mysterious little Hindu princess” who… “conjure[d] up the mysterious shores of the Ganges.” Yet she was simultaneously apprehensive about not fitting into the Indian cultural landscape. Indeed, as Mathur points out, “Sher-Gil’s early detractors in the subcontinent complained that her Indian portraiture ‘smel[t] of the west.’” For Mathur, it was precisely Sher-Gil’s “sense of fragmentation and cultural isolation” that drove her practice. The artist once reflected: ‘It may be that the sadness, the queer ugliness of the types I choose as my models…corresponds to...some inner trait in my nature…’” These models sometimes included Sher-Gil’s own servants. Grappling With Sher-Gil’s Legacy Art historians such as Geeta Kapur have criticized Sher-Gil’s “narcissistic” attempt to transmute her cultural crisis into catharsis by entwining and equating her pain with that of poorer Indians amid political and national turbulence. In Spivakian terms, Sher-Gil employed her dominant gaze to speak through the subaltern for her own benefit. But others have been more benevolent, foregrounding not the inequality between Sher-Gil and her subjects, but the points of solidarity instead. Writers like Mulk Raj Anand have emphasized how truly moved Sher-Gil was by the poverty and patriarchy blighting India at the time. Scholars such as Prachi Priyanka and Subir Rana have highlighted the influence of Gandhi and Nehru on her paintings. “Gandhi’s notion of Swaraj (self-rule), and Nehru’s concept of ‘Indianization’ ” seeped into works which, beginning with Group of Three Girls , Rana writes, were even considered for use by “Congress propaganda for village reconstruction.” The use of the saffron color in Group of Three Girls, which was eventually incorporated into the Indian national flag, is further evidence of Sher-Gil’s alignment with the Independence movement. She also used the red introduced in this painting more liberally and intentionally in later works, such as Woman on Charpai (1940), to represent women’s desires while conveying their repression. This use of what Rana calls “ semiotic color ” perhaps reflected a growing awareness and redressal of the flatter female representation she had begun in Group of Three Girls , possibly due to more intimacy with and time spent in India. Still, Sher-Gil’s work suffered from similar pitfalls as Gandhian philosophies: a sense of saviorism, romanticization, and Orientalization of a more authentic pre-colonial India, and a homogenizing class and caste-blindness. Spivak challenged “the ‘lie’ of global sisterhood between ‘First world’ and ‘Third world’ women… [while] highlight[ing] the failure of Indian nationalism to emancipate lower-class, subaltern women.” A Spivakian reading of Group of Three Girls neatly encapsulates this argument: Sher-Gil transplants her ‘First world’ gaze onto the Indian women subaltern to her while using the grammar of Indian anti-colonial nationalist ideologies. But it does nothing to speak for or help her subjects, beyond stimulating her own aspiration to transcend her displacement. In 2015, it was revealed that the women in the Group of Three Girls were actually Sher-Gil’s upper-class nieces, not subalterns, after all. But this knowledge did little to impact the painting’s narrativization. There was no rewriting, no uproar. Ultimately, the way the girls are painted remains the same. Yet the way we look at them—and the artist’s gaze upon them—can evolve. Retrospectively, Group of Three Girls is the catalyst for examining how Sher-Gil’s practice went on to “embod[y] the most painful paradoxes of a colonial modernity.” A common, knee-jerk contemporary reading of Group of Three Girls may find it admirable due to Sher-Gil’s mixed identity, or its romantic representation of “the Indian woman” as feminist and patriotic, or because the Indian state has adopted it as the pièce de resistance of the “mother of modern Indian art.” However, an engaged Spivakian reading reveals it to be a historical object emblematic of the tensions of pre-Independent India, revealing a methodology for analyzing the present. The beauty of this work lies not just in its artistry or the sense of relation it might evoke among Indian female viewers, but that it distills so much of the ethical, identity-based dilemmas interlocked at the heart of the Indian nation historically and today.∎ Group of Three Girls is widely considered one of Amrita Sher-Gil’s masterpieces. The 1935 artwork has become increasingly popular over the years as a symbol of Indian feminism, while Sher-Gil herself has gained more international recognition and seen an increase in art market capitalization. In the South Asian subcontinent, she has become canonical and even adopted into the Indian state’s official historical national narrative. A major road in central Delhi is named Amrita Shergill Marg, while her works are labeled national “art treasures” that “cannot be taken out of the country.” Sher-Gil’s elevated status, especially through Group of Three Girls , was influenced by the academic boom of postcolonial and intersectional feminist methodologies around the 1990s, which have trickled into the mainstream. A central scholar driving that boom has certainly been Indian theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, whose seminal 1988 essay , “Can the Subaltern Speak?” critiques how Western intellectual discourse perpetuates and constructs the “Other,” or the “subaltern” subject. Spivak insists, however, on the subaltern’s heterogeneity—that it is not a monolith, but endlessly diverse, stratified, and therefore unstable. This idea was clearly a precursor to Kimberlé Crenshaw’s introduction to “intersectionality” in 1989. The term “subaltern” gets bandied about regularly. Spivak’s theory has been elevated to near-pop status in online and academic discourses, but is the subaltern still a useful term? Is Spivak still relevant when her own status as a global public intellectual has suffered the arrows of critiques like caste-blindness and complicity with capitalist pandering? Remember that strange Aesop ad? However, a debate on Spivak as a figurehead is not on today’s table. If the term “subaltern” has been propelled into ubiquity to the point of irony and satirical smirking, we can continue to test its value on different canvases. Today, that is Amrita Sher-Gil’s, specifically her painting, Group of Three Girls . In this work, Sher-Gil transmits a vulnerable period of India’s past, through her privileged Indo-European body, onto the rural Indian women depicted on her canvas. By ventriloquizing lower-class female Indian bodies to express and cope with her own feelings of cultural alienation and dislocation, she becomes a subaltern speaking through another subaltern. Is this problematic or a genuine act of solidarity—an attempt to connect with the pain of others? This Spivakian reading of Sher-Gil’s work attempts to expose a more nuanced interpretation of the painting as a complex ethical problem. More widely, it situates Group of Three Girls as a cultural object both embedded within and symbolic of the fragile, unstable historiography of the Indian nation—once a subaltern state tussling between colonialism and nationalism, on the cusp of partition and independence. Sher-Gil as Subaltern? Born in Budapest to a Hungarian opera singer and a Sikh aristocrat-scholar who was “one of the first photographers of South Asia,” Sher-Gil did most of her artistic training in Italy and France. According to Linda Nochlin’s iconic 1971 essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”, Sher-Gil possessed all the crucial factors needed to achieve success as a female artist: formal European art training, a well-networked artistic family and peer circle, money, mobility and independence, and the mentorship of older, more powerful male artists. But she was also plagued by a crisis of belonging. In Group of Three Girls, three Indian women, dressed modestly in Punjabi salwar kameez outfits, sit in front of a jute-brown background. Their hair is mostly hidden by their dupattas. Their clothes are largely plain, though the material looks gauzy, even diaphanous, thanks to Sher-Gil’s long, languid brushstrokes. Influenced by post-Impressionism , she paints the women in solid, vivid colors. One wears vibrant pistachio green, the other a pulsating saffron, while the final dons a deep vermilion. None of the subjects meet the viewer’s eyes. Their gazes are faraway and downcast, evoking resigned melancholy, or perhaps the strangely beatific expression of the serenity in accepting defeat. The women do not touch or look at each other, as if each was pasted separately in a collage. While the colors and brushstrokes teem with warmth and dynamism, the figures themselves appear frozen, alienated, and emotionally distanced: “together…yet alone,” in the words of art historian Giles Tillotson . A light from outside the image casts shadows on the wall behind them. One’s immediate urge may be to code the subjects as lower-class, oppressed Indian women upon seeing their simple, traditional clothing and mute, passive, and despondent stances. This reading is reinforced by two aspects from Sher-Gil’s previous paintings: first, Sher-Gil’s earlier use of shadows, such as in Self-Portrait as a Tahitian (1934), signified a looming, intrusive male presence, according to art historian Saloni Mathur. In Group of Three Girls, the shadows could symbolize the rigidities of patriarchy, particularly of impending marriage. The painting can further be contrasted with one of Sher-Gil’s earlier European works, Young Girls (1932), in which two women occupy a figuratively warmer space, their bodies angled towards each other, displaying an intimacy and closeness missing from Group of Three Girls. The two “young girls” appear as connected yet distinct people, given how elaborately they are painted, lending their dress, clothes, hair, and surroundings multiple depths of light and texture. In contrast, the women in Group of Three Girls , whose formal depiction is comparatively flatter, become more symbols than individuals. Instead of appearing as a particular group of women bound by a close relationship, the “three girls” become every group of women, isolated but bound only by the circumstances of being Indian, female, and subaltern. Amrita Sher-Gil, Young Girls , 1932, oil on canvas, 164 cm × 133 cm, National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi. But the subaltern itself is an “essentialist” or unfixed concept. Spivak highlights the slippages within the hierarchical, “taxonomic” categorizing of subaltern identities to demonstrate their relational nature—that they are always formed in relation to another individual or group's identity, ultimately rendering them unreliable. In other words, someone may be a subaltern in one context but an oppressor in another. For Sher-Gil, her half-whiteness, wealth, and European elite upbringing lent her enormous privilege in British India, making the rural subjects she painted subaltern in relation to her primarily via social class. Yet in the eyes of the West, up to decades after she died in 1941, Sher-Gil was herself subaltern via race, gender, and geography; she was a less relevant, less authentic woman of color who predominantly painted in and about a Third World colony. A Crisis of Belonging Group of Three Girls is the first painting Sher-Gil produced after leaving Europe in 1934 for a growingly anti-colonial India. Upon her arrival, she proclaimed her “artistic mission” was to “interpret the life of Indians, particularly the poor…silent images of infinite submission and patience…angular brown bodies, strangely beautiful in their ugliness.” Her painting was the first manifestation of this articulated desire to speak on behalf of the subaltern. Sher-Gil would go on to build on this painting’s style and subjects for the rest of her life, depicting Indian women and rural village scenes in flatter forms and hotter colors. Still, her “mission” reads as cliché and problematic today. Seeded firmly and formally in Group of Three Girls , it can be faulted in the same way as Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze’s writings were by Spivak in 1988, who criticized them for making marginalized peoples into a monolith, essentializing, aestheticizing, and further Othering “them”. Meanwhile, the two scholars maintained the elevation and centrality of their Western gazes while assigning virtue to the subaltern solely through their tragedy and oppression. This critique exposes how Sher-Gil denies Group of Three Girls ’ subjects a sense of individuality or agency. The green-clad woman’s hand is cut off from the frame. The red-clad woman’s left palm faces upwards, as if begging or in surrender. Through Sher-Gil’s downward, Westernized outsider gaze, the subjects are only brought together in a homogenizing representation of subaltern Indian women as downtrodden, helpless, and paralyzed. This reading is supported by Sher-Gil’s significant preoccupation with Paul Gauguin’s Tahiti paintings at the time, which she was riffing on in Self-Portrait as a Tahitian . Gauguin’s work itself has been heavily critiqued for his flat, Orientalist depictions of Tahitian women through a colonial, patriarchal gaze. The structure and output of such a dominant gaze play out similarly in Group of Three Girls, where Sher-Gil represents her subjects “in the singular, as archetypes of humanity,” as Mathur writes, “reproduc[ing]…Gauguin’s primitivist gesture.” Amrita Sher-Gil, Self-Portrait as a Tahitian , 1934, oil on canvas, 90 cm × 56 cm, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi. But Sher-Gil was not a complete outsider like Gauguin, as a half-Indian who had already spent much time in India before moving there at the end of 1934. It was both an exciting and painful homecoming. As Mathur notes , Sher-Gil “sought a point of entry into the cultural landscape…from the difficult position of standing partially outside it.” Sher-Gil felt India would offer her more belonging than a racist Europe—a Paris reviewer once diminished her as “an exquisite and mysterious little Hindu princess” who… “conjure[d] up the mysterious shores of the Ganges.” Yet she was simultaneously apprehensive about not fitting into the Indian cultural landscape. Indeed, as Mathur points out, “Sher-Gil’s early detractors in the subcontinent complained that her Indian portraiture ‘smel[t] of the west.’” For Mathur, it was precisely Sher-Gil’s “sense of fragmentation and cultural isolation” that drove her practice. The artist once reflected: ‘It may be that the sadness, the queer ugliness of the types I choose as my models…corresponds to...some inner trait in my nature…’” These models sometimes included Sher-Gil’s own servants. Grappling With Sher-Gil’s Legacy Art historians such as Geeta Kapur have criticized Sher-Gil’s “narcissistic” attempt to transmute her cultural crisis into catharsis by entwining and equating her pain with that of poorer Indians amid political and national turbulence. In Spivakian terms, Sher-Gil employed her dominant gaze to speak through the subaltern for her own benefit. But others have been more benevolent, foregrounding not the inequality between Sher-Gil and her subjects, but the points of solidarity instead. Writers like Mulk Raj Anand have emphasized how truly moved Sher-Gil was by the poverty and patriarchy blighting India at the time. Scholars such as Prachi Priyanka and Subir Rana have highlighted the influence of Gandhi and Nehru on her paintings. “Gandhi’s notion of Swaraj (self-rule), and Nehru’s concept of ‘Indianization’ ” seeped into works which, beginning with Group of Three Girls , Rana writes, were even considered for use by “Congress propaganda for village reconstruction.” The use of the saffron color in Group of Three Girls, which was eventually incorporated into the Indian national flag, is further evidence of Sher-Gil’s alignment with the Independence movement. She also used the red introduced in this painting more liberally and intentionally in later works, such as Woman on Charpai (1940), to represent women’s desires while conveying their repression. This use of what Rana calls “ semiotic color ” perhaps reflected a growing awareness and redressal of the flatter female representation she had begun in Group of Three Girls , possibly due to more intimacy with and time spent in India. Still, Sher-Gil’s work suffered from similar pitfalls as Gandhian philosophies: a sense of saviorism, romanticization, and Orientalization of a more authentic pre-colonial India, and a homogenizing class and caste-blindness. Spivak challenged “the ‘lie’ of global sisterhood between ‘First world’ and ‘Third world’ women… [while] highlight[ing] the failure of Indian nationalism to emancipate lower-class, subaltern women.” A Spivakian reading of Group of Three Girls neatly encapsulates this argument: Sher-Gil transplants her ‘First world’ gaze onto the Indian women subaltern to her while using the grammar of Indian anti-colonial nationalist ideologies. But it does nothing to speak for or help her subjects, beyond stimulating her own aspiration to transcend her displacement. In 2015, it was revealed that the women in the Group of Three Girls were actually Sher-Gil’s upper-class nieces, not subalterns, after all. But this knowledge did little to impact the painting’s narrativization. There was no rewriting, no uproar. Ultimately, the way the girls are painted remains the same. Yet the way we look at them—and the artist’s gaze upon them—can evolve. Retrospectively, Group of Three Girls is the catalyst for examining how Sher-Gil’s practice went on to “embod[y] the most painful paradoxes of a colonial modernity.” A common, knee-jerk contemporary reading of Group of Three Girls may find it admirable due to Sher-Gil’s mixed identity, or its romantic representation of “the Indian woman” as feminist and patriotic, or because the Indian state has adopted it as the pièce de resistance of the “mother of modern Indian art.” However, an engaged Spivakian reading reveals it to be a historical object emblematic of the tensions of pre-Independent India, revealing a methodology for analyzing the present. The beauty of this work lies not just in its artistry or the sense of relation it might evoke among Indian female viewers, but that it distills so much of the ethical, identity-based dilemmas interlocked at the heart of the Indian nation historically and today.∎ SUB-HEAD ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: Kareen Adam · Nazish Chunara A Dhivehi Artists Showcase Shebani Rao A Freelancer's Guide to Decision-Making Amrita Sher-Gil, Group of Three Girls , 1935, oil on canvas, 99.5 x 73.5 cm, National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi. SHARE Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Profile Lahore Punjab Amrita Sher-Gil Orientalism Western Gaze Europe South Asia Subaltern Studies Gayatri Spivak Anti-Colonialism Postcolonial Feminist Theory subjectivity saviorism indianization Gauguin Foucault 1935 Group of Three Girls Self-Portrait as a Tahitian Young Girls Feminism Feminist Art Practice femininity feminine Modernism Bauhaus Avant-Garde Traditions Paul Gauguin Deleuze Primitivism Modernity Postcolonialism Avant-Garde Form Semiotic Color Post-Impressionism Art History Art Criticism Criticism VAMIKA SINHA is an arts and culture journalist based in London. She is Deputy Editor at Wasafiri. 8 Jul 2025 Profile Lahore 8th Jul 2025 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:

In this letter, Ustad Mohammad Ali Talpur responds to Hazaran Baloch, tracing the moral and political stakes of remembrance and resistance in the Baloch struggle. He foregrounds the legacy of the Baloch nation, where mourning and honoring martyrs binds generations, and encourages his pupil to trust in the unflinching nature and will of the Baloch people—traits that have triumphed in the face of 77 years of injustice. THE VERTICAL Letter to History (II) In this letter, Ustad Mohammad Ali Talpur responds to Hazaran Baloch, tracing the moral and political stakes of remembrance and resistance in the Baloch struggle. He foregrounds the legacy of the Baloch nation, where mourning and honoring martyrs binds generations, and encourages his pupil to trust in the unflinching nature and will of the Baloch people—traits that have triumphed in the face of 77 years of injustice. Mir Mohammad Ali Talpur My Dearest Daughter, Hazaran, Your anguished letter made me cry tears of rage, anger, and sadness. They cut deeper into the scars that remain on my soul after witnessing the suffering of our people for over half a century. Having lost so many of my friends and former students, I wonder if these wounds will ever heal. I remember Lawang Khan , seventy years old, who died defending his village in 1973. I remember Ali Mohammad Mengal , a veteran from 1960. I remember Safar Khan Zarakzai who, when surrounded and asked to surrender, replied: This is my land; I will defend it with my life. He died fighting. Etched on my soul are the enforced disappearances of my dearest friends, Duleep Dass “Dali” and Sher Ali Marri, in the spring of 1976. Dali nursed me back to health when I lay injured in the mountains. Etched, too, is the suffering of Baloch families I witnessed living as refugees in Afghanistan—only to be identified as terrorists upon their return. So many unsung heroes, so many disappeared without a trace, so many lives uprooted. They found no peace, neither in exile, nor upon return. My spiritual association with the Baloch struggle began on 15 July 1960, when Nawab Nauroz Khan’s son, Batay Khan, along with six companions––Sabzal Khan Zehri, Bahawal Khan Musiyani, Wali Muhammad Zarakzai, Ghulam Rasool Nichari, Masti Khan Musiyani, and Jamal Khan Zehri—were executed after the state broke its promise of amnesty. Four were hanged in Hyderabad Jail. Three, including Batay Khan, in Sukkur Jail. It was my uncle, Mir Rasool Bakhsh Talpur, who claimed their bodies, performed the funeral rites, and brought them to Kalat. On 21 October 1971, I left home and joined the armed struggle in the Marri hills. I was fuelled by rage. You ask what bullets sound like when they tear through our bodies. I thought of the twenty-seven fired into Sangat Sana , the three that pierced Jalil Reki ’s heart, the one that struck Ali Sher Kurd ’s forehead. Those martyrs may not have heard them, but those sounds echo in the soul of every Baloch who loves the motherland. You mention the screeching chains as they dragged my precious Mahrang away, shamelessly calling it arrest; her sarri/سری/chador trampled by those abducting her. You ask me about the thunder that must have shaken the heavens when my dearest Sammi’s سری was snatched from her head to dehumanize and humiliate her. All this and more is forever seared into me. Let me tell you what a sarri means to the Baloch. Fights cease when our women, with sarris in hand, come in-between. The Baloch say: the sarri is sacred. Our poet Atta Shad said that in return for a bowl of water, we give a hundred years of loyalty. I wish he had also said that the desecration of the sarri is never forgiven. Not in a thousand generations. It was difficult when I first joined the struggle. Despite the pain, however, there was also the belief that eventual victory would come. I, too, closed the door of hopelessness because I knew we were sowing seeds that would one day grow into trees—providing shade and fruit to all. When Banuk Karima was taken from us, it left the nation mourning. Her death created a void which seemed impossible to fill. Then came Mahrang, Sammi, Sabiha, Beebow, and hundreds more. Karima lit a fire in the hearts of Baloch women to participate in the national struggle––she embodied the wisdom and courage I see in all of you. When asked what Banuk Karima meant to Balochistan and its struggle, I replied: Karima is the conscience and the consciousness of the Baloch Nation . You ask me about little Kambar, Zahid’s son, who has lost another father this cursed March. I cannot send him words of consolation; they would be meaningless. But I want him to know that this isn’t his injustice to bear alone. The Baloch Nation will remember. You ask me about the state’s inhumanity toward Bebarg, who lives his life as a paraplegic. Why does the state fear a person who is unable to walk? It fears his voice. That is how the state maintains control: by repressing Baloch voices. My dearest child, it is of utmost importance to understand the essence of this state. It is by nature predatory and extractive––it cannot expand without exploiting us and our words, which refuse to submit to its evil design. We should not expect humanity or compassion from political parties integral to the establishment. They work for each other and protect their own interests. All pillars of the state are complicit. And in general, the silence of society is deafening too. The state will continue repressing us. What we do in response is our responsibility. Our only avenue is resistance. If we give it up, repression will be manifold, as docile people are an easier target. You rightly stated that Mahrang and Sammi taught the Baloch that they must stop being forever mourners, forever betrayed—and for that, they are considered the greatest threat and have been jailed. You are rightly worried about the fact that the new voices of our movement are now in jail cells, and that the state is trying to terrify young girls from treading the path that Karima, Mahrang, and Sammi chose. I feel it is important to understand how our Baloch Nation has responded to this unending crisis. Today, on the streets of Balochistan, girls—some as young as five years old—are carrying pictures of Karima, Mahrang, and Sammi. They are not merely holding their images; they picture themselves as these icons, and that is where our hope lies. For tomorrow, there will be Karimas, Mahrangs, Sammis, Sabihas, and Beebows in the millions. No power on earth will be able to stop them. I am not waiting for that tomorrow—it has already begun. The bastions of tyranny are crumbling, and that is why repression has multiplied and spread. That is why Mahrang and Sammi have been imprisoned. And while this violence will continue, it cannot subdue our spirits. “ Pakistan Zindabad ” was knifed onto the bodies of those Baloch who were extrajudicially killed. Their eyes gouged, their bodies drilled. Did the resistance vaporize and vanish? No. During the 2013 Long March by Mama Qadeer Baloch, Farzana Majeed, and others, faces were covered to avoid recognition. Today, thousands come out fearlessly to protest. The Baloch Nation has become fearless. The only history with a limited shelf life is that of the oppressor. Our history is ineradicable and can only flourish—for victory is our destiny. You ask if writing is futile. No, my dearest daughter, writing is our weapon. And it is a weapon that terrifies the oppressor because the word of freedom is sacred—it enlightens and motivates. Why do they seize books Baloch put up at book fairs? Writing challenges their phony and misleading discourse. Keep writing. You are empowering the Baloch narrative and preserving the history of Baloch resistance—a history long subjected to suppression. Writing strikes fear into the hearts and minds of oppressors in a way that no other weapon can. While other weapons bring only death and destruction, writing gives life—and that is why they fear words so deeply. Future generations will thank you and honor you for your words. You also ask, “Who will stand with us?’ and “Is it possible that the other oppressed nations of this land will stand with us in defiance of a shared oppressor?” My respected daughter, I believe that unity arises from two sources: either from the pain people share, or from a collective consciousness shaped by shared aspirations, history, and naturally, pain. Expecting support from those who believe in the narratives taught in Pakistan Studies is futile. And yes, do not expect the world to come to our aid—it has allowed Israel to do whatever it pleases to the Palestinians. The people may raise their voices, but governments will remain silent—because speaking up would endanger the very systems of brutality and exploitation they rely on. Merely being oppressed does not automatically give someone the consciousness to feel the pain of others or to support them. There are millions of oppressed people here, but support cannot be expected from them in the same way it can be from those who share our collective pain. To obstruct the path of collective consciousness, the state abducts students, blocks book fairs, and systematically neglects the education sector—ensuring that not many Baloch become educated. This denial of education is a key part of a calculated policy of erasure. Through their indiscriminate repression, however, they are unknowingly forging our collective consciousness. This will be the very reason for their downfall. You have talked about our mourning and grief over the years and how it continues. Yes, when there is death, there is grief and mourning—but it has not only been that. When my dearest friend Raza Jehangir was killed on 14 August 2013 by the state, we honored his death. His brave mother led the funeral and they sang a lullaby: Raza jan is little (child) and innocent, joyfully asleep in the decorated cradle. Joyfully asleep in the decorated cradle, sapient (learned men) are his forefathers. Then there is the incredible picture of the wife of Banzay Pirdadani Marri, who stands at the graves of her two sons, Mohammad Khan and Mohammad Nabi, draped in the flag that symbolizes a free Balochistan. They were killed on the same day and their bodies thrown on the roadside. I treated the two boys once, when they were very young and sick. When they grew up, I taught them at the school I managed for our refugee children in Lashkar Gah, Afghanistan. How could my soul feel peace after their death? Yet I know that despite the depth of pain caused by the loss and disappearance of loved ones, the Baloch have mourned with grace and dignity. They cannot be accused of selling their grief. Those in power have offered compensation to the families of the disappeared, but these offers have always been firmly rejected. In the end, you ask, “Tell me, Baba Jan, are we destined to be forever caught in this storm, forever erased, forever replaced?” This storm—or the ones that came before—could not erase us, nor replace us, and neither will the ones that may come in the future. Why do I say this? Because the storm that came on 27 March 1948 could not erase us. Then came another in October 1958 , which led to the resistance of Nawab Nauroz Khan. He was promised amnesty on the oath of the Quran, yet on a single day—15 July 1960—six of his companions and one of his sons were hanged. Some believed it was the end of the resistance. But did it end? No. Babu Sher Mohammad Marri and Ali Mohammad Mengal stood their ground and kept the resistance alive. Peace was made in 1970, but provocations remained. So emerged the 1973–1977 insurgency to resist repression. In September 1974 , when some Marris in Chamaling surrendered under assault by gunships, the state claimed that the core of the resistance had been broken. But had it? No—because the fighting continued until 1977. That was not the end. The Marris who took refuge in Afghanistan did not return when the Zia regime offered them amnesty . Despite the hardships of life as refugees, they stayed. Khair Bakhsh Marri joined them in 1982. He remained there for nearly a decade. That act of defiance kept the spirit of the resistance alive back home. A period of apparent dormancy followed, from 1993 to 2000. But beneath the surface, resentment simmered and political awareness grew. Matters came to a head when Khair Bakhsh Marri was arrested on fabricated charges in 2000 and kept in jail for two years. That moment reignited the resistance. Then came a turning point: the killing of Akbar Bugti on 26 August 2006. Like the 1973–1977 insurgency, the fight spread across Balochistan—it has not ended. Since 2000, the Baloch have faced the severest repression. Every brutal tool at the state's disposal has been used. Our academics, such as Saba Dashtyari and Zahid Askani , have been killed; our political activists have been murdered or disappeared; our journalists have been silenced; our poets have been targeted; and our students have been abducted. And now, even our women have been incarcerated. Yet, the resistance lives on—it refuses to die. It survives because it is an expression of the people's most cherished dream. The Baloch are a resilient nation and do not give up what they hold dear—and what they hold dearest are dignity and freedom. It is no coincidence that the Baloch call their motherland Gul Zameen—Land of Flowers. As they say, Waye watan hushkain dar —I love my land even if it is like a withered twig. There is something vital that must be said. Something that has long been the bane of the Baloch Nation. Those soul-selling Baloch who have collaborated with the establishment, aiding in the suppression of Baloch rights and enabling crimes against their own people. There is an indigenous Native American fable: the birds complained of being killed by arrows, and the response was, “Were it not for the feathers of birds in the arrows, you would be safe.” Our suffering, too, would have been less had some Baloch not provided the feathers for those arrows. Let me tell you something: if brutal crackdowns and military operations could suppress a people's desire for national, political, social, and economic rights, then Algeria would still be a French colony. The French were ruthless and unforgiving. They picked people up, held them in custody, and tortured them for as long as they pleased. Yet in the end, they had to pack up and leave. The resistance, and the will of the people, could not be broken. It is said the French “won” the Battle of Algiers in 1957 by crushing the FLN in the city, but they lost the war in 1960 when the Algerian people rose up together, showing the futility of repression. Repression eventually breeds fearlessness. It compels people to abandon concern for their own safety. And here, they haven’t even won the Battle of Quetta—yet they have already lost Balochistan by irreversibly alienating the Baloch Nation. We can—and must—learn from the Palestinians, who, like us, have endured physical, economic, cultural, and geographic assaults—a systematic genocide since 1948. Yet they have never surrendered. Especially in Gaza, where since October 2023 , genocide has reached a brutal peak. Gaza has been flattened. Hospitals bombed, medical staff killed, famine imposed through a blockade of food and water. Over 60,000 people—seventy percent of them women and children—have been killed . And yet, the people of Gaza have not broken. Gaza may be a narrow strip of land, but despite the backing of powerful Western nations, Israel has failed to crush the spirit of the Gazans. Balochistan is vast. If Gaza has not been broken, then neither can we. In the end, my very precious child, I will say this: Tum maroge, hum niklenge —you will kill us, we will rise. This is not an empty phrase. It is how the Baloch have faced oppression for generations. If it were hollow, the resistance would not have persisted and grown stronger over the past seventy-seven years. It is true that a terrible price has been paid—in blood, in tears, in lost generations. But it is also the reason we have survived. We endure as a dignified nation, seeking a life of freedom and honor, and our will to resist not only endures—it flourishes. Today, I see you all protesting against state oppression, as bravely and wisely as Karima did, and I know this is why hopelessness is not an option for us. Hope is the fruit of the seeds Banuk Karima and other Baloch revolutionaries sowed in the soil of Balochistan. And so, with the accumulation of grief in adulthood, we also inherit seventy-seven years of the history of Baloch resistance, which, in spite of its traumatic chapters, is an inheritance of revolutionary hope for a free Balochistan. Mir Mohammad Ali Talpur Hyderabad 5 April 2025 ∎ My Dearest Daughter, Hazaran, Your anguished letter made me cry tears of rage, anger, and sadness. They cut deeper into the scars that remain on my soul after witnessing the suffering of our people for over half a century. Having lost so many of my friends and former students, I wonder if these wounds will ever heal. I remember Lawang Khan , seventy years old, who died defending his village in 1973. I remember Ali Mohammad Mengal , a veteran from 1960. I remember Safar Khan Zarakzai who, when surrounded and asked to surrender, replied: This is my land; I will defend it with my life. He died fighting. Etched on my soul are the enforced disappearances of my dearest friends, Duleep Dass “Dali” and Sher Ali Marri, in the spring of 1976. Dali nursed me back to health when I lay injured in the mountains. Etched, too, is the suffering of Baloch families I witnessed living as refugees in Afghanistan—only to be identified as terrorists upon their return. So many unsung heroes, so many disappeared without a trace, so many lives uprooted. They found no peace, neither in exile, nor upon return. My spiritual association with the Baloch struggle began on 15 July 1960, when Nawab Nauroz Khan’s son, Batay Khan, along with six companions––Sabzal Khan Zehri, Bahawal Khan Musiyani, Wali Muhammad Zarakzai, Ghulam Rasool Nichari, Masti Khan Musiyani, and Jamal Khan Zehri—were executed after the state broke its promise of amnesty. Four were hanged in Hyderabad Jail. Three, including Batay Khan, in Sukkur Jail. It was my uncle, Mir Rasool Bakhsh Talpur, who claimed their bodies, performed the funeral rites, and brought them to Kalat. On 21 October 1971, I left home and joined the armed struggle in the Marri hills. I was fuelled by rage. You ask what bullets sound like when they tear through our bodies. I thought of the twenty-seven fired into Sangat Sana , the three that pierced Jalil Reki ’s heart, the one that struck Ali Sher Kurd ’s forehead. Those martyrs may not have heard them, but those sounds echo in the soul of every Baloch who loves the motherland. You mention the screeching chains as they dragged my precious Mahrang away, shamelessly calling it arrest; her sarri/سری/chador trampled by those abducting her. You ask me about the thunder that must have shaken the heavens when my dearest Sammi’s سری was snatched from her head to dehumanize and humiliate her. All this and more is forever seared into me. Let me tell you what a sarri means to the Baloch. Fights cease when our women, with sarris in hand, come in-between. The Baloch say: the sarri is sacred. Our poet Atta Shad said that in return for a bowl of water, we give a hundred years of loyalty. I wish he had also said that the desecration of the sarri is never forgiven. Not in a thousand generations. It was difficult when I first joined the struggle. Despite the pain, however, there was also the belief that eventual victory would come. I, too, closed the door of hopelessness because I knew we were sowing seeds that would one day grow into trees—providing shade and fruit to all. When Banuk Karima was taken from us, it left the nation mourning. Her death created a void which seemed impossible to fill. Then came Mahrang, Sammi, Sabiha, Beebow, and hundreds more. Karima lit a fire in the hearts of Baloch women to participate in the national struggle––she embodied the wisdom and courage I see in all of you. When asked what Banuk Karima meant to Balochistan and its struggle, I replied: Karima is the conscience and the consciousness of the Baloch Nation . You ask me about little Kambar, Zahid’s son, who has lost another father this cursed March. I cannot send him words of consolation; they would be meaningless. But I want him to know that this isn’t his injustice to bear alone. The Baloch Nation will remember. You ask me about the state’s inhumanity toward Bebarg, who lives his life as a paraplegic. Why does the state fear a person who is unable to walk? It fears his voice. That is how the state maintains control: by repressing Baloch voices. My dearest child, it is of utmost importance to understand the essence of this state. It is by nature predatory and extractive––it cannot expand without exploiting us and our words, which refuse to submit to its evil design. We should not expect humanity or compassion from political parties integral to the establishment. They work for each other and protect their own interests. All pillars of the state are complicit. And in general, the silence of society is deafening too. The state will continue repressing us. What we do in response is our responsibility. Our only avenue is resistance. If we give it up, repression will be manifold, as docile people are an easier target. You rightly stated that Mahrang and Sammi taught the Baloch that they must stop being forever mourners, forever betrayed—and for that, they are considered the greatest threat and have been jailed. You are rightly worried about the fact that the new voices of our movement are now in jail cells, and that the state is trying to terrify young girls from treading the path that Karima, Mahrang, and Sammi chose. I feel it is important to understand how our Baloch Nation has responded to this unending crisis. Today, on the streets of Balochistan, girls—some as young as five years old—are carrying pictures of Karima, Mahrang, and Sammi. They are not merely holding their images; they picture themselves as these icons, and that is where our hope lies. For tomorrow, there will be Karimas, Mahrangs, Sammis, Sabihas, and Beebows in the millions. No power on earth will be able to stop them. I am not waiting for that tomorrow—it has already begun. The bastions of tyranny are crumbling, and that is why repression has multiplied and spread. That is why Mahrang and Sammi have been imprisoned. And while this violence will continue, it cannot subdue our spirits. “ Pakistan Zindabad ” was knifed onto the bodies of those Baloch who were extrajudicially killed. Their eyes gouged, their bodies drilled. Did the resistance vaporize and vanish? No. During the 2013 Long March by Mama Qadeer Baloch, Farzana Majeed, and others, faces were covered to avoid recognition. Today, thousands come out fearlessly to protest. The Baloch Nation has become fearless. The only history with a limited shelf life is that of the oppressor. Our history is ineradicable and can only flourish—for victory is our destiny. You ask if writing is futile. No, my dearest daughter, writing is our weapon. And it is a weapon that terrifies the oppressor because the word of freedom is sacred—it enlightens and motivates. Why do they seize books Baloch put up at book fairs? Writing challenges their phony and misleading discourse. Keep writing. You are empowering the Baloch narrative and preserving the history of Baloch resistance—a history long subjected to suppression. Writing strikes fear into the hearts and minds of oppressors in a way that no other weapon can. While other weapons bring only death and destruction, writing gives life—and that is why they fear words so deeply. Future generations will thank you and honor you for your words. You also ask, “Who will stand with us?’ and “Is it possible that the other oppressed nations of this land will stand with us in defiance of a shared oppressor?” My respected daughter, I believe that unity arises from two sources: either from the pain people share, or from a collective consciousness shaped by shared aspirations, history, and naturally, pain. Expecting support from those who believe in the narratives taught in Pakistan Studies is futile. And yes, do not expect the world to come to our aid—it has allowed Israel to do whatever it pleases to the Palestinians. The people may raise their voices, but governments will remain silent—because speaking up would endanger the very systems of brutality and exploitation they rely on. Merely being oppressed does not automatically give someone the consciousness to feel the pain of others or to support them. There are millions of oppressed people here, but support cannot be expected from them in the same way it can be from those who share our collective pain. To obstruct the path of collective consciousness, the state abducts students, blocks book fairs, and systematically neglects the education sector—ensuring that not many Baloch become educated. This denial of education is a key part of a calculated policy of erasure. Through their indiscriminate repression, however, they are unknowingly forging our collective consciousness. This will be the very reason for their downfall. You have talked about our mourning and grief over the years and how it continues. Yes, when there is death, there is grief and mourning—but it has not only been that. When my dearest friend Raza Jehangir was killed on 14 August 2013 by the state, we honored his death. His brave mother led the funeral and they sang a lullaby: Raza jan is little (child) and innocent, joyfully asleep in the decorated cradle. Joyfully asleep in the decorated cradle, sapient (learned men) are his forefathers. Then there is the incredible picture of the wife of Banzay Pirdadani Marri, who stands at the graves of her two sons, Mohammad Khan and Mohammad Nabi, draped in the flag that symbolizes a free Balochistan. They were killed on the same day and their bodies thrown on the roadside. I treated the two boys once, when they were very young and sick. When they grew up, I taught them at the school I managed for our refugee children in Lashkar Gah, Afghanistan. How could my soul feel peace after their death? Yet I know that despite the depth of pain caused by the loss and disappearance of loved ones, the Baloch have mourned with grace and dignity. They cannot be accused of selling their grief. Those in power have offered compensation to the families of the disappeared, but these offers have always been firmly rejected. In the end, you ask, “Tell me, Baba Jan, are we destined to be forever caught in this storm, forever erased, forever replaced?” This storm—or the ones that came before—could not erase us, nor replace us, and neither will the ones that may come in the future. Why do I say this? Because the storm that came on 27 March 1948 could not erase us. Then came another in October 1958 , which led to the resistance of Nawab Nauroz Khan. He was promised amnesty on the oath of the Quran, yet on a single day—15 July 1960—six of his companions and one of his sons were hanged. Some believed it was the end of the resistance. But did it end? No. Babu Sher Mohammad Marri and Ali Mohammad Mengal stood their ground and kept the resistance alive. Peace was made in 1970, but provocations remained. So emerged the 1973–1977 insurgency to resist repression. In September 1974 , when some Marris in Chamaling surrendered under assault by gunships, the state claimed that the core of the resistance had been broken. But had it? No—because the fighting continued until 1977. That was not the end. The Marris who took refuge in Afghanistan did not return when the Zia regime offered them amnesty . Despite the hardships of life as refugees, they stayed. Khair Bakhsh Marri joined them in 1982. He remained there for nearly a decade. That act of defiance kept the spirit of the resistance alive back home. A period of apparent dormancy followed, from 1993 to 2000. But beneath the surface, resentment simmered and political awareness grew. Matters came to a head when Khair Bakhsh Marri was arrested on fabricated charges in 2000 and kept in jail for two years. That moment reignited the resistance. Then came a turning point: the killing of Akbar Bugti on 26 August 2006. Like the 1973–1977 insurgency, the fight spread across Balochistan—it has not ended. Since 2000, the Baloch have faced the severest repression. Every brutal tool at the state's disposal has been used. Our academics, such as Saba Dashtyari and Zahid Askani , have been killed; our political activists have been murdered or disappeared; our journalists have been silenced; our poets have been targeted; and our students have been abducted. And now, even our women have been incarcerated. Yet, the resistance lives on—it refuses to die. It survives because it is an expression of the people's most cherished dream. The Baloch are a resilient nation and do not give up what they hold dear—and what they hold dearest are dignity and freedom. It is no coincidence that the Baloch call their motherland Gul Zameen—Land of Flowers. As they say, Waye watan hushkain dar —I love my land even if it is like a withered twig. There is something vital that must be said. Something that has long been the bane of the Baloch Nation. Those soul-selling Baloch who have collaborated with the establishment, aiding in the suppression of Baloch rights and enabling crimes against their own people. There is an indigenous Native American fable: the birds complained of being killed by arrows, and the response was, “Were it not for the feathers of birds in the arrows, you would be safe.” Our suffering, too, would have been less had some Baloch not provided the feathers for those arrows. Let me tell you something: if brutal crackdowns and military operations could suppress a people's desire for national, political, social, and economic rights, then Algeria would still be a French colony. The French were ruthless and unforgiving. They picked people up, held them in custody, and tortured them for as long as they pleased. Yet in the end, they had to pack up and leave. The resistance, and the will of the people, could not be broken. It is said the French “won” the Battle of Algiers in 1957 by crushing the FLN in the city, but they lost the war in 1960 when the Algerian people rose up together, showing the futility of repression. Repression eventually breeds fearlessness. It compels people to abandon concern for their own safety. And here, they haven’t even won the Battle of Quetta—yet they have already lost Balochistan by irreversibly alienating the Baloch Nation. We can—and must—learn from the Palestinians, who, like us, have endured physical, economic, cultural, and geographic assaults—a systematic genocide since 1948. Yet they have never surrendered. Especially in Gaza, where since October 2023 , genocide has reached a brutal peak. Gaza has been flattened. Hospitals bombed, medical staff killed, famine imposed through a blockade of food and water. Over 60,000 people—seventy percent of them women and children—have been killed . And yet, the people of Gaza have not broken. Gaza may be a narrow strip of land, but despite the backing of powerful Western nations, Israel has failed to crush the spirit of the Gazans. Balochistan is vast. If Gaza has not been broken, then neither can we. In the end, my very precious child, I will say this: Tum maroge, hum niklenge —you will kill us, we will rise. This is not an empty phrase. It is how the Baloch have faced oppression for generations. If it were hollow, the resistance would not have persisted and grown stronger over the past seventy-seven years. It is true that a terrible price has been paid—in blood, in tears, in lost generations. But it is also the reason we have survived. We endure as a dignified nation, seeking a life of freedom and honor, and our will to resist not only endures—it flourishes. Today, I see you all protesting against state oppression, as bravely and wisely as Karima did, and I know this is why hopelessness is not an option for us. Hope is the fruit of the seeds Banuk Karima and other Baloch revolutionaries sowed in the soil of Balochistan. And so, with the accumulation of grief in adulthood, we also inherit seventy-seven years of the history of Baloch resistance, which, in spite of its traumatic chapters, is an inheritance of revolutionary hope for a free Balochistan. Mir Mohammad Ali Talpur Hyderabad 5 April 2025 ∎ SUB-HEAD ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: Kareen Adam · Nazish Chunara A Dhivehi Artists Showcase Shebani Rao A Freelancer's Guide to Decision-Making Iman Iftikhar Talpur Sahab (2025) Digital Illustration SHARE Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Letter Balochistan Pakistan Activism Enforced Disappearances State Violence Protests Liberation Journalism Revolution Martyr Grief Sammi Deen Baloch Mahrang Baloch Resistance History Violence Writing After Loss Dissidence Disappearance Baloch Yakjehti Committee Dr Mahrang Baloch Arrests Tum Marogy Hum Niklengy Militarism Leadership Mass Graves Assassination Imprisonment Armed Struggle Repression State Repression Oppression Defiance Mir Mohammad Ali Talpur Sarri Sacred MIR MOHAMMAD ALI TALPUR is a political organiser with the Baloch struggle, a public intellectual, and writer on Balochistan. He joined the Baloch national struggle in 1971, was with the movement from 1973 to the 1977 insurgency, and escaped with them to Afghanistan as a refugee until 1991. He spent three years in the Marri Hills, three years underground in Sindh, and 13 years in Afghanistan, where he was responsible for camps delivering educational and health services to 8000 Baloch refugees in Zabul and Helmand (near Lashkargah). In 2014, he joined a 3000-kilometer-long march to demand the return of disappeared Baloch. He is the author of dozens of articles on the Baloch movement. 9 Apr 2025 Letter Balochistan 9th Apr 2025 IMAN IFTIKHAR is a political theorist, historian, and amateur oil painter and illustrator. She is an editor for Folio Books and a returning fellow at Kitab Ghar Lahore. She is based in Oxford and Lahore. 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:

"So Modhu traveled beyond Kalai, Mokamtala, Bogra, Sirajganj, across the Jamuna Bridge, to the city of Dhaka, two hundred miles away. There he pulls a rickshaw, earns a hundred takas a day, counts that money each night, again and again, can’t settle on one place where he can hide this money." FICTION & POETRY The Cuckoo Keeps Calling "So Modhu traveled beyond Kalai, Mokamtala, Bogra, Sirajganj, across the Jamuna Bridge, to the city of Dhaka, two hundred miles away. There he pulls a rickshaw, earns a hundred takas a day, counts that money each night, again and again, can’t settle on one place where he can hide this money." AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR Translated from the Bengali by Shabnam Nadiya MODHU wakes up at dawn and says to his wife, “Say goodbye.” Modina clasps her husband’s hand and says, “Not today. Go tomorrow.” The cuckoo trills from the branches of the koroi tree. Modhu doesn’t know what it means when the cuckoo calls during a spring dawn. He lies back again. Now comfortable, he goes back to sleep. The next day at dawn, Modhu again asks his wife to bid him farewell. Again, his wife says, “Not today, tomorrow.” Modhu again lies down like a good boy. Sleeps comfortably. The cuckoo calls from the tree. Modhu doesn’t hear. He is sound asleep. The cuckoo grows increasingly desperate. Coo. Coo-oo. Coo-oo-oo. Modhu sleeps, he doesn’t hear. His wife Modina lies awake; she doesn’t hear either. But Mafiz hears the cuckoo trilling in this spring dawn. He is not unromantic. He breaks into song: Oh, why do you call to me so early in the morning, oh, little cuckoo of my life? Modina doesn’t hear Mafiz’s song. Mafiz exits his home and gazes at the three-way intersection, the road that people take to reach town. Mafiz doesn’t see anybody taking that road. He walks. He places his foot on the threshold of Modina’s yard and, in a muted voice, calls out, “Brother, Modhu, have you gone to Dhaka?” Modina shoos cows. “Hyat! Hyat, hyat!” “Hey, girl, why are you shooing me?” Modina picks up a wooden stool and throws it at Mafiz. Mafiz sniggers like a jackal and leaves. As he goes, he says to himself, “No matter how many times you cut me, or hit me…” Modhu wakes up hungry. Modina serves him rice and eats as well. Not freshly cooked, steaming rice. Old rice, with water added. As he eats, Modhu asks, “Isn’t there anymore panta-rice left?” Modina bites her tongue in shame. Which means that there is no more panta-rice left. No more, meaning that in Modina’s judgment, because she herself has eaten too much, the panta has been finished before her man’s hunger has abated. Hence, Modina’s shame, hence, her biting of the tongue. “Now I need to go to Dhaka.” Modhu needs to go to Dhaka for pertinent reasons. Modina asks, “Isn’t it hard to drive a rickshaw?” Modhu knows that this is Modina being tender. Modina knows that driving a rickshaw in Dhaka city is grueling. But working the fields was hellish torment, and the wages were poor—merely sixty takas a day. One day in the month of Joishthya, Modhu had almost died while weeding the jute fields belonging to the Mondals. There was no water in the fields, there were no clouds in the sky, Modhu’s back was burning to ashes from the sun, his throat was parched wood, he was desperately thirsty, he was running for water, the solitary plains had become the deserts of Karbala, in the distance, Bacchu Mondal’s new tin shed glinted in the sunlight, there was a new tube-well near the outer yard of the house, Modhu was running towards it, stumbling on the clods of earth in the hoed field, shouting “A drop of water for me, please!” But before he had reached the tube-well, Modhu had tumbled onto the ground, his eyes had rolled back into his head, he foamed at the mouth. Modhu almost died that day. No more, meaning that in Modina’s judgment, because she herself has eaten too much, the panta has been finished before her man’s hunger has abated. Hence, Modina’s shame, hence, her biting of the tongue. So Modhu traveled beyond Kalai, Mokamtala, Bogra, Sirajganj, across the Jamuna Bridge, to the city of Dhaka, two hundred miles away. There he pulls a rickshaw, earns a hundred takas a day, counts that money each night, again and again, can’t settle on one place where he can hide this money. This is how, day after day, for fifteen straight days, Modhu drives a rickshaw. In Kawran Bazar, twelve of these drivers live in a windowless room; with them live twelve thousand mosquitoes; the mosquitoes sing, suck the blood of all the Modhus, and the Modhus all sleep like the dead. At the crack of dawn, when the tired mosquitoes are each an immobile drop of blood, the Modhus wake up; nature calls them. They not only feel the thunderclouds rumbling in their bellies, they hear them as well. They go out in a group, pull the tabans covering their asses over their heads, and they show their naked dark asses in a row as they hunker down at the edge of the Kazi Nazrul Islam Avenue, or some of them in front of the Hotel Sonargaon gate. They wipe their asses with newspapers because there is no water; not only is there a lack of water to clean themselves, the Modhus don’t have water to bathe. For fifteen days straight, Modhu doesn’t wash himself; sometimes the odor of his own body makes him want to vomit, especially when the sun is strong and Dhaka’s skies and air cease to be. This is how it is, day after day, night after night. But what happiness, what success! When Modhu returns to Modina after fifteen straight days, there is at least fifteen hundred takas in his waist pouch. Which means that for at least a month, he neither thinks of Dhaka nor speaks of it. Modhu goes to Dhaka city. The watered rice is finished, there is no more rice left in the house, Modina sits emptyhanded by the derelict stove. A cuckoo trills in a tree; Modina doesn’t hear it, but Mafiz does. It has never happened that a cuckoo sings and Mafiz hasn’t heard it. When Modhu crosses the three-way intersection of the highway and goes towards the upazila town, Mafiz peeks from behind the house. He spots Modina sitting by the stove doing nothing and he begins to joke around. “Brother, Modhu, are you off to Dhaka?” Modina turns her head. Joyous, Mafiz says, “What’s up, Modina?” “What’s your deal?” Modina scolds Mafiz in a solemn manner. “You’re hankering for a beating?” “If you beat me with your own hands,” Mafiz says as he grins with all his teeth and comes forward fearlessly, “my life would be a treasure.” “Go home.” Modina is even more serious. “Do you want a job, Modina?” Mafiz coaxes her. Modina isn’t willing to listen to anything. She threatens Mafiz, “I’m telling you, go.” Mafiz tries to get angry and says, “I’m here to do you a favor without being asked, and you want to shoo me off like a cow?” Modina asks in a serious manner, “What favor?” Mafiz responds with mystery. “You’ll get money, wheat. Want a job?” “What job?” “Shooing goats,” Mafiz says and chuckles. Although he hadn’t intended to laugh. Modina is furious. “Go away, you bastard. You can’t find someone else to joke with?” Mafiz moves fast to try to control the damage and speaks in a very businesslike manner. “Not a joke, Modina, for real! No actual work involved, just shooing cows and goats.” “Explain clearly, what sort of job is this then?” Mafiz explains it clearly. “Haven’t you seen those trees planted on either side of the highway? Those trees need to be guarded so that cows and goats don’t chew them up. That’s the job. They’ll pay cash, they’ll also pay with wheat. You sell the wheat to buy rice. And with the money, you buy beef, tilapia…!” “Stop, stop.” Modina stops Mafiz and suspicion rolls across her eyes and face. She narrows her eyes, creases her forehead, and interrogates him. “Why would anyone give me this job when there are so many people around?” “Why, I’ll arrange it for you. I’ll grab the Chairman’s hands and feet and I’ll beg…” Mafiz pauses for no reason. He can’t find anything else to say. But his plan and his words are quite clear. Still, Modina wants to hear more about this job guarding trees and the means to getting it even more clearly. “Go on, why did you stop?” Mafiz laughs and says, “I will grab the Chairman’s hands and feet and beg: Uncle, give this job to Modina, you won’t find a girl as nice as Modina even if you look and look…” Modina howls with laughter. A cool breeze wafts across the ditch and disappears. From the branches of the koroi tree, a cuckoo calls. Mafiz glances towards the tree and looks at the cuckoo. Then he gazes at Modina’s face and says in a melancholy manner, “Do you know what the cuckoo is saying? Mafiz says, “The cuckoo is crying. It’s crying and asking, Where did my own little cuckoo bird go?” “What?” There is a smile on Modina’s face; she knows what Mafiz is about to say. Mafiz says, “The cuckoo is crying. It’s crying and asking, Where did my own little cuckoo bird go?” Modina laughs again. Her laughter enrages the cuckoo in the koroi tree. Mafiz speaks the cuckoo’s mind, “Why do you laugh like that Modina?” “What is it to you if I laugh?” Modina asks cocking her eyebrow like a flirt. “My ribs shatter to bits and my soul wants to fly away,” Mafiz says. Modina laughs, shimmying her whole body. Mafiz looks at the tree but the cuckoo is gone. It has been raining all day in Dhaka; as he pedals his rickshaw Modhu is pretty much taking a shower. After getting drenched all day, all the warmth had left his body. Modhu cannot fathom where his body is finding so much heat in the evening. He feels cold, his head hurts, and soon he begins to shiver. He rolls around on the floor in the dark room, and like a child, he moans, calling out to his mother. It isn’t raining in the village of Modhupur; the moon is visible in the sky and a cuckoo is singing in the branches of the koroi tree. Mafiz stands by Modina’s window, grasping the grill and whispering, “Modina! Oh, Modina!” Scared, Modina scrambles into a sitting position, and spits on her own chest to dissipate her fear, and Mafiz whistles in the air saying, “It’s me, Mafiz!” The power has gone out in Dhaka city. In the box-like room where Modhu rolls on the ground by himself, shivering and moaning, the darkness of hell has descended: Modhu thinks he is dying. In the village of Modhupur, through the gaps in the branches of the koroi tree, slivers of moonlight land on Modina’s window; outside stands Mafiz, like a ghost, and inside is Modina. Modina’s teeth can be seen white in the shadow of moonlight, her eyes are shining, and she is pretending to be angry with Mafiz, telling him she was going to complain to Modhu when he came back, and Modhu would grind Mafiz’s bones into powder and apply it to his body. Modina purses her lips in laughter as she talks, and Mafiz says that Modhu wasn’t coming back to Modhupur anymore, he was going to die in Dhaka. Mafiz tells Modina, “Our fortunes were written together. You have no choice but me, Modina.” Modina slides her arm through the window grill and shoves Mafiz in the chest. “Go home, you stray cow.” Mafiz grabs Modina’s hand in the blink of an eye and says, “You don’t know this, but I know it for sure, Modina. I have you written in my fate and you have me.” Modina feels that Mafiz has lost his head. As Mafiz goes back to his own house, he dreams that Modhu has died in Dhaka. “He’s dead, that bastard Modhu is dead,” says Mafiz, willing Modina’s husband to die as he walks home. Right then, in Kawran Bazar, Dhaka, Modhu is freezing and shivering, and he is calling out to Allah, saying, “Don’t take my life, Khoda. Let me live this time around. I’ll never come back to Dhaka in this lifetime.” The next morning Modhu recovers from his fever; he sees that there is no more rain, the sky is a shining blue, and the buildings are all smiling. Modhu forgets his promise to Allah, and that very afternoon he goes out again with his rickshaw. He recalls the bone-shaking fever from the night before and laughs to himself. That morning, Mafiz places his foot on the threshold of Modhu’s yard and calls out in a low voice, “Brother, Modhu, are you back from Dhaka?” But Mafiz knows very well that if Modhu is supposed to be back fifteen days later, there are still three more days to go. Two days before the day that Modhu is supposed to return to Modhupur, he drops off a passenger in the inner side of Gulshan-2 and goes to grab a cup of tea at a roadside stall. He takes two sips of his tea and turns around to find his rickshaw gone. At first, Modhu doesn’t believe it. He thinks maybe someone has hidden his rickshaw nearby as a prank. But no, it isn’t that simple. The rickshaw has disappeared, meaning seriously disappeared. Modhu goes to the rickshaw owner and describes the situation. The owner points towards Modhu and orders his people, “Tie up that fool.” Before the ones under order had begun the work, the owner himself landed a kick in Modhu’s belly. “You fucking nobody, where’s my rickshaw?” A grunt emerges from Modhu’s mouth, he doubles over and grabs his mouth with one hand. One of the owner’s followers runs over and, almost astride Modhu’s shoulders, he grabs Modhu’s hair, shaking his head and demands, “Say it, you son of a bitch, to which of your fathers did you sell off the boss’s rickshaw?” The boss screams, “First, do him over real good.” Modhu is made over almost into a corpse, and thirteen hundred and twenty five takas, meaning all his earnings, are taken away from him before he is handed over to the police. The police take Modhu to the station and hit him some more in the hope of getting some money, but they quickly realize that not only will no one show up with any money for his release, the owner and his men had already beat him so much that he might very well die in the police station. In which case, the newspapers will start writing about death in police custody, and all those poor-loving human rights organization folks will drum up a furor. The police think about all this hassle and push Modhu out of the station. Modhu can’t walk; he falls onto the street in front of the police station and moans. The police feel inconvenienced and annoyed at this; they load Modhu into the back of a pickup truck, and drive around the city, along this street and that, and they focus their flashlights here and there looking for a convenient spot in which to dump him. As they search, one of them has an idea. “Well, then,” he says to his colleagues, “whose fault is it that we’re going through all this trouble?” They drive the pickup truck with Modhu in the back to the Begunbari house-cum-garage of the rickshaw owner and roar at him, “You, pal, have murdered the suspect before handing him over to the police!” The rickshaw owner doesn’t seem perturbed by the roaring police; he goes inside and quickly returns with ten thousand takas. He tucks it into the hand of one of the policemen and says, “There’s no more cash in the house, saar. Just manage the thing, please.” One of the policemen grows angry. “Is this a joke!” The rickshaw owner doesn’t quite understand what his anger means; still, out of habit, he goes back inside and returns with another ten thousand takas. Then he gets a louder scolding, and a policeman even utters the words, “under arrest.” Therefore, the rickshaw owner goes back inside again, and when he is late in coming back out, the policemen look at each other with suspicion. But before they lose their patience, the rickshaw owner reemerges with a page from his check book. He says, “Saars, an accident just happened. It is my fault, but I don’t want the guy to die. Here, I’ve written out one hundred thousand.” The policeman stops him midway and says, “Pal, you want to survive, then show up at the station tomorrow morning with five hundred thousand in cash. We don’t do checks-fecks.” The rickshaw owner says, “What arrangements for the body?” A policeman answers, “That’s the big trouble right now. What to do with this dead body, we’ve been going around all night…pal, that five hundred thousand won’t cut it. We’ll have to take care of the journalists; we’ll have to take care of the human rights people. Make it six lakhs and be at the station by nine a.m.” But Modhu isn’t a dead body yet. On the floor in the back of the pickup truck, he lies flat on his back with his neck at an angle, peering at them like a weak, sick kitten. There is still a spark of life in his dying eyes. It was the end of night when Modhu was carefully laid down behind a bush in a corner of the Suhrawardy Gardens, from the police pickup truck. Silence descended once the mechanical noise of the pickup truck disappeared in the distance. The silence reigned for a few moments; then suddenly, someone blew on the mosque microphone, and in a voice deep like thunder, began the chant of Allahu Akbar. When the quivering notes of the azaan floated to Modhu’s nearly numb ears, his eyes opened slightly. In the distance, he saw a light tremble. He tried to move one of his hands but couldn’t. He tried to move his legs but couldn’t. Modhu tried to make a noise with his mouth; he forced himself to say, Allah! But Modhu’s voice didn’t echo in the wind. Modhu would die and Mafiz would have Modina forever—this is what is written in Modina and Mafiz’s destinies. Modina doesn’t believe it but Mafiz’s faith doesn’t have an ounce of doubt. But why Mafiz counts the days till Modhu’s return is something only he knows. Two days before Modhu is supposed to come back, which was fifteen days after his departure, Mafiz, once again, stands by Modina’s window and says that Modhu will not return. He is going to die in Dhaka; and because when poor people die that far away, their bodies never make it back, Modina will never see Modhu again. When Mafiz is telling Modina all this, Modhu is rolling back and forth between consciousness and unconsciousness on the floor of the pickup truck in the streets of Dhaka. Modina protests the ill-omened, cruel words from Mafiz by scratching his chest and neck until he bleeds. But when Mafiz groans in pain, she covers his mouth with her hand and says, “Oh, does it burn?” When Mafiz sulks and wants to leave, Modina grabs his shoulder again and says, “Come tomorrow! The day after, he’ll be back home!” The next night, before the cuckoo sings in the koroi tree, three ghosts come to Modina’s house. They had whispered to each other as they came down the road that Modhu was gone. “Let’s go and eat Modhu’s wife.” These ghosts only eat people of the female gender; from age eight to fifty-eight, wherever they find a woman at an opportune moment, they eat her. These famous ghosts live in the upazila town; they came to the village of Modhupur after verifying and ascertaining the information that Modhu is absent, and truly they find Modina by herself in Modhu’s house, and when they find her, they begin to eat her. They take turns in eating Modina. After the first ghost, the second ghost, then the third ghost, then the first ghost again. While they eat Modina in turns, at some point, Mafiz shows up. Modina sees Mafiz and whimpers in the hope of getting some help, but one of the ghosts grabs hold of her nose and mouth so hard that not only any noise, even her breath cannot emerge from her. In addition, another ghost grasps her throat with five and five, ten fingers; Modina thrashes around, groans, her tongue lolls out, her eyes want to bug out. Seeing which, Mafiz, a single person, attacks the three ghosts; two of whom pick him up and slam him down on the ground; a grunt emerges from Mafiz’s throat, his eyes go dark; one ghost picks up a half-brick and smashes it down on Mafiz’s head; his skull opens up with a crack, and this encourages the ghost, so he begins smashing the brick down into Mafiz’s skull again and again. Right then, the cuckoo trills in the koroi tree. Ghosts don’t know what it means when a cuckoo sings in a spring evening. ∎ Translated from the Bengali by Shabnam Nadiya MODHU wakes up at dawn and says to his wife, “Say goodbye.” Modina clasps her husband’s hand and says, “Not today. Go tomorrow.” The cuckoo trills from the branches of the koroi tree. Modhu doesn’t know what it means when the cuckoo calls during a spring dawn. He lies back again. Now comfortable, he goes back to sleep. The next day at dawn, Modhu again asks his wife to bid him farewell. Again, his wife says, “Not today, tomorrow.” Modhu again lies down like a good boy. Sleeps comfortably. The cuckoo calls from the tree. Modhu doesn’t hear. He is sound asleep. The cuckoo grows increasingly desperate. Coo. Coo-oo. Coo-oo-oo. Modhu sleeps, he doesn’t hear. His wife Modina lies awake; she doesn’t hear either. But Mafiz hears the cuckoo trilling in this spring dawn. He is not unromantic. He breaks into song: Oh, why do you call to me so early in the morning, oh, little cuckoo of my life? Modina doesn’t hear Mafiz’s song. Mafiz exits his home and gazes at the three-way intersection, the road that people take to reach town. Mafiz doesn’t see anybody taking that road. He walks. He places his foot on the threshold of Modina’s yard and, in a muted voice, calls out, “Brother, Modhu, have you gone to Dhaka?” Modina shoos cows. “Hyat! Hyat, hyat!” “Hey, girl, why are you shooing me?” Modina picks up a wooden stool and throws it at Mafiz. Mafiz sniggers like a jackal and leaves. As he goes, he says to himself, “No matter how many times you cut me, or hit me…” Modhu wakes up hungry. Modina serves him rice and eats as well. Not freshly cooked, steaming rice. Old rice, with water added. As he eats, Modhu asks, “Isn’t there anymore panta-rice left?” Modina bites her tongue in shame. Which means that there is no more panta-rice left. No more, meaning that in Modina’s judgment, because she herself has eaten too much, the panta has been finished before her man’s hunger has abated. Hence, Modina’s shame, hence, her biting of the tongue. “Now I need to go to Dhaka.” Modhu needs to go to Dhaka for pertinent reasons. Modina asks, “Isn’t it hard to drive a rickshaw?” Modhu knows that this is Modina being tender. Modina knows that driving a rickshaw in Dhaka city is grueling. But working the fields was hellish torment, and the wages were poor—merely sixty takas a day. One day in the month of Joishthya, Modhu had almost died while weeding the jute fields belonging to the Mondals. There was no water in the fields, there were no clouds in the sky, Modhu’s back was burning to ashes from the sun, his throat was parched wood, he was desperately thirsty, he was running for water, the solitary plains had become the deserts of Karbala, in the distance, Bacchu Mondal’s new tin shed glinted in the sunlight, there was a new tube-well near the outer yard of the house, Modhu was running towards it, stumbling on the clods of earth in the hoed field, shouting “A drop of water for me, please!” But before he had reached the tube-well, Modhu had tumbled onto the ground, his eyes had rolled back into his head, he foamed at the mouth. Modhu almost died that day. No more, meaning that in Modina’s judgment, because she herself has eaten too much, the panta has been finished before her man’s hunger has abated. Hence, Modina’s shame, hence, her biting of the tongue. So Modhu traveled beyond Kalai, Mokamtala, Bogra, Sirajganj, across the Jamuna Bridge, to the city of Dhaka, two hundred miles away. There he pulls a rickshaw, earns a hundred takas a day, counts that money each night, again and again, can’t settle on one place where he can hide this money. This is how, day after day, for fifteen straight days, Modhu drives a rickshaw. In Kawran Bazar, twelve of these drivers live in a windowless room; with them live twelve thousand mosquitoes; the mosquitoes sing, suck the blood of all the Modhus, and the Modhus all sleep like the dead. At the crack of dawn, when the tired mosquitoes are each an immobile drop of blood, the Modhus wake up; nature calls them. They not only feel the thunderclouds rumbling in their bellies, they hear them as well. They go out in a group, pull the tabans covering their asses over their heads, and they show their naked dark asses in a row as they hunker down at the edge of the Kazi Nazrul Islam Avenue, or some of them in front of the Hotel Sonargaon gate. They wipe their asses with newspapers because there is no water; not only is there a lack of water to clean themselves, the Modhus don’t have water to bathe. For fifteen days straight, Modhu doesn’t wash himself; sometimes the odor of his own body makes him want to vomit, especially when the sun is strong and Dhaka’s skies and air cease to be. This is how it is, day after day, night after night. But what happiness, what success! When Modhu returns to Modina after fifteen straight days, there is at least fifteen hundred takas in his waist pouch. Which means that for at least a month, he neither thinks of Dhaka nor speaks of it. Modhu goes to Dhaka city. The watered rice is finished, there is no more rice left in the house, Modina sits emptyhanded by the derelict stove. A cuckoo trills in a tree; Modina doesn’t hear it, but Mafiz does. It has never happened that a cuckoo sings and Mafiz hasn’t heard it. When Modhu crosses the three-way intersection of the highway and goes towards the upazila town, Mafiz peeks from behind the house. He spots Modina sitting by the stove doing nothing and he begins to joke around. “Brother, Modhu, are you off to Dhaka?” Modina turns her head. Joyous, Mafiz says, “What’s up, Modina?” “What’s your deal?” Modina scolds Mafiz in a solemn manner. “You’re hankering for a beating?” “If you beat me with your own hands,” Mafiz says as he grins with all his teeth and comes forward fearlessly, “my life would be a treasure.” “Go home.” Modina is even more serious. “Do you want a job, Modina?” Mafiz coaxes her. Modina isn’t willing to listen to anything. She threatens Mafiz, “I’m telling you, go.” Mafiz tries to get angry and says, “I’m here to do you a favor without being asked, and you want to shoo me off like a cow?” Modina asks in a serious manner, “What favor?” Mafiz responds with mystery. “You’ll get money, wheat. Want a job?” “What job?” “Shooing goats,” Mafiz says and chuckles. Although he hadn’t intended to laugh. Modina is furious. “Go away, you bastard. You can’t find someone else to joke with?” Mafiz moves fast to try to control the damage and speaks in a very businesslike manner. “Not a joke, Modina, for real! No actual work involved, just shooing cows and goats.” “Explain clearly, what sort of job is this then?” Mafiz explains it clearly. “Haven’t you seen those trees planted on either side of the highway? Those trees need to be guarded so that cows and goats don’t chew them up. That’s the job. They’ll pay cash, they’ll also pay with wheat. You sell the wheat to buy rice. And with the money, you buy beef, tilapia…!” “Stop, stop.” Modina stops Mafiz and suspicion rolls across her eyes and face. She narrows her eyes, creases her forehead, and interrogates him. “Why would anyone give me this job when there are so many people around?” “Why, I’ll arrange it for you. I’ll grab the Chairman’s hands and feet and I’ll beg…” Mafiz pauses for no reason. He can’t find anything else to say. But his plan and his words are quite clear. Still, Modina wants to hear more about this job guarding trees and the means to getting it even more clearly. “Go on, why did you stop?” Mafiz laughs and says, “I will grab the Chairman’s hands and feet and beg: Uncle, give this job to Modina, you won’t find a girl as nice as Modina even if you look and look…” Modina howls with laughter. A cool breeze wafts across the ditch and disappears. From the branches of the koroi tree, a cuckoo calls. Mafiz glances towards the tree and looks at the cuckoo. Then he gazes at Modina’s face and says in a melancholy manner, “Do you know what the cuckoo is saying? Mafiz says, “The cuckoo is crying. It’s crying and asking, Where did my own little cuckoo bird go?” “What?” There is a smile on Modina’s face; she knows what Mafiz is about to say. Mafiz says, “The cuckoo is crying. It’s crying and asking, Where did my own little cuckoo bird go?” Modina laughs again. Her laughter enrages the cuckoo in the koroi tree. Mafiz speaks the cuckoo’s mind, “Why do you laugh like that Modina?” “What is it to you if I laugh?” Modina asks cocking her eyebrow like a flirt. “My ribs shatter to bits and my soul wants to fly away,” Mafiz says. Modina laughs, shimmying her whole body. Mafiz looks at the tree but the cuckoo is gone. It has been raining all day in Dhaka; as he pedals his rickshaw Modhu is pretty much taking a shower. After getting drenched all day, all the warmth had left his body. Modhu cannot fathom where his body is finding so much heat in the evening. He feels cold, his head hurts, and soon he begins to shiver. He rolls around on the floor in the dark room, and like a child, he moans, calling out to his mother. It isn’t raining in the village of Modhupur; the moon is visible in the sky and a cuckoo is singing in the branches of the koroi tree. Mafiz stands by Modina’s window, grasping the grill and whispering, “Modina! Oh, Modina!” Scared, Modina scrambles into a sitting position, and spits on her own chest to dissipate her fear, and Mafiz whistles in the air saying, “It’s me, Mafiz!” The power has gone out in Dhaka city. In the box-like room where Modhu rolls on the ground by himself, shivering and moaning, the darkness of hell has descended: Modhu thinks he is dying. In the village of Modhupur, through the gaps in the branches of the koroi tree, slivers of moonlight land on Modina’s window; outside stands Mafiz, like a ghost, and inside is Modina. Modina’s teeth can be seen white in the shadow of moonlight, her eyes are shining, and she is pretending to be angry with Mafiz, telling him she was going to complain to Modhu when he came back, and Modhu would grind Mafiz’s bones into powder and apply it to his body. Modina purses her lips in laughter as she talks, and Mafiz says that Modhu wasn’t coming back to Modhupur anymore, he was going to die in Dhaka. Mafiz tells Modina, “Our fortunes were written together. You have no choice but me, Modina.” Modina slides her arm through the window grill and shoves Mafiz in the chest. “Go home, you stray cow.” Mafiz grabs Modina’s hand in the blink of an eye and says, “You don’t know this, but I know it for sure, Modina. I have you written in my fate and you have me.” Modina feels that Mafiz has lost his head. As Mafiz goes back to his own house, he dreams that Modhu has died in Dhaka. “He’s dead, that bastard Modhu is dead,” says Mafiz, willing Modina’s husband to die as he walks home. Right then, in Kawran Bazar, Dhaka, Modhu is freezing and shivering, and he is calling out to Allah, saying, “Don’t take my life, Khoda. Let me live this time around. I’ll never come back to Dhaka in this lifetime.” The next morning Modhu recovers from his fever; he sees that there is no more rain, the sky is a shining blue, and the buildings are all smiling. Modhu forgets his promise to Allah, and that very afternoon he goes out again with his rickshaw. He recalls the bone-shaking fever from the night before and laughs to himself. That morning, Mafiz places his foot on the threshold of Modhu’s yard and calls out in a low voice, “Brother, Modhu, are you back from Dhaka?” But Mafiz knows very well that if Modhu is supposed to be back fifteen days later, there are still three more days to go. Two days before the day that Modhu is supposed to return to Modhupur, he drops off a passenger in the inner side of Gulshan-2 and goes to grab a cup of tea at a roadside stall. He takes two sips of his tea and turns around to find his rickshaw gone. At first, Modhu doesn’t believe it. He thinks maybe someone has hidden his rickshaw nearby as a prank. But no, it isn’t that simple. The rickshaw has disappeared, meaning seriously disappeared. Modhu goes to the rickshaw owner and describes the situation. The owner points towards Modhu and orders his people, “Tie up that fool.” Before the ones under order had begun the work, the owner himself landed a kick in Modhu’s belly. “You fucking nobody, where’s my rickshaw?” A grunt emerges from Modhu’s mouth, he doubles over and grabs his mouth with one hand. One of the owner’s followers runs over and, almost astride Modhu’s shoulders, he grabs Modhu’s hair, shaking his head and demands, “Say it, you son of a bitch, to which of your fathers did you sell off the boss’s rickshaw?” The boss screams, “First, do him over real good.” Modhu is made over almost into a corpse, and thirteen hundred and twenty five takas, meaning all his earnings, are taken away from him before he is handed over to the police. The police take Modhu to the station and hit him some more in the hope of getting some money, but they quickly realize that not only will no one show up with any money for his release, the owner and his men had already beat him so much that he might very well die in the police station. In which case, the newspapers will start writing about death in police custody, and all those poor-loving human rights organization folks will drum up a furor. The police think about all this hassle and push Modhu out of the station. Modhu can’t walk; he falls onto the street in front of the police station and moans. The police feel inconvenienced and annoyed at this; they load Modhu into the back of a pickup truck, and drive around the city, along this street and that, and they focus their flashlights here and there looking for a convenient spot in which to dump him. As they search, one of them has an idea. “Well, then,” he says to his colleagues, “whose fault is it that we’re going through all this trouble?” They drive the pickup truck with Modhu in the back to the Begunbari house-cum-garage of the rickshaw owner and roar at him, “You, pal, have murdered the suspect before handing him over to the police!” The rickshaw owner doesn’t seem perturbed by the roaring police; he goes inside and quickly returns with ten thousand takas. He tucks it into the hand of one of the policemen and says, “There’s no more cash in the house, saar. Just manage the thing, please.” One of the policemen grows angry. “Is this a joke!” The rickshaw owner doesn’t quite understand what his anger means; still, out of habit, he goes back inside and returns with another ten thousand takas. Then he gets a louder scolding, and a policeman even utters the words, “under arrest.” Therefore, the rickshaw owner goes back inside again, and when he is late in coming back out, the policemen look at each other with suspicion. But before they lose their patience, the rickshaw owner reemerges with a page from his check book. He says, “Saars, an accident just happened. It is my fault, but I don’t want the guy to die. Here, I’ve written out one hundred thousand.” The policeman stops him midway and says, “Pal, you want to survive, then show up at the station tomorrow morning with five hundred thousand in cash. We don’t do checks-fecks.” The rickshaw owner says, “What arrangements for the body?” A policeman answers, “That’s the big trouble right now. What to do with this dead body, we’ve been going around all night…pal, that five hundred thousand won’t cut it. We’ll have to take care of the journalists; we’ll have to take care of the human rights people. Make it six lakhs and be at the station by nine a.m.” But Modhu isn’t a dead body yet. On the floor in the back of the pickup truck, he lies flat on his back with his neck at an angle, peering at them like a weak, sick kitten. There is still a spark of life in his dying eyes. It was the end of night when Modhu was carefully laid down behind a bush in a corner of the Suhrawardy Gardens, from the police pickup truck. Silence descended once the mechanical noise of the pickup truck disappeared in the distance. The silence reigned for a few moments; then suddenly, someone blew on the mosque microphone, and in a voice deep like thunder, began the chant of Allahu Akbar. When the quivering notes of the azaan floated to Modhu’s nearly numb ears, his eyes opened slightly. In the distance, he saw a light tremble. He tried to move one of his hands but couldn’t. He tried to move his legs but couldn’t. Modhu tried to make a noise with his mouth; he forced himself to say, Allah! But Modhu’s voice didn’t echo in the wind. Modhu would die and Mafiz would have Modina forever—this is what is written in Modina and Mafiz’s destinies. Modina doesn’t believe it but Mafiz’s faith doesn’t have an ounce of doubt. But why Mafiz counts the days till Modhu’s return is something only he knows. Two days before Modhu is supposed to come back, which was fifteen days after his departure, Mafiz, once again, stands by Modina’s window and says that Modhu will not return. He is going to die in Dhaka; and because when poor people die that far away, their bodies never make it back, Modina will never see Modhu again. When Mafiz is telling Modina all this, Modhu is rolling back and forth between consciousness and unconsciousness on the floor of the pickup truck in the streets of Dhaka. Modina protests the ill-omened, cruel words from Mafiz by scratching his chest and neck until he bleeds. But when Mafiz groans in pain, she covers his mouth with her hand and says, “Oh, does it burn?” When Mafiz sulks and wants to leave, Modina grabs his shoulder again and says, “Come tomorrow! The day after, he’ll be back home!” The next night, before the cuckoo sings in the koroi tree, three ghosts come to Modina’s house. They had whispered to each other as they came down the road that Modhu was gone. “Let’s go and eat Modhu’s wife.” These ghosts only eat people of the female gender; from age eight to fifty-eight, wherever they find a woman at an opportune moment, they eat her. These famous ghosts live in the upazila town; they came to the village of Modhupur after verifying and ascertaining the information that Modhu is absent, and truly they find Modina by herself in Modhu’s house, and when they find her, they begin to eat her. They take turns in eating Modina. After the first ghost, the second ghost, then the third ghost, then the first ghost again. While they eat Modina in turns, at some point, Mafiz shows up. Modina sees Mafiz and whimpers in the hope of getting some help, but one of the ghosts grabs hold of her nose and mouth so hard that not only any noise, even her breath cannot emerge from her. In addition, another ghost grasps her throat with five and five, ten fingers; Modina thrashes around, groans, her tongue lolls out, her eyes want to bug out. Seeing which, Mafiz, a single person, attacks the three ghosts; two of whom pick him up and slam him down on the ground; a grunt emerges from Mafiz’s throat, his eyes go dark; one ghost picks up a half-brick and smashes it down on Mafiz’s head; his skull opens up with a crack, and this encourages the ghost, so he begins smashing the brick down into Mafiz’s skull again and again. Right then, the cuckoo trills in the koroi tree. Ghosts don’t know what it means when a cuckoo sings in a spring evening. ∎ SUB-HEAD ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: Kareen Adam · Nazish Chunara A Dhivehi Artists Showcase Shebani Rao A Freelancer's Guide to Decision-Making "The Cuckoo Keeps Calling" by Hafsa Ashfaq. SHARE Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Short Story Translation Bengali Bangladesh Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. 23 Sept 2020 Short Story Translation 23rd Sep 2020 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. 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:

“How do you laugh at untrammeled power? Either you are completely terrorized by it, or you completely delegitimize its authority by laughing in its face and doing the most absurd things.” COMMUNITY Experimentalism in the Face of Fascism “How do you laugh at untrammeled power? Either you are completely terrorized by it, or you completely delegitimize its authority by laughing in its face and doing the most absurd things.” AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR RECOMMENDED: The Orders Were to Rape You: Tigresses in the Tamil Eelam Struggle , the newest book by Meena Kandasamy (Navayana, 2021). RECOMMENDED: The Orders Were to Rape You: Tigresses in the Tamil Eelam Struggle , the newest book by Meena Kandasamy (Navayana, 2021). SUB-HEAD ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: Kareen Adam · Nazish Chunara A Dhivehi Artists Showcase Shebani Rao A Freelancer's Guide to Decision-Making Watch the interview on YouTube or IGTV. SHARE Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Interview Chennai Sociolinguistics Avant-Garde Form Experimental Methods Dalit Literature Dalit Histories Indian Fascism Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam Tamil Tigers Auto-Fiction Bhima Koregaon Marxist Theory André Breton Absurdity Explanation Affect Translation Tamil Eelam Personal History Failure Narrative Structure Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. 7 Sept 2020 Interview Chennai 7th Sep 2020 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. 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:

“We looked at all these old EMI vinyl album covers. I remember listening to the song and thinking: 'This song is pink.'” INTERACTIVE Natasha Noorani's Retro Aesthetic “We looked at all these old EMI vinyl album covers. I remember listening to the song and thinking: 'This song is pink.'” Natasha Noorani Natasha Noorani released “Choro,” the first single from her new album, on 24th May 2021. She first performed it unplugged for SAAG's previous online event, FLUX . As part of In Grief, In Solidarity , Noorani discussed what inspired the music video's aesthetic with SAAG advisory editor Senna Ahmad, with whom Noorani collaborated on “Choro.” For both, it was a risk, a labor of love, and a long-awaited collaboration—each of which speaks to how Noorani chooses to provoke and pay homage to Pakistani pop music in equal measure. Watch to hear more about their vision, how the pandemic affected the shoot of the music video, their numerous inspiration boards, their shared love for the music of the eighties and nineties, Urdu typography, and more. Natasha Noorani released “Choro,” the first single from her new album, on 24th May 2021. She first performed it unplugged for SAAG's previous online event, FLUX . As part of In Grief, In Solidarity , Noorani discussed what inspired the music video's aesthetic with SAAG advisory editor Senna Ahmad, with whom Noorani collaborated on “Choro.” For both, it was a risk, a labor of love, and a long-awaited collaboration—each of which speaks to how Noorani chooses to provoke and pay homage to Pakistani pop music in equal measure. Watch to hear more about their vision, how the pandemic affected the shoot of the music video, their numerous inspiration boards, their shared love for the music of the eighties and nineties, Urdu typography, and more. SUB-HEAD ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: Kareen Adam · Nazish Chunara A Dhivehi Artists Showcase Shebani Rao A Freelancer's Guide to Decision-Making Follow our YouTube channel for updates from past or future events. SHARE Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Live Lahore Music Contemporary Music Retro Aesthetics Nostalgia Typography Contemporary Pop Pakistani Pop Music Video Homage Cover Art In Grief In Solidarity Fashion Haseena Moin Selfies Embroidery Color Art Practice Visual Art Collaboration Vinyl Urdu Music NATASHA NOORANI is a musician, festival director and ethnomusicologist from Lahore. Noorani has a diverse range as a singer-songwriter, playback singer and voice-over artist. While pursuing contemporary Pakistani pop music, she has also been training in khayal gayaki, and was awarded the Goethe Talents Scholarship in 2019. Her solo EP Munaasib is inspired by r’n’b, neo-soul, and prog rock. Noorani is part of the band Biryani Brothers, and has collaborated on recordings with Strings, Abdullah Siddiqui, Sikandar Ka Mandar, Talal Qureshi, Gentle Robot & Jamal Rahman. Noorani was featured on Velo Sound Station (2020), and has also recorded on soundtracks for the films Baaji (2019) and Chalay Thay Saath (2017). 5 Jun 2021 Live Lahore 5th Jun 2021 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:

Four South Asian authors talk about children's publishing & narratives that come from pain but create joy. COMMUNITY Dissident Kid Lit Four South Asian authors talk about children's publishing & narratives that come from pain but create joy. AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR Political dissidence isn't often thought to be part of parenting discourse or children's reading practice—but it must be. In our third panel, four South Asian authors talk about navigating children's publishing and the balance of narratives that come from pain but create joy. Saira Mir, Simran Jeet Singh, Vashti Harrison, & Shelly Anand discussed why their books tackle issues including race, religion, age, and body image, and how children's literature can aim to decenter the white gaze, break out of victimized narratives, and spark conversations in young readers. Watch Deputy Editor Aditya Desai on how this panel came about. The panel opened with Shelly reading from her book, Laxmi's Mooch , that has since been published to great acclaim. It then moved into a conversation with Saira, Simran, and Vashti and their books, Muslim Girls Rise , Fauja Singh Keeps Going , and Festival of Colors , respectively, while tackling such questions as: How do you balance the desire to claim ownership of narratives or to offer representation? How do we navigate being asked to write about communal trauma, pain versus writing what we want? What are the strategies of breaking out of a victimizing framework? We conclude with an illustration demo from Vashti on how she collaborates with the writer's storylines and finds ways to place her own political stamp on the book! EDITOR'S NOTE: Since this panel on 20th December 2020, our panelists have published more notable books (some recent, others upcoming in 2023). Check for updates by navigating to their pages below. Political dissidence isn't often thought to be part of parenting discourse or children's reading practice—but it must be. In our third panel, four South Asian authors talk about navigating children's publishing and the balance of narratives that come from pain but create joy. Saira Mir, Simran Jeet Singh, Vashti Harrison, & Shelly Anand discussed why their books tackle issues including race, religion, age, and body image, and how children's literature can aim to decenter the white gaze, break out of victimized narratives, and spark conversations in young readers. Watch Deputy Editor Aditya Desai on how this panel came about. The panel opened with Shelly reading from her book, Laxmi's Mooch , that has since been published to great acclaim. It then moved into a conversation with Saira, Simran, and Vashti and their books, Muslim Girls Rise , Fauja Singh Keeps Going , and Festival of Colors , respectively, while tackling such questions as: How do you balance the desire to claim ownership of narratives or to offer representation? How do we navigate being asked to write about communal trauma, pain versus writing what we want? What are the strategies of breaking out of a victimizing framework? We conclude with an illustration demo from Vashti on how she collaborates with the writer's storylines and finds ways to place her own political stamp on the book! EDITOR'S NOTE: Since this panel on 20th December 2020, our panelists have published more notable books (some recent, others upcoming in 2023). Check for updates by navigating to their pages below. SUB-HEAD ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: Kareen Adam · Nazish Chunara A Dhivehi Artists Showcase Shebani Rao A Freelancer's Guide to Decision-Making Watch the panel on YouTube or IGTV. SHARE Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Panel Kid Lit Children's Literature Age Ageism Black Solidarities Islamophobia Anti-Racism Publishing Industry Public History Colorism Leadership Future Dream Spaces Dreaming Spiritual Practice Art Practice Illustration Demonstration Reading Muslim-American Narrative Identity Procreate Sikh Spiritualism Biracial Diaspora Diasporic Distance Dreamers Legends Muslim Girls Brownness In-Progress Affirmation Art Knowledge Comics Debut Authors Public Arts Authenticity Genre Tropes Religion Generational Stories Kindness as Politics Personal History Experimental Methods Language Comic Humor Pedagogy Absurdity Literature & Liberation Art Activism Fiction Craft Race Metaphor Vernacular Literature Politics of Art Victimization Narratives Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. 20 Dec 2020 Panel Kid Lit 20th Dec 2020 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. 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:

Two years ago, short on money and hungry for something new, Rasti Farooq started pillion riding through Lahore. What began as a practical choice became an intimate, disorienting encounter with the city, and with herself. Here’s everything you would note about everything if you went around your city on a bike. FEATURES On Smelling Men’s Hair & Other Lessons in Impropriety Two years ago, short on money and hungry for something new, Rasti Farooq started pillion riding through Lahore. What began as a practical choice became an intimate, disorienting encounter with the city, and with herself. Here’s everything you would note about everything if you went around your city on a bike. AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR Since 2024, I’ve smelled more men’s hair than I ever signed up for. It would be untrue to say that I never signed up to smell anyone’s hair, because I certainly have. But only women’s hair and specifically silky hair. I have walked behind and past many a straight-haired girl, and been slapped in the face with that fruity post-shower waft. I wanted it. But I could never have it, because the usual department store shampoos that boast that signature scent are not designed for the likes of me, with my type 3C (very curly) hair. Having said that, I have never been even vaguely curious about men’s hair, mostly because men’s scalp hygiene is poorer than women’s on average. Shampooing just doesn’t seem to figure the same way in their lives. All this unfortunate oversharing to underscore that the smelling of men’s hair was entirely involuntary. I’m just: 1) seated very close to men, 2) seated very close behind them, 3) we are moving through space at about 30-40 kmph because we are on 4) a motorbike 5) which means a trusty bit of wind combined with 6) the fact that riders have to take off their helmets when passing through the smattering of military checkpoints around Lahore, (they also get taken off during the ride because most will only wear them to hoodwink traffic police officers and then proceed to dangle them off the bike handle the rest of the time). The physics of this dynamic means that the wind in their hair whips my pillion-riding face, and that’s how I know that most men’s hair smells sebum-y. But every 18th ride or so, that coveted fruity shampoo smell makes a surprise appearance. In those moments, I would take lung-fulls of that fragrant air because it calmed my nervous system (a need I had at that time, more on this in a bit). One day, I caught myself mid-exhale: how would this rider feel if he got wind (!) of this involuntary intimacy? It felt a bit like an Uno Reverse situation of the impropriety lesson I got from my mother growing up: she would spritz her perfume once on her palm, dab the tip of her forefinger into the droplets in her hand, and then press the tip lightly on a single point on either side of her neck. Your perfume was for you to smell, she would remind me, never unknown men. But here I was, an unknown woman, smelling men’s various bodily scents on the daily. In truth, I’ve spent a great deal of my commute on motorbikes considering impropriety. Pillion riding was new to my life in 2024. I was 31, used to waking up every morning, dressing to my heart's desire and, with tempered confidence, stepping out the door into what was a well-studied yet inscrutable world. But now , new contingencies demanded an updated protocol: I felt that my very conspicuously dressed “up” body may as well be a sharp knife slicing through public space in the early morning hours, cleaving the worlds of everyone it encountered into halves as I covered the 18 kilometers from home to work every day. It sounds overly dramatic now, but at the time, those misgivings felt reasonable. My Virgo temperament was keen to approach this problem systematically. I mapped out variables, cycled through undesirable scenarios, considered several tactical approaches, and eventually devised a near-perfect SOP. When the rider accepts your ride on the app and calls you to confirm your pick-up location, it is the perfect opportunity to demonstrate with your voice that you are female, a fact they may not necessarily pick up on by your profile name alone (not “Rasti” but “Jehan”, as in your friend whose name you borrowed for this app 3 years ago, after a government ban on a film you acted in turned things dicey, personal security wise). For extra measure, you turn up the girly in your voice. Some do a double take, others don't break a sweat. The next potentially tense moment arrives when you walk out of your building and your rider takes in the sight of Jehan: you’re usually in pants/jeans, rings on your fingers, bangles and distracting shoes, your helmet dangling from your hand. You avoid sleeveless tops entirely now because two attempts of riding with bare arms down Lahori streets have resulted in considerable vexation on the faces of fellow riders (and other pillion riding women), not evidenced with, say, a calf (sometimes you think maybe it is true what your friend’s mother once said in her case against the sleeveless: something potently sensual about the curve of the shoulder, entirely absent in a calf and unmatched by the curve of a knee). You’re approaching your rider now, and you make sure to put on your business-as-usual face because it is important to set the rider at ease: this is not a hapless girl attempting this for the first time and no, she most certainly will not fall off the bike and no sir, this is not her papa’s borrowed helmet. You say salam, throw your helmet on your head and your right leg over the seat. At this leg-throwing junction–confirming that you will indeed be riding astride and not modestly sidesaddle like most women do–you’re aware of some mild tensing, which is sometimes just curiosity, sometimes some caution. You let it pass and grab on tight to the U-shaped silver rail behind you that juts out over the rear light. This is a failsafe strategy to avoid contact and avoiding contact is absolutely imperative for everyone’s sake, nevermind that the repetitive gripping may have gifted you your new elbow joint dysfunction. By this point, some riders slide onto the petrol tank to widen the gap between their hips and your crotch. But sometimes they don’t, and that’s okay too because you’re pretty good at squeezing yourself between the rider and the U-rail. All in all, you’re a confident pillion rider except for when that silver rail is missing, which it is on some bikes, in which case you try and clutch on to the sides of the seat in front of you but the grip isn’t as secure and you can’t stop yourself from lurching forwards. The missing U-rail is not even how I ended up accidentally touching my rider for the first time. I was making what I thought was a small, harmless adjustment on the seat, but by the end of it I had poked my rider in his left buttock with my thumb. I held my breath. My first thought: how to not make him think that just because I'm in excessively flared, sort-of see-through pants with a linen button-down that won’t even cover my ass that I get up to this kind of behavior all the time? I said an audible “sorry”, he said nothing, and we carried on down Ferozepur road. The first time I flew onto a rider’s back with all my breasts, I didn't say anything. It felt like nothing would have sufficed for the moment; the line had been crossed so egregiously that the line just had to be treated like a construct. My breasts have bumped into 3 other riders since; nobody says anything and things carry on. The only kind of unremarkable physical contact is when I accidentally headbump my rider and our helmets go pop. *** My helmet is to me what I imagine a Garmin sportswatch is to a sando-wearing gymbro. I fawn over her, I’m always waiting for someone to notice her and ask me about her so I can show her off, and I'm never lax about wearing her which most riders will compliment in a mildly surprised tone as if a prudent female rider defies some expectation. Except for that one rider who seemed to be slightly bothered by it: ‘ Aap nay kyun helmet pehni hui hay?’ (‘why are you wearing a helmet?’), he asked as we rode out from my workplace. I paused. The inflection on you was provocative. He was waiting for my response. I’d had yet another brain-melting day at work, and was thinking about keeping my knees pressed into the sides of the bike for the duration that we would be zigzagging through post-work gridlocks; I wanted quiet, not whatever this question was. I shot back: why do you wear a helmet? And he went: but I asked you. We did maybe one more round of that and then I snapped at him with an unkind lesson on the physics of flying through the air after a car collision and becoming jam on the road. He didn’t respond and we rode in silence. That was one of only two cantankerous rides I’ve had in over 300+. I realised the helmet doesn't factor as a safeguard against death for most bikers; like the seatbelt, it’s an annoying imposition, yet another tool available to the state to squeeze fines out of ordinary citizens. I, on the other hand, am very serious about dodging death by drunk drivers / underage boys / underslept drivers of public transport / rich people in their SUV’s and pick-up trucks who think traffic lights are for pussies. In June 2024, I went looking for a death-defying helmet in Bohri Bazaar, Karachi, after consulting with my friend who rides his heavy bike (a cruiser) around Karachi (bold). It was a small store, shelves top to bottom packed with helmets and other riding gear. After some research, I decided that I wanted a full face (chin protection) flip-helmet (raiseable face shield) with a second, smaller visor inside, tinted to protect against the sun. It also absolutely had to look cool. The ones that were most popular (‘jo sab say ziada running main hain…’) according to the store owner all had snakes and skulls graffited on them in colours that gave ‘energy drink’. Ideally, I would have liked a helmet with something whimsical painted on it, like a rock nestled in a forest that hadn’t moved in three thousand years. But I settled for a matte grey-black with red streaks that curved around from the back, a faint skull at the very top, and some raptor-esque graffiti on the sides. She was a thick girl (useful for my bigger-than-average head size and even bigger hair), with detachable inner padding and a neat little flip switch above my right ear to flick the tinted visor down. I’ve stared many an MP (military police) in the eye as I flipped that switch and rode off away from their smug little checkposts and it has felt cool every time. In spite of my helmet, I’ve spent much of my commute time considering death and its cousin, paralysis, with only a brief respite in between. It was January 2025, and the city was launching a (sadly short-lived) pilot project: a designated “bike lane”. One day, there were laborers painting the left strip of Ferozepur Road green going down several kilometers. They did this for a couple weeks till a spell of light rain washed all the green away (along with allegedly 110 million rupees for the locally produced paint, supposedly a cost-effective substitute for the imported variety, as per a local news channel). A week later, some parts of the stretch got a fresh coat of paint and a barricade went up, cutting off the bike lane from the rest of the road. For a while, vehicles tried to navigate the nightmarish crisscross of entry and exit points to the lane. It was chaotic, but once inside the lane, my heart rate would be noticeably lower. It was on Ferozepur road going down this bike lane that I first noticed them. *** They were riding outside the barricade on the main road, 50 meters ahead. I noticed the pillion rider’s arms first: they were encircling the rider and…it wasn’t a loose grip. Then: her riding astride, black hair in a braid that came down to her shoulder blades, and finally: she was leaning into the hug, her whole body pressed up against the rider and her chin was resting on the rider’s right shoulder. There was something so immediately unfamiliar about this posture–it felt like it was maybe 3 moves shy from kissing in public. Luckily, a flyover was approaching; my rider slid onto the main lane to go up the bridge and suddenly I was riding parallel to the Chin and the Shoulder, and the Shoulder was attached to a head with cropped hair and pointy ends and the head was tilted sideways toward the Chin–eyes still pinned to the road in front–and Chin’s nose would periodically brush against the rider’s cheek. The rider had a loose zipper jacket on, sleeves pulled up to the elbows, 3 thin bands on her (gasp!) right wrist. She was saying something maybe wicked, maybe jovial, because both the heads were low and the mouths pulled up into smiles. Suddenly, she flicked her eyes from the road onto me riding to her right. She couldn’t have known I was also a woman because of my generously concealing helmet, and she didn’t pause to do the usual check I get subjected to by other riders on the road: hands, then breasts. And even if she did know, I had a feeling she would’ve still been annoyed at how keenly I was taking the two of them in. She revved her engine and rode off, her CD70 zigzagging between cars, leaving me feeling exhilarated because my secret hypothesis seemed to have had its first positive testing. It was April of 2025 and by that time, young girls on e-bikes had become–sorry, give me a second, it still feels unreal to say this–common around all parts of Lahore. It happened steadily: one month it was one girl on her e-bike jostling for her place on the road in early morning traffic. The next month there were 6. And somehow, it broke through whatever ceiling had stalled previous “women friendly” transportation initiatives: ”pink” rickshaws, “pink” buses, women-only ride-hailing apps. At first, it was just young girls headed to school or work; a few months later, the middle-aged women who work as house help in the gated community where I live, the ones who would make the morning walk to their respective houses every day, were now riding into the community on e-bikes. Picture it: thick-set women in their printed shalwar kameez riding astride in two’s, taking their own damn selves to work. I was afraid to point it out to anyone lest I jinxed it. Quietly, I placed a bet against, well, patriarchy: the excess of women on e-bikes was going to stir another kraken: the CD70, the reigning bike model in Pakistan for many decades, would betray its male overlords and turn out to, in fact, be quite maneuverable in the hands of women. Like Chin and Shoulder. In that way, 2025, which was otherwise miserly, gifted me a score of utterly new silhouettes to devour everyday: the girl riding down Sherpao into the setting sun with her billowing abaya making her look straight up Batmanesque; the mother taking her son for an evening ride on a pleasant April day, riding at a leisurely pace; two girls lounging on a bench in a small park, their e-bike parked next to them. Something fundamental seems to be shifting in the working and social lives of women in Lahore, and on many days I sit quaking with anticipation about all its possibilities. I imagine this is how our boomer parents felt about the arrival of the internet. *** As giant a stride as that is, I have to remind myself to be patient when it comes to what bike-riding women will be allowed to / will allow themselves to wear as they step out in this new, knife-like way. For anyone who has been disturbed by the sighting of all these newly “out” girls on their e-bikes, it must be reassuring to know that almost all of them are in abayas. And I suppose it has to be that way if we are to be collectively eased into this new age with minimal harm. I was stupidly dismissive of this when I started pillion riding, though not out of any principled defiance. It was May 2024, and we were hurtling toward a heat wave (hitting a record high of 44.5 degrees celsius that June). Not burning my skin off on the 40-minute 9:20 am ride would entail layering over my short-sleeved work clothes. A friend with moderately high survivalist tendencies gave me a windbreaker: a steal from Daraz, grey, light as a feather. Even so, the thought of double layering in Lahore’s May was unbearable. So May through June, I rode on the streets of my city with nothing but my bra under my kind-of-see-through windbreaker, rolling up my day shirt in my bag to wear when I got to the office. I figured my backpack would cover most of my back, along with any evidence of a bra-strap. The front was trickier, but there was always the slouchy shoulders trick, a tried and tested method to diminish the appearance and therefore possibility of breasts. The only problem was that I kept having visions of being thrown off my bike because of a drunk driver, followed by my flimsy wind-breaker ripping and me lying on a public street in my bra. Terrifying. By the time summer of 2025 rolled around, I was prepared: a series of black-as-night sleeveless chemises, waist-length, made of the thinnest cotton by the family tailor, Ramzan sahab, as light as the windbreaker that would go on top. *** Along the way, there have been the usual reminders that God dislikes a self-assured planner. There was that one (and only) time that I walked out of my building with my usual confidence and was told bluntly by the rider that he couldn’t take me (“sorry ma’am, main ladies ko nahi leta”) which, essentially, was him refusing me permission to get on his bike. Maybe his own personal discomfort, maybe a promise made to his wife–either way, fair. Only twice have I been prompted to consider fates worse than death and paralysis. Turns out that a healthy 40 percent of riders consider running out of petrol somewhere out on the road a low-stake problem needing attention only after the fact. One night, I had just finished dinner with a group of friends in DHA Phase 5, an upscale area by all standards. It was past midnight, so not ideal, but I calculated that the route back to my house would skirt through patrolled parts of the city, so not too bad either. About 4 minutes into the ride, the bike began sputtering with low fuel, and my rider veered to the left, parked, got off and started walking across the road to a petrol station 100m down, leaving me in a darkened spot of the street, sitting on a vehicle I had no knowledge of how to use. Peeved, I scampered after him and waited at the well-lit and peopled station while he went back across the road to his bike with a pitcher of fuel. When we got back on the road, I discreetly leaned over to see who and what he was messaging, and noticed that his wallpaper was him with a big grin and a rifle in his hand. When he asked me if I was studying in college, I made him drop me off at an approaching mall. The second time, we were travelling late afternoon on a service lane that runs parallel to the Ring Road highway around the outer part of the city. The bike sputtered, but this time, the closest pump was at least 1.5 kilometers away. These words were barely out of my mouth when my rider, a 50-something man with a bright orange beard, told me to hang tight and rode off and out of sight. I stood at the side of the highway – maroon suede shirt, top three buttons open, heeled boots, grey flared pants, bronze bangles and a helmet on my head – and waited in stunned silence. Every passing person on bike or rickshaw or car gawked at the sight of this strange helmeted creature who seemed to be standing beside a highway without much of a plan. I considered someone snatching my bag, snatching the whole of me, or getting frisky as they drove past. I waited with a mini blade tucked in my knuckle (thank you again, survivalist friend). It was a tense 10 minutes, but then I spotted my rider–big flashy mehndi beard–speeding back to get me. *** My first ever ride was probably the nicest one I’ve had in these two years. I approached it as an experiment to see if pillion riding was going to solve either one of the two pressing problems of my life at the time (more on this too, I promise). It was noon on a Sunday which meant fewer people on the roads. That increased my chances of getting a serious-minded uncle kind of a rider instead of a flamboyant youngster because he would likely be sleeping in on a Sunday. Moreover, it was an intentionally short ride (8 km) into the cantonment area (hello military police everywhere). Sure enough, my rider was a mid-40’s uncle with a greying beard and he rode me uneventfully to my destination. It cost me RS 110. When I got off I felt compelled to tell him he’d made me feel very safe. He seemed slightly surprised at receiving this compliment at 12:17 pm on a Sunday, but accepted it nonetheless. He rode off and I stood there with a growing sense that riding around the city was going to save me from me. At the time, without any prior notice, I had embarked on my first pilgrimage to rage. Before, rage and I had been wary acquaintances; she would hang around my circle a lot but I knew better than to trust her. By 2024, I was beginning my mornings with her and taking her to bed every night. I was convinced she was funnier and cleverer than anyone else, and I let her regale me with tales about how obnoxious and insufferable and disappointing everyone truly was: women, men, children, siblings, mentors, friends, colleagues, neighbours, strangers, everyone . During rare moments of clarity, I wanted more than anything to be freed of her, freed of the pinball machine that was my mind and its most sulphuric thoughts, and it turns out that heat on the roads can do that for you, specifically heat that bounces off asphalt as you wait at a 30-second traffic light on a 39°C morning. Something else that can do that for you is touching treetops as you go down fly-overs, which I do every time I’m taking Jinnah toward Firdous Market or Sherpao toward Jail Road. Little clusters of trees spill over the parapet walls on both routes, and something about having a brief unscheduled encounter with the very top of a tree short-circuits my nervous system. These daily offerings of my rides back home–fleeting, mystifying, unexpected, primordial–peeled the rage off slowly. Like the sight of an uncle crying behind the wheel of his car as he drove down Kasur, a tissue pressed to his eyes; auburn February sunsets that cut me down to size; the masculine urge to shake the head at anything inconvenient: missing a green light, jumpy pedestrians, the petrol finishing, a surprise speedbreaker; leaning in to have shouty conversations over wind and horns with men you were probably only going to meet once in your life about living in this wondrous city and seeing it be asphyxiated by smog, by 100-legged billboards, rental prices, the military, housing societies and megaprojects. My other life-problem was a lot simpler in comparison: pillion riding kept me from going broke for the third time in 2 years. My life had experienced seismic shifts during Covid’s debut year of 2020. Before, I had had unobstructed access to someone else’s Honda City, and I had driven it all over Lahore at all kinds of hours. In 2021, I moved into a house where the cars (multiple) came with multiple conditions. I could drive the older manual Honda Civic Reborn (a glorious model) but not the newer Toyota Aqua even though it was smaller and automatic (so more “female-friendly” as per man-logic) but that too only during daylight hours and for certain stretches of time. By the end of 2023, I was living on my own, chest deep in bills and groceries and with the acute sense that the city I had been living in for 14 years had become unaffordable. I couldn’t even take myself to work on a hailed car everyday, let alone to restaurants or shops that I used to frequent. It took some time, but once I accepted that I was indeed poorer in my 30’s than I’d been in my 20’s—not the favoured trajectory—I found myself calling my first bike that Sunday afternoon. Another 20 or so uneventful rides later, somewhere on Canal Road, the heat like a whip cracking open the synapses in my brain is when suddenly: what if all these women riding behind these men on the Canal aren’t all wives and mothers and daughters and sisters? What if I’m not the only stranger-danger-woman impinging on this equilibrium of public order and decency? And sure enough, when I really looked, I saw that some of the women whizzing past me on the Canal also sat as far as possible on the other end of the seat with their arms folded away from the man transporting them. Then I noticed two women getting off around a commercial area and handing money over to the rider. In the end, rather embarrassingly, I had to admit to myself that of course I was not one in a handful of women in this sprawling city who were compelled by necessity to hail bikes for their commute and of course women did it every single day given how affordable and fast it was. Really the only oddity about me doing it was that I presented as somebody who would have some other means. Which makes for the usual confusion on the faces of the military police stalking the 10 or so checkposts that surround the cantonment area (‘cantt’) where I usually find myself. Their job in some ways is to complicate the entry of 1) non-rich looking people 2) non-Punjabi looking people 3) non-Pakistani looking people into Cantt. In that regard, I am a bit of a headache in that I am not 1) ( phew because critical security priority) but I am 2) and 3). In fact, popular opinion suggests that I can comfortably be confused for Turkish/Lebanese/Iranian/Greek. So as I approach the checkpost, riders ahead and behind taking off their helmets so their faces can be recorded by the Go-Pro’s hanging off the neck of every MP (I keep mine on, only pushing the face shield up), I see consternation tense the face of the MP. He clocks first the clothes, then the legs parted in a straddle, then the (always) painted lips. He can’t help but puff up as he steps toward me–he’s about to strike down the stealthy advance of a foreign woman into a securitized zone of the city. I disarm him a little by asking curtly, jee bhai, kia chahiye? (yes, what do you want?). He falters briefly at the comfortable Urdu and the tone, gathers himself up again, and demands my ID card. This is good because I have it ready in a zipper pocket and I get to pull it out, hand it over and watch his face fall as he realises today is not the day he gets to intercept a foreign conspiracy. What I hate is when they don’t ask for the ID card and instead order me to get my entry “logged”. Getting myself logged in the system means parking 50m ahead beside a cabin and coming face to face with the “Lady Searcher” (as advertised in big lettering on the outside of the cabin, which, if one considers the tradition of military parlance, is surprisingly lyrical, almost poetic: ~ lady searcher ~ ). She’s usually in an abaya, and has been sitting in that cramped cabin over, no doubt, a long shift with no view and no company and no Go-Pro or other fancy tech to deploy either; just an old register with lined columns in which she has to enter data by hand . I sympathise, I do. And I really would rather confront the villain than the stooge, especially since something about being expertly surveilled by a woman is extremely unsettling. The Lady Searcher always looks at me like I’m the whorish offspring of disreputable people. She’ll bark at me to take my helmet off and we’re off to a very bad start. I’ve tried different approaches—doubling down, impudence, shaming, humour—she does not back down. She is very bad for my rage, I’ve realised, so now I try and limit my exposure to her. I go into the cabin and promptly answer all her questions about where I’ve come from and where I was born and where I’m going and why I’m going where I’m going. *** I really thought that unless I pursued some bucket-list calibre things—requiring at the very least money and a new destination—I wouldn’t be unlocking any truly new experience in my 30’s; new like the unique thrill of the absolutely unfamiliar felt explosively at a cellular level. I certainly did not think it was going to happen on a narrow street in a cramped junction nestled under the Sherpao flyover. This street is the preferred alternative route for some riders because it snakes under busier parts of town. It is lined with motels and food joints—burger and shawarma, biryani and pulao, mithai and bakery, kebab and fish. We, two fools on a bike, were attempting to cross the 250m stretch five minutes before iftar. Crowds thronged food stalls on either side, buying snacks to break their fast, men hung about in two’s and three’s, listening for the azaan, hawkers shouted and flailed their arms trying to entrap customers, people scurried back home to break their fast. I instructed my body to brace for some swift dodging of stares and limbs as we approached the throng, forgetting that it was still winter and my body was hidden under layers of clothing including a puffer jacket, and my hair was still cropped and entirely hidden under my helmet. The first man that I passed by on that street must have stood not a foot away from me. He was holding a menu in his hand, and was looking over my head, his eyes fixed on customers across the road. The next was a man who was rushing across the street, his arm outstretched as he yelled something at someone. It began to dawn on me that we had all gone off-script; this wasn’t how crammed public spaces worked. I cast my eyes around hurriedly trying to catch at least one man looking my way, but it was as if I was a blurry detail, a thing to be cropped out. And–the truly new new–while my mind had needed to ascertain all this, my body had arrived at it much earlier. It hadn’t actually braced for anything at all even after I had instructed it to, not a muscle tensed in the knowledge that we were approaching male bodies in various states of frenzy and languor, not even with the awareness that nobody was bothering to create a “respectable” distance between us as we crossed. It was precisely because of this, because my body was a non-event, that our proximity was a perfectly neutral, luminously new sensation. ∎ Since 2024, I’ve smelled more men’s hair than I ever signed up for. It would be untrue to say that I never signed up to smell anyone’s hair, because I certainly have. But only women’s hair and specifically silky hair. I have walked behind and past many a straight-haired girl, and been slapped in the face with that fruity post-shower waft. I wanted it. But I could never have it, because the usual department store shampoos that boast that signature scent are not designed for the likes of me, with my type 3C (very curly) hair. Having said that, I have never been even vaguely curious about men’s hair, mostly because men’s scalp hygiene is poorer than women’s on average. Shampooing just doesn’t seem to figure the same way in their lives. All this unfortunate oversharing to underscore that the smelling of men’s hair was entirely involuntary. I’m just: 1) seated very close to men, 2) seated very close behind them, 3) we are moving through space at about 30-40 kmph because we are on 4) a motorbike 5) which means a trusty bit of wind combined with 6) the fact that riders have to take off their helmets when passing through the smattering of military checkpoints around Lahore, (they also get taken off during the ride because most will only wear them to hoodwink traffic police officers and then proceed to dangle them off the bike handle the rest of the time). The physics of this dynamic means that the wind in their hair whips my pillion-riding face, and that’s how I know that most men’s hair smells sebum-y. But every 18th ride or so, that coveted fruity shampoo smell makes a surprise appearance. In those moments, I would take lung-fulls of that fragrant air because it calmed my nervous system (a need I had at that time, more on this in a bit). One day, I caught myself mid-exhale: how would this rider feel if he got wind (!) of this involuntary intimacy? It felt a bit like an Uno Reverse situation of the impropriety lesson I got from my mother growing up: she would spritz her perfume once on her palm, dab the tip of her forefinger into the droplets in her hand, and then press the tip lightly on a single point on either side of her neck. Your perfume was for you to smell, she would remind me, never unknown men. But here I was, an unknown woman, smelling men’s various bodily scents on the daily. In truth, I’ve spent a great deal of my commute on motorbikes considering impropriety. Pillion riding was new to my life in 2024. I was 31, used to waking up every morning, dressing to my heart's desire and, with tempered confidence, stepping out the door into what was a well-studied yet inscrutable world. But now , new contingencies demanded an updated protocol: I felt that my very conspicuously dressed “up” body may as well be a sharp knife slicing through public space in the early morning hours, cleaving the worlds of everyone it encountered into halves as I covered the 18 kilometers from home to work every day. It sounds overly dramatic now, but at the time, those misgivings felt reasonable. My Virgo temperament was keen to approach this problem systematically. I mapped out variables, cycled through undesirable scenarios, considered several tactical approaches, and eventually devised a near-perfect SOP. When the rider accepts your ride on the app and calls you to confirm your pick-up location, it is the perfect opportunity to demonstrate with your voice that you are female, a fact they may not necessarily pick up on by your profile name alone (not “Rasti” but “Jehan”, as in your friend whose name you borrowed for this app 3 years ago, after a government ban on a film you acted in turned things dicey, personal security wise). For extra measure, you turn up the girly in your voice. Some do a double take, others don't break a sweat. The next potentially tense moment arrives when you walk out of your building and your rider takes in the sight of Jehan: you’re usually in pants/jeans, rings on your fingers, bangles and distracting shoes, your helmet dangling from your hand. You avoid sleeveless tops entirely now because two attempts of riding with bare arms down Lahori streets have resulted in considerable vexation on the faces of fellow riders (and other pillion riding women), not evidenced with, say, a calf (sometimes you think maybe it is true what your friend’s mother once said in her case against the sleeveless: something potently sensual about the curve of the shoulder, entirely absent in a calf and unmatched by the curve of a knee). You’re approaching your rider now, and you make sure to put on your business-as-usual face because it is important to set the rider at ease: this is not a hapless girl attempting this for the first time and no, she most certainly will not fall off the bike and no sir, this is not her papa’s borrowed helmet. You say salam, throw your helmet on your head and your right leg over the seat. At this leg-throwing junction–confirming that you will indeed be riding astride and not modestly sidesaddle like most women do–you’re aware of some mild tensing, which is sometimes just curiosity, sometimes some caution. You let it pass and grab on tight to the U-shaped silver rail behind you that juts out over the rear light. This is a failsafe strategy to avoid contact and avoiding contact is absolutely imperative for everyone’s sake, nevermind that the repetitive gripping may have gifted you your new elbow joint dysfunction. By this point, some riders slide onto the petrol tank to widen the gap between their hips and your crotch. But sometimes they don’t, and that’s okay too because you’re pretty good at squeezing yourself between the rider and the U-rail. All in all, you’re a confident pillion rider except for when that silver rail is missing, which it is on some bikes, in which case you try and clutch on to the sides of the seat in front of you but the grip isn’t as secure and you can’t stop yourself from lurching forwards. The missing U-rail is not even how I ended up accidentally touching my rider for the first time. I was making what I thought was a small, harmless adjustment on the seat, but by the end of it I had poked my rider in his left buttock with my thumb. I held my breath. My first thought: how to not make him think that just because I'm in excessively flared, sort-of see-through pants with a linen button-down that won’t even cover my ass that I get up to this kind of behavior all the time? I said an audible “sorry”, he said nothing, and we carried on down Ferozepur road. The first time I flew onto a rider’s back with all my breasts, I didn't say anything. It felt like nothing would have sufficed for the moment; the line had been crossed so egregiously that the line just had to be treated like a construct. My breasts have bumped into 3 other riders since; nobody says anything and things carry on. The only kind of unremarkable physical contact is when I accidentally headbump my rider and our helmets go pop. *** My helmet is to me what I imagine a Garmin sportswatch is to a sando-wearing gymbro. I fawn over her, I’m always waiting for someone to notice her and ask me about her so I can show her off, and I'm never lax about wearing her which most riders will compliment in a mildly surprised tone as if a prudent female rider defies some expectation. Except for that one rider who seemed to be slightly bothered by it: ‘ Aap nay kyun helmet pehni hui hay?’ (‘why are you wearing a helmet?’), he asked as we rode out from my workplace. I paused. The inflection on you was provocative. He was waiting for my response. I’d had yet another brain-melting day at work, and was thinking about keeping my knees pressed into the sides of the bike for the duration that we would be zigzagging through post-work gridlocks; I wanted quiet, not whatever this question was. I shot back: why do you wear a helmet? And he went: but I asked you. We did maybe one more round of that and then I snapped at him with an unkind lesson on the physics of flying through the air after a car collision and becoming jam on the road. He didn’t respond and we rode in silence. That was one of only two cantankerous rides I’ve had in over 300+. I realised the helmet doesn't factor as a safeguard against death for most bikers; like the seatbelt, it’s an annoying imposition, yet another tool available to the state to squeeze fines out of ordinary citizens. I, on the other hand, am very serious about dodging death by drunk drivers / underage boys / underslept drivers of public transport / rich people in their SUV’s and pick-up trucks who think traffic lights are for pussies. In June 2024, I went looking for a death-defying helmet in Bohri Bazaar, Karachi, after consulting with my friend who rides his heavy bike (a cruiser) around Karachi (bold). It was a small store, shelves top to bottom packed with helmets and other riding gear. After some research, I decided that I wanted a full face (chin protection) flip-helmet (raiseable face shield) with a second, smaller visor inside, tinted to protect against the sun. It also absolutely had to look cool. The ones that were most popular (‘jo sab say ziada running main hain…’) according to the store owner all had snakes and skulls graffited on them in colours that gave ‘energy drink’. Ideally, I would have liked a helmet with something whimsical painted on it, like a rock nestled in a forest that hadn’t moved in three thousand years. But I settled for a matte grey-black with red streaks that curved around from the back, a faint skull at the very top, and some raptor-esque graffiti on the sides. She was a thick girl (useful for my bigger-than-average head size and even bigger hair), with detachable inner padding and a neat little flip switch above my right ear to flick the tinted visor down. I’ve stared many an MP (military police) in the eye as I flipped that switch and rode off away from their smug little checkposts and it has felt cool every time. In spite of my helmet, I’ve spent much of my commute time considering death and its cousin, paralysis, with only a brief respite in between. It was January 2025, and the city was launching a (sadly short-lived) pilot project: a designated “bike lane”. One day, there were laborers painting the left strip of Ferozepur Road green going down several kilometers. They did this for a couple weeks till a spell of light rain washed all the green away (along with allegedly 110 million rupees for the locally produced paint, supposedly a cost-effective substitute for the imported variety, as per a local news channel). A week later, some parts of the stretch got a fresh coat of paint and a barricade went up, cutting off the bike lane from the rest of the road. For a while, vehicles tried to navigate the nightmarish crisscross of entry and exit points to the lane. It was chaotic, but once inside the lane, my heart rate would be noticeably lower. It was on Ferozepur road going down this bike lane that I first noticed them. *** They were riding outside the barricade on the main road, 50 meters ahead. I noticed the pillion rider’s arms first: they were encircling the rider and…it wasn’t a loose grip. Then: her riding astride, black hair in a braid that came down to her shoulder blades, and finally: she was leaning into the hug, her whole body pressed up against the rider and her chin was resting on the rider’s right shoulder. There was something so immediately unfamiliar about this posture–it felt like it was maybe 3 moves shy from kissing in public. Luckily, a flyover was approaching; my rider slid onto the main lane to go up the bridge and suddenly I was riding parallel to the Chin and the Shoulder, and the Shoulder was attached to a head with cropped hair and pointy ends and the head was tilted sideways toward the Chin–eyes still pinned to the road in front–and Chin’s nose would periodically brush against the rider’s cheek. The rider had a loose zipper jacket on, sleeves pulled up to the elbows, 3 thin bands on her (gasp!) right wrist. She was saying something maybe wicked, maybe jovial, because both the heads were low and the mouths pulled up into smiles. Suddenly, she flicked her eyes from the road onto me riding to her right. She couldn’t have known I was also a woman because of my generously concealing helmet, and she didn’t pause to do the usual check I get subjected to by other riders on the road: hands, then breasts. And even if she did know, I had a feeling she would’ve still been annoyed at how keenly I was taking the two of them in. She revved her engine and rode off, her CD70 zigzagging between cars, leaving me feeling exhilarated because my secret hypothesis seemed to have had its first positive testing. It was April of 2025 and by that time, young girls on e-bikes had become–sorry, give me a second, it still feels unreal to say this–common around all parts of Lahore. It happened steadily: one month it was one girl on her e-bike jostling for her place on the road in early morning traffic. The next month there were 6. And somehow, it broke through whatever ceiling had stalled previous “women friendly” transportation initiatives: ”pink” rickshaws, “pink” buses, women-only ride-hailing apps. At first, it was just young girls headed to school or work; a few months later, the middle-aged women who work as house help in the gated community where I live, the ones who would make the morning walk to their respective houses every day, were now riding into the community on e-bikes. Picture it: thick-set women in their printed shalwar kameez riding astride in two’s, taking their own damn selves to work. I was afraid to point it out to anyone lest I jinxed it. Quietly, I placed a bet against, well, patriarchy: the excess of women on e-bikes was going to stir another kraken: the CD70, the reigning bike model in Pakistan for many decades, would betray its male overlords and turn out to, in fact, be quite maneuverable in the hands of women. Like Chin and Shoulder. In that way, 2025, which was otherwise miserly, gifted me a score of utterly new silhouettes to devour everyday: the girl riding down Sherpao into the setting sun with her billowing abaya making her look straight up Batmanesque; the mother taking her son for an evening ride on a pleasant April day, riding at a leisurely pace; two girls lounging on a bench in a small park, their e-bike parked next to them. Something fundamental seems to be shifting in the working and social lives of women in Lahore, and on many days I sit quaking with anticipation about all its possibilities. I imagine this is how our boomer parents felt about the arrival of the internet. *** As giant a stride as that is, I have to remind myself to be patient when it comes to what bike-riding women will be allowed to / will allow themselves to wear as they step out in this new, knife-like way. For anyone who has been disturbed by the sighting of all these newly “out” girls on their e-bikes, it must be reassuring to know that almost all of them are in abayas. And I suppose it has to be that way if we are to be collectively eased into this new age with minimal harm. I was stupidly dismissive of this when I started pillion riding, though not out of any principled defiance. It was May 2024, and we were hurtling toward a heat wave (hitting a record high of 44.5 degrees celsius that June). Not burning my skin off on the 40-minute 9:20 am ride would entail layering over my short-sleeved work clothes. A friend with moderately high survivalist tendencies gave me a windbreaker: a steal from Daraz, grey, light as a feather. Even so, the thought of double layering in Lahore’s May was unbearable. So May through June, I rode on the streets of my city with nothing but my bra under my kind-of-see-through windbreaker, rolling up my day shirt in my bag to wear when I got to the office. I figured my backpack would cover most of my back, along with any evidence of a bra-strap. The front was trickier, but there was always the slouchy shoulders trick, a tried and tested method to diminish the appearance and therefore possibility of breasts. The only problem was that I kept having visions of being thrown off my bike because of a drunk driver, followed by my flimsy wind-breaker ripping and me lying on a public street in my bra. Terrifying. By the time summer of 2025 rolled around, I was prepared: a series of black-as-night sleeveless chemises, waist-length, made of the thinnest cotton by the family tailor, Ramzan sahab, as light as the windbreaker that would go on top. *** Along the way, there have been the usual reminders that God dislikes a self-assured planner. There was that one (and only) time that I walked out of my building with my usual confidence and was told bluntly by the rider that he couldn’t take me (“sorry ma’am, main ladies ko nahi leta”) which, essentially, was him refusing me permission to get on his bike. Maybe his own personal discomfort, maybe a promise made to his wife–either way, fair. Only twice have I been prompted to consider fates worse than death and paralysis. Turns out that a healthy 40 percent of riders consider running out of petrol somewhere out on the road a low-stake problem needing attention only after the fact. One night, I had just finished dinner with a group of friends in DHA Phase 5, an upscale area by all standards. It was past midnight, so not ideal, but I calculated that the route back to my house would skirt through patrolled parts of the city, so not too bad either. About 4 minutes into the ride, the bike began sputtering with low fuel, and my rider veered to the left, parked, got off and started walking across the road to a petrol station 100m down, leaving me in a darkened spot of the street, sitting on a vehicle I had no knowledge of how to use. Peeved, I scampered after him and waited at the well-lit and peopled station while he went back across the road to his bike with a pitcher of fuel. When we got back on the road, I discreetly leaned over to see who and what he was messaging, and noticed that his wallpaper was him with a big grin and a rifle in his hand. When he asked me if I was studying in college, I made him drop me off at an approaching mall. The second time, we were travelling late afternoon on a service lane that runs parallel to the Ring Road highway around the outer part of the city. The bike sputtered, but this time, the closest pump was at least 1.5 kilometers away. These words were barely out of my mouth when my rider, a 50-something man with a bright orange beard, told me to hang tight and rode off and out of sight. I stood at the side of the highway – maroon suede shirt, top three buttons open, heeled boots, grey flared pants, bronze bangles and a helmet on my head – and waited in stunned silence. Every passing person on bike or rickshaw or car gawked at the sight of this strange helmeted creature who seemed to be standing beside a highway without much of a plan. I considered someone snatching my bag, snatching the whole of me, or getting frisky as they drove past. I waited with a mini blade tucked in my knuckle (thank you again, survivalist friend). It was a tense 10 minutes, but then I spotted my rider–big flashy mehndi beard–speeding back to get me. *** My first ever ride was probably the nicest one I’ve had in these two years. I approached it as an experiment to see if pillion riding was going to solve either one of the two pressing problems of my life at the time (more on this too, I promise). It was noon on a Sunday which meant fewer people on the roads. That increased my chances of getting a serious-minded uncle kind of a rider instead of a flamboyant youngster because he would likely be sleeping in on a Sunday. Moreover, it was an intentionally short ride (8 km) into the cantonment area (hello military police everywhere). Sure enough, my rider was a mid-40’s uncle with a greying beard and he rode me uneventfully to my destination. It cost me RS 110. When I got off I felt compelled to tell him he’d made me feel very safe. He seemed slightly surprised at receiving this compliment at 12:17 pm on a Sunday, but accepted it nonetheless. He rode off and I stood there with a growing sense that riding around the city was going to save me from me. At the time, without any prior notice, I had embarked on my first pilgrimage to rage. Before, rage and I had been wary acquaintances; she would hang around my circle a lot but I knew better than to trust her. By 2024, I was beginning my mornings with her and taking her to bed every night. I was convinced she was funnier and cleverer than anyone else, and I let her regale me with tales about how obnoxious and insufferable and disappointing everyone truly was: women, men, children, siblings, mentors, friends, colleagues, neighbours, strangers, everyone . During rare moments of clarity, I wanted more than anything to be freed of her, freed of the pinball machine that was my mind and its most sulphuric thoughts, and it turns out that heat on the roads can do that for you, specifically heat that bounces off asphalt as you wait at a 30-second traffic light on a 39°C morning. Something else that can do that for you is touching treetops as you go down fly-overs, which I do every time I’m taking Jinnah toward Firdous Market or Sherpao toward Jail Road. Little clusters of trees spill over the parapet walls on both routes, and something about having a brief unscheduled encounter with the very top of a tree short-circuits my nervous system. These daily offerings of my rides back home–fleeting, mystifying, unexpected, primordial–peeled the rage off slowly. Like the sight of an uncle crying behind the wheel of his car as he drove down Kasur, a tissue pressed to his eyes; auburn February sunsets that cut me down to size; the masculine urge to shake the head at anything inconvenient: missing a green light, jumpy pedestrians, the petrol finishing, a surprise speedbreaker; leaning in to have shouty conversations over wind and horns with men you were probably only going to meet once in your life about living in this wondrous city and seeing it be asphyxiated by smog, by 100-legged billboards, rental prices, the military, housing societies and megaprojects. My other life-problem was a lot simpler in comparison: pillion riding kept me from going broke for the third time in 2 years. My life had experienced seismic shifts during Covid’s debut year of 2020. Before, I had had unobstructed access to someone else’s Honda City, and I had driven it all over Lahore at all kinds of hours. In 2021, I moved into a house where the cars (multiple) came with multiple conditions. I could drive the older manual Honda Civic Reborn (a glorious model) but not the newer Toyota Aqua even though it was smaller and automatic (so more “female-friendly” as per man-logic) but that too only during daylight hours and for certain stretches of time. By the end of 2023, I was living on my own, chest deep in bills and groceries and with the acute sense that the city I had been living in for 14 years had become unaffordable. I couldn’t even take myself to work on a hailed car everyday, let alone to restaurants or shops that I used to frequent. It took some time, but once I accepted that I was indeed poorer in my 30’s than I’d been in my 20’s—not the favoured trajectory—I found myself calling my first bike that Sunday afternoon. Another 20 or so uneventful rides later, somewhere on Canal Road, the heat like a whip cracking open the synapses in my brain is when suddenly: what if all these women riding behind these men on the Canal aren’t all wives and mothers and daughters and sisters? What if I’m not the only stranger-danger-woman impinging on this equilibrium of public order and decency? And sure enough, when I really looked, I saw that some of the women whizzing past me on the Canal also sat as far as possible on the other end of the seat with their arms folded away from the man transporting them. Then I noticed two women getting off around a commercial area and handing money over to the rider. In the end, rather embarrassingly, I had to admit to myself that of course I was not one in a handful of women in this sprawling city who were compelled by necessity to hail bikes for their commute and of course women did it every single day given how affordable and fast it was. Really the only oddity about me doing it was that I presented as somebody who would have some other means. Which makes for the usual confusion on the faces of the military police stalking the 10 or so checkposts that surround the cantonment area (‘cantt’) where I usually find myself. Their job in some ways is to complicate the entry of 1) non-rich looking people 2) non-Punjabi looking people 3) non-Pakistani looking people into Cantt. In that regard, I am a bit of a headache in that I am not 1) ( phew because critical security priority) but I am 2) and 3). In fact, popular opinion suggests that I can comfortably be confused for Turkish/Lebanese/Iranian/Greek. So as I approach the checkpost, riders ahead and behind taking off their helmets so their faces can be recorded by the Go-Pro’s hanging off the neck of every MP (I keep mine on, only pushing the face shield up), I see consternation tense the face of the MP. He clocks first the clothes, then the legs parted in a straddle, then the (always) painted lips. He can’t help but puff up as he steps toward me–he’s about to strike down the stealthy advance of a foreign woman into a securitized zone of the city. I disarm him a little by asking curtly, jee bhai, kia chahiye? (yes, what do you want?). He falters briefly at the comfortable Urdu and the tone, gathers himself up again, and demands my ID card. This is good because I have it ready in a zipper pocket and I get to pull it out, hand it over and watch his face fall as he realises today is not the day he gets to intercept a foreign conspiracy. What I hate is when they don’t ask for the ID card and instead order me to get my entry “logged”. Getting myself logged in the system means parking 50m ahead beside a cabin and coming face to face with the “Lady Searcher” (as advertised in big lettering on the outside of the cabin, which, if one considers the tradition of military parlance, is surprisingly lyrical, almost poetic: ~ lady searcher ~ ). She’s usually in an abaya, and has been sitting in that cramped cabin over, no doubt, a long shift with no view and no company and no Go-Pro or other fancy tech to deploy either; just an old register with lined columns in which she has to enter data by hand . I sympathise, I do. And I really would rather confront the villain than the stooge, especially since something about being expertly surveilled by a woman is extremely unsettling. The Lady Searcher always looks at me like I’m the whorish offspring of disreputable people. She’ll bark at me to take my helmet off and we’re off to a very bad start. I’ve tried different approaches—doubling down, impudence, shaming, humour—she does not back down. She is very bad for my rage, I’ve realised, so now I try and limit my exposure to her. I go into the cabin and promptly answer all her questions about where I’ve come from and where I was born and where I’m going and why I’m going where I’m going. *** I really thought that unless I pursued some bucket-list calibre things—requiring at the very least money and a new destination—I wouldn’t be unlocking any truly new experience in my 30’s; new like the unique thrill of the absolutely unfamiliar felt explosively at a cellular level. I certainly did not think it was going to happen on a narrow street in a cramped junction nestled under the Sherpao flyover. This street is the preferred alternative route for some riders because it snakes under busier parts of town. It is lined with motels and food joints—burger and shawarma, biryani and pulao, mithai and bakery, kebab and fish. We, two fools on a bike, were attempting to cross the 250m stretch five minutes before iftar. Crowds thronged food stalls on either side, buying snacks to break their fast, men hung about in two’s and three’s, listening for the azaan, hawkers shouted and flailed their arms trying to entrap customers, people scurried back home to break their fast. I instructed my body to brace for some swift dodging of stares and limbs as we approached the throng, forgetting that it was still winter and my body was hidden under layers of clothing including a puffer jacket, and my hair was still cropped and entirely hidden under my helmet. The first man that I passed by on that street must have stood not a foot away from me. He was holding a menu in his hand, and was looking over my head, his eyes fixed on customers across the road. The next was a man who was rushing across the street, his arm outstretched as he yelled something at someone. It began to dawn on me that we had all gone off-script; this wasn’t how crammed public spaces worked. I cast my eyes around hurriedly trying to catch at least one man looking my way, but it was as if I was a blurry detail, a thing to be cropped out. And–the truly new new–while my mind had needed to ascertain all this, my body had arrived at it much earlier. It hadn’t actually braced for anything at all even after I had instructed it to, not a muscle tensed in the knowledge that we were approaching male bodies in various states of frenzy and languor, not even with the awareness that nobody was bothering to create a “respectable” distance between us as we crossed. It was precisely because of this, because my body was a non-event, that our proximity was a perfectly neutral, luminously new sensation. ∎ SUB-HEAD Two years ago, short on money and hungry for something new, Rasti Farooq started pillion riding through Lahore. What began as a practical choice became an intimate, disorienting encounter with the city, and with herself. Here’s everything you would note about everything if you went around your city on a bike. ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: Kareen Adam · Nazish Chunara A Dhivehi Artists Showcase Shebani Rao A Freelancer's Guide to Decision-Making Ode To History" (2024), gouache on paper, 21 x 28 inches, courtesy of Khadijah Rehman. SHARE Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Essay Lahore Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. 25 Mar 2026 Essay Lahore 25th Mar 2026 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. 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:

Towards the end of FLUX, a key organizer with Muslims For Just Futures, Muslims for Abolitionist Futures, among others, performed a DJ set with Bhangra and urban music beats, featuring Major Lazer, Meesha Shafi & more, bringing a wide-ranging event about many intellectual and material shifts to an end. INTERACTIVE FLUX · A Celebratory Set by DJ Kiran Towards the end of FLUX, a key organizer with Muslims For Just Futures, Muslims for Abolitionist Futures, among others, performed a DJ set with Bhangra and urban music beats, featuring Major Lazer, Meesha Shafi & more, bringing a wide-ranging event about many intellectual and material shifts to an end. Darakshan Raja FLUX: An Evening in Dissent An uplifting set by DJ Kiran to dance to at the end of a weighty virtual event. Jaishri Abichandani's Art Studio Tour Kshama Sawant & Nikil Saval: A panel on US left electoralism, COVID-19, recent victories, & lasting problems. Natasha Noorani's Live Performance of "Choro" Bhavik Lathia & Jaya Sundaresh: A panel on the US Left & its relationship with media in the wake of Bernie Sanders' loss. Tarfia Faizullah: Poetry Reading Rajiv Mohabir: Poetry Reading SAAG, So Far: A Panel with the Editors FLUX: An Evening in Dissent An uplifting set by DJ Kiran to dance to at the end of a weighty virtual event. Jaishri Abichandani's Art Studio Tour Kshama Sawant & Nikil Saval: A panel on US left electoralism, COVID-19, recent victories, & lasting problems. Natasha Noorani's Live Performance of "Choro" Bhavik Lathia & Jaya Sundaresh: A panel on the US Left & its relationship with media in the wake of Bernie Sanders' loss. Tarfia Faizullah: Poetry Reading Rajiv Mohabir: Poetry Reading SAAG, So Far: A Panel with the Editors SUB-HEAD ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: Kareen Adam · Nazish Chunara A Dhivehi Artists Showcase Shebani Rao A Freelancer's Guide to Decision-Making Watch the event in full on IGTV. SHARE Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Event Global Virtual Live FLUX Bhangra Music DJ Urban Desi Music Muslims For Just Futures North American Diaspora Muslim Abolitionist Futures Anti-Racism Islamophobia Major Lazer Meesha Shafi The Halluci Nation Boogey the Beat Northern Voice Jay Hun Sultaan Kisaan Bands Experimental Electronica Experimental Music DARAKSHAN RAJA A.K.A. DJ KIRAN is an abolitionist activist, musician, and DJ who works to cultivate joy and community in movement work with Bhangra and Urban Desi Music. DJ Kiran was part of The Empowerment Album , a collaboration between desi women DJs from the US, UK, and Canada. Darakshan is the co-founder and co-director of Muslims for Just Futures , a grassroots organization that focuses on working-class communities, women, and communities nationally through the Muslim Abolitionist Futures (MAF) National Network. 5 Dec 2020 Event Global 5th Dec 2020 A Set by Discostan Arshia Fatima Haq · Prithi Khalique 5th Jun FLUX · Natasha Noorani Unplugged: "Choro" Natasha Noorani 5th Dec FLUX · A Panel on SAAG, So Far Shreyas R Krishnan · Kartika Budhwar · Nur Nasreen Ibrahim · Aishwarya Kumar 5th Dec FLUX · Tarfia Faizullah: Poetry Reading Tarfia Faizullah 5th Dec FLUX · Poetry Reading by Rajiv Mohabir with Marginalia Rajiv Mohabir 5th Dec On That Note:

Activist Ammar Ali Jan in conversation with Kamil Ahsan. COMMUNITY The Pakistani Left, Separatism & Student Movements Activist Ammar Ali Jan in conversation with Kamil Ahsan. Ammar Ali Jan We worry too much about divisions within the left. It can be very productive if people engage in a decent, intellectual conversation. Actual disagreements shouldn't be repressed for the sake of some mythical unity. Editor's Note: Throughout the Baloch student long march & the #PashtunLongMarch2Karachi , the Pakistani state cracked down on activists—including Ammar Ali Jan—and continues to. This conversation took place in September 2020. A detention order for Ammar Ali Jan was issued in late November 2020. It was far from the first time he had faced detention, intimidation, or threats from the state. Granted pre-arrest bail, the detention order was lifted in December by the Lahore High Court, with LHC Chief Justice Muhammad Qasim Khan saying: “In Pakistan, influential people will not let their rivals to move freely by misusing ‘detention orders’." We worry too much about divisions within the left. It can be very productive if people engage in a decent, intellectual conversation. Actual disagreements shouldn't be repressed for the sake of some mythical unity. Editor's Note: Throughout the Baloch student long march & the #PashtunLongMarch2Karachi , the Pakistani state cracked down on activists—including Ammar Ali Jan—and continues to. This conversation took place in September 2020. A detention order for Ammar Ali Jan was issued in late November 2020. It was far from the first time he had faced detention, intimidation, or threats from the state. Granted pre-arrest bail, the detention order was lifted in December by the Lahore High Court, with LHC Chief Justice Muhammad Qasim Khan saying: “In Pakistan, influential people will not let their rivals to move freely by misusing ‘detention orders’." SUB-HEAD ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: Kareen Adam · Nazish Chunara A Dhivehi Artists Showcase Shebani Rao A Freelancer's Guide to Decision-Making Watch the interview on YouTube or IGTV. SHARE Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Interview Pakistan Student Movements Baloch Students Organization-Azad Haqooq-e-Khalq Movement Student Solidarity March Baloch Student Long March Pashtun Tahafuz Movement Shehri Tahafuz Movement Zaigham Abbas Universities State Repression Repression in Universities Partha Chatterjee Subaltern Studies Karl Polanyi People's Solidarity Forum Neofeudalism Neoliberalism Constitutionalism Pashtun Long March Trade Unions Electoral Politics Elections AMMAR ALI JAN is an activist, historian, and educator. He holds a Ph.D. in History from Cambridge, where he worked on communist thought in India. His work explores the intersection of communism and nationalism in Colonial India by examining how European ideas are extended and reshaped as they circulate in the non-European world. He is also a member of the Haqooq-e-Khalq Movement (HKM), a civil rights campaign dedicated to safeguarding the constitutional rights of Pakistani citizens. He is a regular contributor to The News International , and has taught at Government College, Punjab University, and Forman Christian College in Lahore, Pakistan. 14 Dec 2020 Interview Pakistan 14th Dec 2020 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:

Acclaimed musician and composer Vijay Iyer on how the constraints of musical genre emerged from racial capitalism: the history of "jazz" itself narrated by delinking music from its Black radical and avant-garde traditions. COMMUNITY Musical Genre as a Creation of Racial Capitalism Acclaimed musician and composer Vijay Iyer on how the constraints of musical genre emerged from racial capitalism: the history of "jazz" itself narrated by delinking music from its Black radical and avant-garde traditions. Vijay Iyer We go through these cycles of the mainstream press declaring jazz dead, then rediscovering it. There's a savior! That narrative's really problematic. It excludes and erases countless Black musicians who have been at the vanguard for decades. RECOMMENDED: Uneasy (ECM, 2021): Vijay Iyer with Tyshawn Sorey and Linda May Han Oh. We go through these cycles of the mainstream press declaring jazz dead, then rediscovering it. There's a savior! That narrative's really problematic. It excludes and erases countless Black musicians who have been at the vanguard for decades. RECOMMENDED: Uneasy (ECM, 2021): Vijay Iyer with Tyshawn Sorey and Linda May Han Oh. SUB-HEAD ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: Kareen Adam · Nazish Chunara A Dhivehi Artists Showcase Shebani Rao A Freelancer's Guide to Decision-Making Watch the interview on YouTube or IGTV. SHARE Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Interview Jazz Criticism Music Music Criticism Race & Genre Black Radical Traditions Amiri Baraka Roscoe Mitchell Racial Capitalism Avant-Garde Origins Village Vanguard Post-George Floyd Moment Historicity Black Speculative Musicalities Insurgence in Jazz Genre Fluidity Critical Improvisation Studies The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition Fred Moten Charles Mingus VIJAY IYER is a composer-pianist who has been described by The New York Times as a “social conscience, multimedia collaborator, system builder, rhapsodist, historical thinker and multicultural gateway.” He has received a MacArthur Fellowship, a Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, a United States Artist Fellowship, a Grammy nomination, and the Alpert Award in the Arts, and was voted Downbeat Magazine ’s Jazz Artist of the Year four times in the last decade. He has released twenty-four albums of his music, most recently UnEasy (ECM Records, 2021), a trio session with drummer Tyshawn Sorey and bassist Linda May Han Oh; The Transitory Poems (ECM, 2019), a live duo recording with pianist Craig Taborn; Far From Over (ECM, 2017) with the award-winning Vijay Iyer Sextet; and A Cosmic Rhythm with Each Stroke (ECM, 2016) a suite of duets with visionary composer-trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith. He recently served as composer-in-residence at London’s Wigmore Hall, music director of the Ojai Music Festival, and artist-in-residence at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. He teaches at Harvard University in the Department of Music and the Department of African and African American Studies. 8 Nov 2020 Interview Jazz 8th Nov 2020 The Craft of Writing in Occupied Kashmir Huzaifa Pandit 24th Jan Kashmiri ProgRock and Experimentation as Privilege Zeeshaan Nabi 21st Dec Nation-State Constraints on Identity & Intimacy Chaitali Sen 17th Dec Syncretism & the Contemporary Ghazal Ali Sethi 14th Oct Origins of Modernism & the Avant-Garde in India Amit Chaudhuri 4th Oct On That Note:

Solidarity failed when it came to a dire Afghan refugee crisis, decades in the making. THE VERTICAL Everyone Failed Us Solidarity failed when it came to a dire Afghan refugee crisis, decades in the making. Arash Azizzada · Irene Benedicto “A group of women leaders are badly in danger and one of them is my mom. I really searching for a person who can help us. They attack our home at first…. I hope you can help us. Every one of us really get depressed, please help us to get out of here.” THE BARRAGE of messages I receive, like the one above from western Afghanistan on almost a daily basis has not stopped, even a year later. Desperate daily emails from Afghans seeking refuge and safety flood our inboxes. Some are social activists, human rights defenders, former interpreters, and women leaders at risk of retribution from the Taliban. Other marginalized groups such as Hazaras and Shias have already been victims of ethnic cleansing by the Taliban and remain targets of ISIS attacks. Women activists have been disappeared by the Taliban authorities. Afghans seeking evacuation hold onto hope in what seems to be a hopeless situation. No longer expecting the international community to come to their rescue, for governments and institutions to do what they’re supposed to do, they rely on community organizers like myself and others. For two decades, America bragged about what it was building in Afghanistan. Last summer, the “Afghanistan project” was exposed for the facade that it was: a hollow rentier-state that only held ever legitimacy with Western donors and not with the Afghan people. Despite obvious bubbles of progress where hope flourished amidst the violence, the impending threat of a drone strike or Taliban suicide blast was always around the corner. Some rural areas were battered and mired in misery due to violence and poverty; others flourished, led by Afghan women and marginalized communities. The only constant was never-ending conflict. It seems as if the U.S. built a house of cards in Afghanistan, created in its own image, a house that started falling when the chains of dependency were challenged. The alliance with human rights abusers, the elevation of notorious pedophiles, and funding of endemic corruption brought back to power an oppressive, authoritarian regime that is erasing women, marginalized ethnic groups, and the disabled from public and daily life. The U.S. ran prisons where innocent Afghans were tortured. Entire villages were wiped off the map, and this was excused away as collateral damage. The U.S. spent years telling Afghans to pursue their dreams, break barriers, and challenge cultural norms. Then, it turned its back on them and betrayed them. Perhaps those of us who dreamt of a better Afghanistan were at fault for having expectations of a country whose very existence was kickstarted by genocide, a country where American presidents attempt brazen coups and its own citizens storm its political headquarters. The grim reality that we bore witness to these past few months is one that anyone who has paid attention to Afghanistan could have seen coming. There is even a U.S. agency–the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR)--which is dedicated to overseeing how reconstruction money was used in Afghanistan. In report after report, year after year, quarter after quarter, SIGAR wrote about the ghosts that the U.S. created–schools and hospitals that didn’t exist and a 300,000-man army that only functioned on paper. The Washington Post even devoted a series titled “The Afghanistan Papers, ” to showcase how policymakers and Pentagon officials had lied and deceived the American people about its success and accomplishments for 20 successive years. Nobody cared. The failure to value Afghan lives, however, lies not just with policymakers and elected officials. Certainly, the list of those responsible for the current situation in Afghanistan is long, ranging from Afghan elites to American elected officials from both parties going back four decades. Administration after administration has deprioritized Afghan lives and centered the needs of American hegemony. Congress held hearings on Afghanistan and yet rarely featured any Afghans. Policy discussions on Afghanistan in Washington D.C. at influential think tanks left out Afghans entirely. Afghans were left invisible in an occupation that lasted so long that it became not the “forever war” but rather the “forgotten war.” Afghanistan had disappeared from the psyche of the American people. Even when SIGAR released a report on rampant corruption that was wasting billions or when the Washington Post talked about lie after lie coming from the Pentagon, America just didn’t seem to care. The right-wing was too busy destroying democracy, the Democratic party was too busy fundraising from defense contractors, and the anti-war Left was too white to put Afghans and other impacted communities at the forefront. In our own Afghan American community, too many in our diaspora were profiting off the occupation. Their kids will go to prestigious American colleges, while Afghan girls will not be able to go to school at all and are robbed of a future. An international audience did finally pay attention to us last summer. American media, though, centered on the feelings of almost a million veterans who served in Afghanistan rather than asking Afghans how a withdrawal would impact them. The images of Afghans clinging onto the bottom of a military cargo plane had the world hooked. What does it say about our humanity that it took those tragic images for everyone to ask what we can do to help? For just a few days, people across the globe valued Afghan life. But moments like that are fleeting–Afghan history is littered with broken promises. Some of us have read enough history to know that the international community will not learn the lessons of its failure in Afghanistan and begin centering on the needs of the Afghan people. The Taliban spends every day perfecting its repression while the world has moved on, despite empty tweets and statements of solidarity. Today, as a year has passed since the chaotic withdrawal, wide-ranging sanctions on Afghanistan and theft of Afghan assets by the U.S. continue to inflict immense pain on innocent Afghan people, causing a humanitarian crisis that will likely lead to mass-scale death through malnutrition and starvation, a policy that disproportionately impacts Afghan girls and women. The United States’ attitude remains the same: focusing only on self-interest, even if it harms Afghans, except now it is done through economic warfare rather than through bombs built by defense contractor companies like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. Afghans deserve justice and reparations for the harm America has caused in my home country. Despite that vision for the future, what America leaves behind are closed immigration pathways and a desire to pretend Afghans don’t exist in the first place. Perhaps if a few more Afghans clung onto a plane leaving the Kabul airport, someone would care. ∎ “A group of women leaders are badly in danger and one of them is my mom. I really searching for a person who can help us. They attack our home at first…. I hope you can help us. Every one of us really get depressed, please help us to get out of here.” THE BARRAGE of messages I receive, like the one above from western Afghanistan on almost a daily basis has not stopped, even a year later. Desperate daily emails from Afghans seeking refuge and safety flood our inboxes. Some are social activists, human rights defenders, former interpreters, and women leaders at risk of retribution from the Taliban. Other marginalized groups such as Hazaras and Shias have already been victims of ethnic cleansing by the Taliban and remain targets of ISIS attacks. Women activists have been disappeared by the Taliban authorities. Afghans seeking evacuation hold onto hope in what seems to be a hopeless situation. No longer expecting the international community to come to their rescue, for governments and institutions to do what they’re supposed to do, they rely on community organizers like myself and others. For two decades, America bragged about what it was building in Afghanistan. Last summer, the “Afghanistan project” was exposed for the facade that it was: a hollow rentier-state that only held ever legitimacy with Western donors and not with the Afghan people. Despite obvious bubbles of progress where hope flourished amidst the violence, the impending threat of a drone strike or Taliban suicide blast was always around the corner. Some rural areas were battered and mired in misery due to violence and poverty; others flourished, led by Afghan women and marginalized communities. The only constant was never-ending conflict. It seems as if the U.S. built a house of cards in Afghanistan, created in its own image, a house that started falling when the chains of dependency were challenged. The alliance with human rights abusers, the elevation of notorious pedophiles, and funding of endemic corruption brought back to power an oppressive, authoritarian regime that is erasing women, marginalized ethnic groups, and the disabled from public and daily life. The U.S. ran prisons where innocent Afghans were tortured. Entire villages were wiped off the map, and this was excused away as collateral damage. The U.S. spent years telling Afghans to pursue their dreams, break barriers, and challenge cultural norms. Then, it turned its back on them and betrayed them. Perhaps those of us who dreamt of a better Afghanistan were at fault for having expectations of a country whose very existence was kickstarted by genocide, a country where American presidents attempt brazen coups and its own citizens storm its political headquarters. The grim reality that we bore witness to these past few months is one that anyone who has paid attention to Afghanistan could have seen coming. There is even a U.S. agency–the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR)--which is dedicated to overseeing how reconstruction money was used in Afghanistan. In report after report, year after year, quarter after quarter, SIGAR wrote about the ghosts that the U.S. created–schools and hospitals that didn’t exist and a 300,000-man army that only functioned on paper. The Washington Post even devoted a series titled “The Afghanistan Papers, ” to showcase how policymakers and Pentagon officials had lied and deceived the American people about its success and accomplishments for 20 successive years. Nobody cared. The failure to value Afghan lives, however, lies not just with policymakers and elected officials. Certainly, the list of those responsible for the current situation in Afghanistan is long, ranging from Afghan elites to American elected officials from both parties going back four decades. Administration after administration has deprioritized Afghan lives and centered the needs of American hegemony. Congress held hearings on Afghanistan and yet rarely featured any Afghans. Policy discussions on Afghanistan in Washington D.C. at influential think tanks left out Afghans entirely. Afghans were left invisible in an occupation that lasted so long that it became not the “forever war” but rather the “forgotten war.” Afghanistan had disappeared from the psyche of the American people. Even when SIGAR released a report on rampant corruption that was wasting billions or when the Washington Post talked about lie after lie coming from the Pentagon, America just didn’t seem to care. The right-wing was too busy destroying democracy, the Democratic party was too busy fundraising from defense contractors, and the anti-war Left was too white to put Afghans and other impacted communities at the forefront. In our own Afghan American community, too many in our diaspora were profiting off the occupation. Their kids will go to prestigious American colleges, while Afghan girls will not be able to go to school at all and are robbed of a future. An international audience did finally pay attention to us last summer. American media, though, centered on the feelings of almost a million veterans who served in Afghanistan rather than asking Afghans how a withdrawal would impact them. The images of Afghans clinging onto the bottom of a military cargo plane had the world hooked. What does it say about our humanity that it took those tragic images for everyone to ask what we can do to help? For just a few days, people across the globe valued Afghan life. But moments like that are fleeting–Afghan history is littered with broken promises. Some of us have read enough history to know that the international community will not learn the lessons of its failure in Afghanistan and begin centering on the needs of the Afghan people. The Taliban spends every day perfecting its repression while the world has moved on, despite empty tweets and statements of solidarity. Today, as a year has passed since the chaotic withdrawal, wide-ranging sanctions on Afghanistan and theft of Afghan assets by the U.S. continue to inflict immense pain on innocent Afghan people, causing a humanitarian crisis that will likely lead to mass-scale death through malnutrition and starvation, a policy that disproportionately impacts Afghan girls and women. The United States’ attitude remains the same: focusing only on self-interest, even if it harms Afghans, except now it is done through economic warfare rather than through bombs built by defense contractor companies like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. Afghans deserve justice and reparations for the harm America has caused in my home country. Despite that vision for the future, what America leaves behind are closed immigration pathways and a desire to pretend Afghans don’t exist in the first place. Perhaps if a few more Afghans clung onto a plane leaving the Kabul airport, someone would care. ∎ SUB-HEAD ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: Kareen Adam · Nazish Chunara A Dhivehi Artists Showcase Shebani Rao A Freelancer's Guide to Decision-Making Photograph courtesy of Arash Azizzada (November 2019). SHARE Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Op-Ed Afghanistan Refugee Crisis US Imperialism The Failure of the Diaspora ARASH AZIZZADA is a writer, photographer, and community organizer based in Los Angeles, CA. The children of Afghan refugees, Arash is deeply committed to social justice and building communities. He co-founded Afghan Diaspora for Equality and Progress (ADEP) in 2016, aimed at elevating and empowering changemakers within the Afghan community. He recently co-launched Afghans For A Better Tomorrow (AFBT), and has focused on evacuation and rapid response coordination efforts in the wake of America’s military withdrawal from Afghanistan. He has written for the New York Times , Newsweek , and been featured on NPR and Vice News . IRENE BENEDICTO is an investigative and data reporter with ten years of experience working as a journalist. She has covered breaking news and written in-depth long-form stories, local and international news from eight different countries on three continents, including the political hubs of Washington DC and Brussels, and three investigative data projects on migration, public health, and social inequities. 24 Feb 2023 Op-Ed Afghanistan 24th Feb 2023 The Captive Mind Sola Mahfouz 26th Jun Whiplash and Contradiction in Sri Lanka’s aragalaya Harshana Rambukwella 27th Feb Universalism & Solidarity in a Post-Roe Landscape Sharmin Hossain 23rd Feb Climate Crimes of US Imperalism in Afghanistan Shah Mahmoud Hanifi 16th Oct Chats Ep. 1 · On A Premonition; Recollected Jamil Jan Kochai 13th Nov On That Note:

“Those first days in April was when I think I started to grasp the enormity of the crisis. People were live-tweeting themselves in death. I just stopped working. I was doing medical resources at the time, which meant I was calling to make sure if oxygen tanks and hospital beds were available.” INTERACTIVE The Assessment of Veracity: COVID-19 Mutual Aid Organizing “Those first days in April was when I think I started to grasp the enormity of the crisis. People were live-tweeting themselves in death. I just stopped working. I was doing medical resources at the time, which meant I was calling to make sure if oxygen tanks and hospital beds were available.” Riddhi Dastidar Journalist and organizer Riddhi Dastidar worked tirelessly throughout 2020 and 2021 for pandemic relief in Delhi. In our event In Grief, In Solidarity , Dastidar recounts their experience of being in Delhi as a reporter in April 2020, when the enormity of the situation truly hit home. Amidst the many dead, dying, and a severe shortage of hospital beds, Dastidar was making urgent calls for oxygen tanks and hospital beds. Here, with Art Director Priyanka Kumar, Dastidar explained how the grief and devastation motivated Mutual Aid India —an act of confusion and desperation as much as urgency. "If I compile a list of campaigns that are working on grassroots relief, would you be willing to volunteer?" they remember asking, imagining it would be a relatively small thing to begin. The pandemic, of course, exacerbated the divisions and marginalization within Indian society. As Dastidar explains, how grassroots organizations seemed to assess the "veracity" of need seemed ignorant of what lived reality was like. Dastidar later discusses, citing Kaveh Akbar, that this was the sort of time when art and poetry were simply not activism. Only organizing was. Their refusal of a conflation is, in itself, an act of demonstrating veracity. Kumar, in turn, asked: How does somebody involved in both investigative journalism and mutual aid organizing also make sure to attend to one's own grief? Journalist and organizer Riddhi Dastidar worked tirelessly throughout 2020 and 2021 for pandemic relief in Delhi. In our event In Grief, In Solidarity , Dastidar recounts their experience of being in Delhi as a reporter in April 2020, when the enormity of the situation truly hit home. Amidst the many dead, dying, and a severe shortage of hospital beds, Dastidar was making urgent calls for oxygen tanks and hospital beds. Here, with Art Director Priyanka Kumar, Dastidar explained how the grief and devastation motivated Mutual Aid India —an act of confusion and desperation as much as urgency. "If I compile a list of campaigns that are working on grassroots relief, would you be willing to volunteer?" they remember asking, imagining it would be a relatively small thing to begin. The pandemic, of course, exacerbated the divisions and marginalization within Indian society. As Dastidar explains, how grassroots organizations seemed to assess the "veracity" of need seemed ignorant of what lived reality was like. Dastidar later discusses, citing Kaveh Akbar, that this was the sort of time when art and poetry were simply not activism. Only organizing was. Their refusal of a conflation is, in itself, an act of demonstrating veracity. Kumar, in turn, asked: How does somebody involved in both investigative journalism and mutual aid organizing also make sure to attend to one's own grief? SUB-HEAD ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: Kareen Adam · Nazish Chunara A Dhivehi Artists Showcase Shebani Rao A Freelancer's Guide to Decision-Making Follow our YouTube channel for updates from past or future events. SHARE Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Live Delhi COVID-19 Event In Grief In Solidarity Veracity Essential Workers Mutual Aid Organizing Art Practice Accountability Affect Exhaustion Pretense Fundraising Social Media Mutual Aid India Diasporic Donors Grassroots Organizing Cyclone Hyat NGOs Direct Bank Transfer Disaster Capitalism RIDDHI DASTIDAR is an award-winning writer and reporter based in Delhi. Their work focuses on disability justice, public health, gender, rights and development, climate and culture. They are a contributing editor at Vogue India , and formerly worked at Khabar Lahariya . Their work has appeared in CNN , Foreign Policy , The Baffler , Vogue , and Wasafiri , amongst others, and been supported by the Pulitzer Center. 5 Jun 2021 Live Delhi 5th Jun 2021 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: