"Go back to sleep Ms. Chowdhury, the American situation is strange" FICTION & POETRY Alien of Extraordinary Ability "Go back to sleep Ms. Chowdhury, the American situation is strange" Tarfia Faizullah Editors' note: The following is an excerpt from a longer work-in-progress called “A lien of Extraordinary Ability. ” The artworks at the beginning and end of the poem are a result of a collaboration between the author and the artist. Alien of extraordinary ability is an alien classification by United States Citizenship and ______________ Services. The United States may grant a priority visa to an alien who is able to demonstrate “ extraordinary ability in the sciences, arts, education, business, or athletics” or through some other extraordinary career achievements. The ________________ version of the classification (EB-1A), which grants permanent residency, additionally requires the alien to demonstrate "sustained national or international acclaim”, “achievements recognized by others in the field of expertise,” and "a level of expertise indicating that the individual is one of that small percentage who have risen to the very top of the field of endeavor.” When one knows thee, then alien there is none, then no door is shut. —Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali “Why do you want this visa?” a home. is it here? is it here? is it here? “Why in this country?” everyone likes sweet stuff sometimes. “What are your plans?” To build a spaceship out of the years named Solace. so it is to be born a particular particle to no particular address on no particular day of a less-than particular week. so it is to be star-seer, sin-shelter, flower named nayantara, a rearview. so it is that the name∞ You were given is not the same. nonetheless You are chosen. so it is to sense in an other an otherworldly sweetness. Have we met? You ask. No— for I am talking to myself. Before You, Idea. so it is to walk towards a frame hoping for image vs error . . . for don’t You want to see Your own particles pictured in the museum mirrors? No? Ok. then forget continuum. be disruption ∞ go back to sleep Ms. Chowdhury, the American situation is strange but we have not met yet. this is a museum. i am making a list∞ Personal ornaments Collared disks Scepters & early imagery Neolithic axes of the _______________ culture Blades Dagger-axes arrowheads & knives Serrated disks Ceremonial blades Serrated and ________________ axes Handles Animal heads and masks Dragons Fish Birds Naturalistic animals Insects Surface decoration Dish with coiled bird & dragon interlacery Plaque Shroud∞ ∞this is a list to keep thoughts of you at bay ∞so it is to imagine your death. to hold a conversation with your absence: so good, this gallery, You say— yes, it is quite the door to a thousand years ago! cries the Past. sshhh, begs the Future. let’s watch the wall open . . . see, we’ll have time for the fields! see, we’ll consult the sun re the moon! see, now we’ll “see” other families. our own. is this a museum or a border? where there is a border, does there need to be patrol? “no touching the heart! i mean art!” security cries. okay, i say, okay. and part the regions of my torso that is how i learn the guard is blind to my mockingbird inside. “now walk towards flowering cherry and autumn maples,” Mockingbird commands. “do it. alone” ∞idea-You disappears. I leave the museum or linger. i become or engage in: an etching window shopping allusions to the sea light palette ewer & basin I once was and will never again be: virgin & child the rape of ____________ by _____________ Are you also trying to understand what it is to be: a master “Alien (Reflection)” by Saniya Kamal for SAAG. Mixed media, 2020. Editors' note: The following is an excerpt from a longer work-in-progress called “A lien of Extraordinary Ability. ” The artworks at the beginning and end of the poem are a result of a collaboration between the author and the artist. Alien of extraordinary ability is an alien classification by United States Citizenship and ______________ Services. The United States may grant a priority visa to an alien who is able to demonstrate “ extraordinary ability in the sciences, arts, education, business, or athletics” or through some other extraordinary career achievements. The ________________ version of the classification (EB-1A), which grants permanent residency, additionally requires the alien to demonstrate "sustained national or international acclaim”, “achievements recognized by others in the field of expertise,” and "a level of expertise indicating that the individual is one of that small percentage who have risen to the very top of the field of endeavor.” When one knows thee, then alien there is none, then no door is shut. —Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali “Why do you want this visa?” a home. is it here? is it here? is it here? “Why in this country?” everyone likes sweet stuff sometimes. “What are your plans?” To build a spaceship out of the years named Solace. so it is to be born a particular particle to no particular address on no particular day of a less-than particular week. so it is to be star-seer, sin-shelter, flower named nayantara, a rearview. so it is that the name∞ You were given is not the same. nonetheless You are chosen. so it is to sense in an other an otherworldly sweetness. Have we met? You ask. No— for I am talking to myself. Before You, Idea. so it is to walk towards a frame hoping for image vs error . . . for don’t You want to see Your own particles pictured in the museum mirrors? No? Ok. then forget continuum. be disruption ∞ go back to sleep Ms. Chowdhury, the American situation is strange but we have not met yet. this is a museum. i am making a list∞ Personal ornaments Collared disks Scepters & early imagery Neolithic axes of the _______________ culture Blades Dagger-axes arrowheads & knives Serrated disks Ceremonial blades Serrated and ________________ axes Handles Animal heads and masks Dragons Fish Birds Naturalistic animals Insects Surface decoration Dish with coiled bird & dragon interlacery Plaque Shroud∞ ∞this is a list to keep thoughts of you at bay ∞so it is to imagine your death. to hold a conversation with your absence: so good, this gallery, You say— yes, it is quite the door to a thousand years ago! cries the Past. sshhh, begs the Future. let’s watch the wall open . . . see, we’ll have time for the fields! see, we’ll consult the sun re the moon! see, now we’ll “see” other families. our own. is this a museum or a border? where there is a border, does there need to be patrol? “no touching the heart! i mean art!” security cries. okay, i say, okay. and part the regions of my torso that is how i learn the guard is blind to my mockingbird inside. “now walk towards flowering cherry and autumn maples,” Mockingbird commands. “do it. alone” ∞idea-You disappears. I leave the museum or linger. i become or engage in: an etching window shopping allusions to the sea light palette ewer & basin I once was and will never again be: virgin & child the rape of ____________ by _____________ Are you also trying to understand what it is to be: a master “Alien (Reflection)” by Saniya Kamal for SAAG. Mixed media, 2020. SUB-HEAD ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: Kareen Adam · Nazish Chunara A Dhivehi Artists Showcase Shebani Rao A Freelancer's Guide to Decision-Making "Error" by Saniya Kamal, for SAAG. Mixed media, 2020. SHARE Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Poetry Dallas Bangladesh Diaspora Immigration Cultural Narratives of Immigration Borders Visa Alien of Extraordinary Ability Alienation Work Authorization Poetic Form Particularity Temporality Ornamentation North American Diaspora TARFIA FAIZULLAH is the author of two poetry collections, Registers of Illuminated Villages (Graywolf, 2018) and Seam (SIU, 2014). Tarfia’s writing appears widely in the U.S. and abroad in the Daily Star, Hindu Business Line, BuzzFeed, PBS News Hour, Huffington Post, Poetry Magazine, Ms. Magazine, the Academy of American Poets, Oxford American, the New Republic, the Nation, Halal If You Hear Me (Haymarket, 2019), and has been displayed at the Smithsonian, the Rubin Museum of Art, and elsewhere. Tarfia is currently based in Dallas. 13 Oct 2020 Poetry Dallas 13th Oct 2020 SANIYA KAMAL is a writer and artist, currently and MFA student in Fiction at Brown University. Chats Ep. 10 · On Ambition, Immigration, Class in “Gold Diggers” Sanjena Sathian 21st Jun Chats Ep. 9 · On the Essay Collection “Southbound” Anjali Enjeti 19th May Chats Ep. 8 · On Migrations in Global History Neilesh Bose 4th May FLUX · Tarfia Faizullah: Poetry Reading Tarfia Faizullah 5th Dec Authenticity & Exoticism Jenny Bhatt 4th Sep On That Note:

In Hong Kong’s shifting political landscape, diasporic South Asian communities have emerged as key voices within a growing movement to build transnational solidarity, especially in regards to Palestine. Through reshaping activist networks and confronting racial exclusion, South Asians are building new alliances, resisting colonialism, and deepening their commitment to Palestinian liberation. In Hong Kong’s shifting political landscape, diasporic South Asian communities have emerged as key voices within a growing movement to build transnational solidarity, especially in regards to Palestine. Through reshaping activist networks and confronting racial exclusion, South Asians are building new alliances, resisting colonialism, and deepening their commitment to Palestinian liberation. "Khai Hoa" (Bloom) by Hoai Phuong. Artist LOCATION AUTHOR · AUTHOR · AUTHOR 23 Oct 2010 rd · THE VERTICAL REPORTAGE · LOCATION Shifting Solidarities Building inclusive organizing networks is a fraught endeavor in Hong Kong. For the last five years , residents involved in demonstrations and community events have had to work around the government’s crackdown on civil liberties. For South Asians, the situation is more complex. In addition to dealing with the impacts of COVID-19 policies and the recent National Security Law ( NSL )—specifically implemented to intimidate dissenters—they also have to contend with the implicit racial biases of fellow organizers. It wasn’t until 2023, when people started protesting Israel’s genocide in Palestine, that organizing practices began shifting, with efforts to learn from South Asians’ years of work in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle. While there is still plenty of room for progress, 2023 marked a promising moment of intersectional coalition building in Hong Kong’s political history. In 2019, the government proposed the Fugitive Offenders and Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters Legislation (Amendment), a bill regarding extradition that allowed criminal suspects to be sent for trial to a number of countries, including the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan, and Macau. In the months that followed, more than a million people took to the streets to protest , citing concerns that the bill would expose people in Hong Kong to China’s judicial system. Protestors clashed with the police, and in the aftermath , faced immense repression; hundreds of activists were exiled, unions were dismantled, and residents left the territory in mass numbers. Amidst the turmoil, citizens found solace in one another, with the term “Hong Konger” becoming a unifying marker of identity for many dissenters. Despite this burgeoning camaraderie, ethno-nationalist tendencies persisted. The newfound sense of community excluded the city’s historic South Asian citizens —a group that came to the region as early as the 1800s, when the British colonized the city. Initially arriving as soldiers in the British army, South Asians eventually became central to setting up key administrative and educational institutions within the territory. However, today, Hong Kongers of South Asian descent still face institutionalized discrimination rooted in a colonial racial hierarchy, colorism, and language segregation. Adnan Muhammad is a Pakistani-Hong Konger who founded a Palestine solidarity group called United For Palestine (UFP) in 2017. Reflecting on his experience organising around Palestine in Hong Kong, he said, “We always felt like we were operating within silos [because] most of the people who came to our events were either Pakistani or Indian, or Muslim [from diverse backgrounds].” Adnan added that during the 2019 anti-extradition bill protests , South Asians and other minority communities could not partake because of the language barrier; most protest materials were in Cantonese. If they did participate, they became “easy targets” for the police due to their ethnicity, the institution's deeply rooted racist attitudes , and, notably, discriminatory “stop and search” practices. This is an observation that Alison Tan, a food designer and organizer, made , too. The Hong Kong-based designer stated, “People have a bit of a mind-your-own-business mentality in Hong Kong, especially in public, but during the demonstrations, you could see people actively looking out for each other,” adding, “Yet, when there were instances of police aggression towards South Asians, no one seemed to step up.” The organizing networks established in 2019 largely dissipated the following year when the pandemic hit. The government imposed 6pm curfews, movement tracking mobile apps, mask mandates, and restrictions on gatherings. In public, an air of self-censorship took root. Citizens felt that they couldn’t have open conversations about the ways these laws were negatively impacting them. The NSL, passed in 2020, made dissent along with community organizing even more difficult. It allowed the Hong Kong government to prosecute individuals with crimes of secession (trying to break away from China), subversion (threatening the government’s power), terrorism (acts of violence), and collusion with foreign organizations. Each of these crimes was vaguely defined—no one really seemed to know what would count as a transgression. By instituting this law, the government was effectively cracking down on civil liberties, including the freedom of speech. Despite the intensity of censorship, Hong Kong citizens did not lose their fervor for dissent. When Israel launched a genocidal attack on Palestine following the events of October 7th, organizing networks slowly began springing back into action. Citizens still didn’t have freedom of assembly, so events started out as small-scale, community-based, and non-confrontational gatherings. Nevertheless, organizers were resolute and made an effort to be intersectional. Following the cancellation of a Palestinian film screening at a community arts studio, solidarity efforts intensified. The events that were previously semi-public went completely underground. During this time, Alison remembers seeing South Asian and Middle Eastern communities taking the lead in filling a crucial gap in people’s knowledge about Palestine. “Most Chinese Hong Kongers do not care, and do not know [about Palestine]. We just don’t have an insight into the way faith, for example, plays a role in the struggle.” For Alison and Adnan, this knowledge gap exists because there has been little exchange and solidarity between movements for Hong Kong’s liberation and those located outside the region. In the past year, however, efforts by groups like United for Palestine have converged their goals with those of other organizing collectives. Under UFP leadership, people joined messaging groups made by South Asian Muslim youth that disseminated information about teach-ins and prayers being held in mosques that helped spread awareness about the history of the Palestinian cause. There were communal events, tucked away from the public eye, where people gathered to talk about grief, frustration, and their commitment to justice. Reflecting on these shifts, Adnan felt that even though their collective began operating in Hong Kong in 2017, “It was only after October 2023 that our efforts began reaching people beyond South Asian and Muslim communities, and people from other communities began to take an interest.” Vera, a Chinese Hong-Konger whose artist studio is located in a diverse neighborhood consisting of Indian, Pakistani, Nepalese, and Chinese residents, shared that his studio’s support for Palestine has brought him and his colleagues closer to their South Asian neighbors. “X, a Pakistani kaifong , who often plays chess with me, visited our space and saw Palestinian flags. Since then, he’s been cooking for us, saying Palestinians are like his brothers and sisters.” This again represents a rare instance of solidarity between communities who live alongside each other but don’t always have common ground to meaningfully interact with one another—a divide that's frequently reinforced by systemic factors, including language differences. At a community mutual aid event in March 2024 that raised 48,000 HKD in donations for Palestine, South Asian students put up a stall selling keffiyehs, mehndi, and other solidarity materials alongside other Hong Kongers who sold miso soup, zines, and second-hand clothing. The event also featured a halal vegan-friendly spread of foods and learning sessions about Islam’s role in the resistance and the Palestinian struggle against colonization. The fundraiser, centered around honoring and learning about Palestinian culture, ended with a moving performance of a song, “My mouth was made for speaking,” by a Hong Kong singer, drawing powerful links between the struggle for Palestine’s liberation and Hong Kong’s own struggle against imperialism. This is not to say that there has not been pushback. Events that have taken place more publicly have been shut down and censored under the pretext of ambiguous complaints. While official reasoning remains unknown, pro-Palestine organizers speculate that the government seeks to avoid friction with pro-Zionist lobbies and maintain a politically neutral—or rather, a conflict-free—environment within the city. Of course, choosing to remain indifferent to a genocide is akin to implicitly siding with the oppressor. In August 2024, after almost a year of community-based events for Palestine, some organizers were able to host a public exhibit showcasing Palestine solidarity posters at Hong Kong’s premier Art Book Fair, “BOOKED,” at Tai Kwun Contemporary. However, two days before the fair was due to begin, the exhibition was canceled without any clear explanation from the management. Pivotally, organizers remain resilient and tactful. Within two days of the exhibition at BOOKED being canceled, they secured an alternative venue and utilized solidarity networks to gather a large number of attendees. Jason, a photographer who has been running a leftist reading club in Hong Kong for the past year, believes this was only possible because efforts related to Palestine revitalized networks of organizing that had been previously quashed. “There was a lot of energy in the city that dissipated [after 2019], and now people have a reason to come together again.” Alison, who was also at the event, said, “Palestine has really brought people from all walks of life together in a really powerful way.” It is hard to say whether these efforts make a dent in the powerful apparatus of settler-colonial regimes that seek to occupy Palestine. But within their own context, these newly formed relationships are allowing communities in Hong Kong to chip away at divisions along racial and ethnic lines.∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Tags Tags 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:

· COMMUNITY Interview · Nepal Photo Kathmandu & Public History in Nepal Photojournalist NayanTara Gurung Kakshapati in conversation with Shubhanga Pandey Watch the interview on YouTube or IGTV. The archive of Nepal Picture Library is there to diversity our narratives of the past and begin to look at historically marginalized histories of specific communities, whether that be along the lines of caste or ethnicity or gender. SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Interview Nepal Archiving Photojournalism Photo Circle Photo Kathmandu International Festival Nepal Picture Library Library Archival Practice Exhibitions Pedagogy People's Movement II Skin of Chitwan Indigeneity Indigenous Art Practice Indigeneous Spaces Dalit Histories Anthropocene Journalism Jana Andolan II Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) Insurgency Public History Public Space Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. 25th Nov 2020 AUTHOR · AUTHOR Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 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:

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:

· FEATURES Essay · Bengal Dukkha “As life moves to time elsewhere, in the cities of the world I’ve set out to leave behind me, things move to water, its flow. I do not fail to notice that both time and water flow—perhaps it is this that abets and causes motion?” Artwork by Haris Hidayat Ullah for SAAG. “For a tear is an intellectual thing.” William Blake THEY are beating water. They are beating water with a hammer. I wake up with this sound in my ears. I yawn to be sure that I’m awake. I don’t know whether people yawn in their sleep. I don’t know many other things—whether the body wakes up before the mind, or whether it is possible to beat water with a hammer. But they’re beating water with a hammer. The ears must be the most alert part of our bodies? I’ve heard water speaking in different dialects before. From the sound of it being poured, I can make out how far water in a glass is from the brim; I hear buckets in neighbouring flats overflow; I hear leaking taps, disobedient drops falling to the floor from the mouth of a tap, unhurt; I hear sweat collect into drops; I hear saliva move inside mouths; I hear water breathe and sleep. But this is a different water. They are beating water . I walk out of my rented room. Outside, there’s the light, reluctant to announce itself as if it were a guest. The wind is just the opposite, seeking attention. Both invisible, invincible. What is visible is water—the river Teesta, swollen like an overworked muscle, twitching, like a nerve. But where’s the hammer? I look, but with my ears. There is the regular rhythm of water falling on water to the earth, where everything must collect. When I get out of bed—and from the dream where I was caged all night—the world is in motion. In towns and cities, that motion is triggered by time. Here, where I’ve come to escape time’s fundamentalism, it is not time that is causing motion, for water is the last of the revolutionaries, having managed to live indifferent to time. As life moves to time elsewhere, in the cities of the world I’ve set out to leave behind me, things move to water, its flow. I do not fail to notice that both time and water flow —perhaps it is this that abets and causes motion? There are no mirrors in this house, and so I do not see any humans. I do not know the antonym of ‘human’, but whatever it is, it is for this that I have come here. For me, the opposite of humans is water. It is perhaps because I feel related to water, related as in being a relative. Every time I’ve tried to say this to someone, they’ve dismissed or interpreted this as a ‘poetic’ reflection. I’ve seen doctors who’ve dismissed it as a phase—like teenagers who fancy themselves as their favourite crushes on their T-shirts— and others who’ve told me that there was nothing to worry about feeling like that, for humans are indeed composed mainly of water, more than three-fifths of us. But no one really understands. The drizzle has stopped though I can see its ruins—on leaves, floors, tarpaulin. That water can fall anywhere without breaking its bones is a slap to the superiority of vertebrates. I wonder whether water, if it were animal, would be mammal or aves. Are these raindrops eggs then, or corpses? I am water not because I long to flow. I am water because no metal, no air, no music, nothing can hold my sadness like water. Water fills a teardrop like air fills a yawn. The elements rush in when they sense emptiness. My fingers are on my face again. If water could leave fossils, I imagine that this is how they’d look—these marks coursing down my face. They disappear, but not the sadness. Perhaps it is my fossil. It might have all begun with dehydration. My days in the hospital were marked by the aloneness of being inside the womb of a dark room, but without the water of the womb that enables life. Bottles of saline water hung like benevolent angels beside me, keeping watch over my life. I could see them even in the darkness—the fluorescence of water inside a plastic bottle. I heard them coax life into me, drop by drop, as if I was being created anew. I lay on my back, my spine dividing the bed like a book, thinking of strangers—writers whose words still hadn’t left me, co-passengers whose words had stuck as spit does on walls. That is the thing about sadness—its extremism, its intrusiveness, that leaves space for nothing. Sadness changes us unrecognisably even as we appear the same to the world. Humans, after all, are not like the sky—one cannot tell the climate of feelings from its body and colour. Dark clouds do not appear like boils on human bodies to indicate sadness. It was hard to believe that it was crying that had left me dehydrated. Any piece of wood becomes sweet-smelling when left in the proximity of sandalwood: this is a saying in Bangla. Left beside water for days, hearing it trickle drop by drop into my body, I became an embodiment of that. The thought of organ transplants never left me, as if this water would replace my sadness, my body’s largest organ. I could not think of it as anything but water—it came out of me as tears, snot, and sweat, the last in moments of panic and anxiety, when I felt this fear would corrode everything. I felt it inside me as one does water, in its various states, moving inside me like water, me trying to push it out as if it were gaseous, but it was like ice, solid and heavy, territorial, refusing to move, immobilising me, every thought and action. I longed for a hammer that’d allow me to break it into pieces just like the ice-candy man scraped ice. I hoped for this new water from the drip to take its place, as rain cleans the air, to fill me with life as I imagined life should be: without pain. I thought of the agents of my sadness—those I’d loved, whose understanding had now disappeared. As if I’d suddenly turned into a foreign language. I imagined their sadness as well, even as I knew that it was different from mine. I saw theirs from the outside, and recognised it from their words and gestures. From the self-centredness that suffering brings, I understood only the obvious: if sadness were a species, I belonged to its phylum. Life with watercolour, I see now, was also a life with water. What I loved most about watercolour was what I loved most about water—its unexpectedness of flow and behaviour. Even after all these years, I couldn’t be completely sure how a dab of the brush would behave on the canvas. It could spread beyond my imagined prediction, or it could remain still, like the skin of a drying pond. That was how sadness settled inside me even though I still can’t tell whether the sadness was inside or outside. Watercolour changed my perception of language. Surface tension—the physical property of water that explained its behaviour on the canvas—I now saw only as ‘tension’. Paint I came to read and hear as ‘pain’. Like people, sounds and things and expressions had begun disappearing from my life. Cohabitation meant living with, living beside. My long history of living beside water, as it helped me understand the world on canvas, and then the interminable days of lying beside the relentless drip, reminded me of possible older lives—memories stored inside the gene, like a safe deposit that would remain unused until needed. My immediate ancestors had made a life in the alluvial plains of Bengal—my mother’s paternal family on the Gangetic delta, my father’s by the Padma. In this, they were related to the first humans who built settlements by the river. I hoped that that ancient sense of water, its blood and its carefree individualism, had trickled into me in some way. They had known water simply as water; as neighbour, not as something imagined , like ice or gas. This intimacy with water had marked their relationships—not just fluidity and flow, but a natural transparency and constancy. But the river was only a memory inside me—a human memory, of calls of fear by my great grand-people, of delight in its offerings, of the sound of splashing, of rolling abundance, and also of drowning. Why has the river stopped flowing after entering me? How have I become its station? There is nothing we own as deeply as pain. That is perhaps why we’re reluctant to let it go. I’m often unable to distinguish myself from my sadness. It is not like looking in a mirror, where I know I am related to the person looking back at me, who moves when I do, who walks away when I do. That sadness can have a body and breasts and fingers and a stomach that moves in all four directions is still new to me, even after all these years. For it is hard to imagine sadness. An infant might be able to imagine many things, perhaps even its hair blowing in the wind, but it can’t imagine sadness. Why am I sad? Trying to answer this question is like looking for a black stone from amidst a large pile of black stones—the answer is there, but not identifiable to me. If I knew which stone it was, I’d throw it far away, beyond the reach of the strength of my arms and the power of my eyes. I think of possible reasons for my sadness—I pile them together like those black stones. When they topple over inside my head, I arrange them differently, like books on shelves, but nothing helps. I only feel it inside me. Sometimes, I rub my chest as if sadness were a lump that would dissolve and melt inside me. But I can’t touch it. I feel that I’ve let sadness turn to god, the way god is invisible but everywhere. Like Hindu gods, sadness is also form-changing. The pestle pounding between my breasts transforms into a leech in my throat, and soon into water in my eyes. I touch the water and stare at it sometimes. For even though it might look like the same water, the sadness is always different. Like water, like god, like a caterpillar, it is always changing form. I struggle to remember why I was sad yesterday or why I cried all night last week. When I am exhausted by its ingratitude at my having given it a home to stay, I want to throw it out. Instead, I hide it from the world as if it were a secret love. I try to remember when I first made its acquaintance but I fail. It seems I’ve known it for as long as I have known my mother. Or life. Because I don’t tell anyone about it, I cannot seek their assistance. Once or twice, a friend who sensed the wildlife of my tears over the phone, says, ‘Maybe you should see a doctor? I have a friend who benefitted from…’ I struggle the most at that moment—her words are like a laxative inside my gut, they push my sadness out violently. My face is in my hands then—I have to hide my tears from the world. I have no idea why hiding my face seemed necessary at that moment. I am embarrassed. I feel guilty. I always feel guilty for being sad. Happiness missionaries are everywhere—on my bookshelves, in my phone, in notes I have copied and written to myself. Life seems to be only about joy, about participating in ananda, in pleasure, in happiness—everything we do ought to be directed towards that sole aim. Sadness is life’s outcast, and those like me are therefore life’s outcasts too. Why tears are more private than laughter, I don’t know. I will not be able to recognise my tears, in spite of having known them for so many years, ever since I was born. They are not like blood and its groups. If they were, we might have been able to know about the group that constituted the saddest people. When a friend asks what sadness feels like, whether it’s permanent, (‘Like paralysis?’), I try to think of an appropriate metaphor and fail—‘It’s like a niggling cough inside you. You feel it there, inside your chest, waiting to come out all the time’. Nothing helps. Nothing helps. For everything might have a language—some kind of language—but sadness doesn’t. It is pre-linguistic, and hasn’t evolved since then. That is another thing that I think about often. That sadness might be my only connect with my oldest ancestors. My body, with deposits of pollutants, might not be related to theirs, their reasons for joy must have been different from mine, but I think it is our sadness that makes us true relatives. I refuse to see a doctor. A friend says: ‘You must change a shoe that pinches’. It is not the fact of my sadness being compared to a shoe that irritates me. It is their assumption that sadness can be replaced. Everyone seems to have a vague idea about what that replacement might be, but they can’t be quite sure—a spare tyre replaces a similar tyre; will another kind of sadness replace this sadness? Sadness paralyses. It is because the water freezes. How does it move then? I pose this as an anonymous question to a suicide prevention website and someone writes back immediately. I imagine the responder to be a woman, and soon after, a machine. ‘Try origami—take paper and try to fold it into a shape that resembles your sadness. Write to us after you’ve done that. Being able to do that is half your work done.’ I recoil from the aggressive tone, this ridding of sadness now so integral to me, as close as a biological child. The annoyance passes, but the thought loiters in my consciousness. I bring old newspaper and turn to my fingers—they’ve fed and cleaned me all my life, won’t they bring me some calm if they can? Stars and birds, flowers and balloons—everything can be created from folding paper, so at that point it appears that this is how god created the world, merely by folding. I’ve only ever made boats before—folding squares into triangles and pulling them inside out gently until the likeness of a boat emerged. It was a surprise every single time—the genius of folds, of lines and planes, sticking without water’s glue. And yet, no matter how much my boat-making improved with practice, the tiny boat never managed to sail without capsizing. The thinness of paper, even with its softness, fails to find appropriate support in a partner like water, it being without a spine itself. Is sadness the paper I’ll have to fold into a boat, or the water on which the boat must sail? My heart feels like a boatman trying to boat on a dried river. I cry in the shower. Water washing water, as if water were excreta—the way I heard my grandmother say bishey bishkhoy, poison kills poison. Water runs over me, touching me in places where even light struggles to enter. I close the tap from time to time but cannot leave. Water is a magnet—I know I should leave for dryness, for warmth, but I stand there waiting for more water. I am aware of my aloneness, I feel like a seed. It was possible that all seeds are as lonely as the mango stone. Loneliness had turned them hard and unwelcoming of every kind of touch, whether of blade or tongue or teeth. The opposite of this was the papaya—seeds that were soft and silky and naughty, this joy coming to them from living in a commune inside: a hundred blackish seeds. That is why hair too is never lonely—it struggles for space, but is never in want of company. The heart, on the other hand, is completely alone. One heart, one penis, one vagina. But two breasts. Was there a moral in this? Was water as lonely as me? I wouldn’t ever know, so dependent was I on this body and its inability to migrate to anything besides itself. I hated my thoughts and wanted to be rid of them. In fact, I wanted to be rid of myself. I questioned all my thoughts and actions as if they were someone else’s, even an enemy’s. I did not realise that I was lonely—I did not understand that my loneliness had pitted me against myself. It was a surprise, what I had become—like a wet and fierce wind that carves rocks, so that what we see is actually the remainder after the tussle between stone and wind, I was now a leftover of my sadness. Sadness slows down everything—it survives on echoes, for everything returns over and over again. It stammers inside, trying hard to get out. It becomes like a port of the heart, and mind that they always return to. Compared to other emotions, its pace is slow—but slow only horizontally, for it moves southwards like water does through soil. Other emotions, like the roots of trees, feed on sadness urgently. They change immediately, for sadness is a powerful catalyst: it changes its surroundings without itself changing. I try to understand sadness through physics—taking away a piece of brick will result in exactly the same volume of air taking its place. The disappearance of a person leaves sadness that is far greater than the physical volume of the person. How does that happen? Science fails, I fail. To carry the size and weight of sadness that is bigger and heavier than one’s body; it was sadness that Sisyphus was trying to push up the mountain. I have this image: I’m standing at the top of a hill, about to jump off, but I can’t. I think it is sadness that glues me to the spot for sadness is an addiction. I’ve become a parasite to this sadness. I must remain alive to keep my sadness alive. I don’t know why they call it stream-of-consciousness. Lately, every time water from my paintbrush has leaked onto the canvas, that phrase has come up. Information doesn’t interest me—they are like nails that break for being too long, the fact of this phrase coming from William James’s revolutionary book. Did he actually mean stream of sadness when he said consciousness? Was he sad when he coined the phrase? But at times it doesn’t feel like a stream but a waterfall—water hurting water, sadness hitting sadness. I’m teaching my nephew to draw water. Next to him is a box of watercolours. We are rubbing water—with a brush, of course—on a blue tablet to produce blue water: adding water to produce water, a version of sexual reproduction as it were, humans producing humans, plants producing plants, like producing like. (That is the nature of reproduction: to produce versions of oneself. Only the sun is different. We, in all our varied forms, are its offspring, but we don’t resemble it.) The little boy takes the brush and pulls it from one end of the page to the other until its bluish stains mark the page. He promptly calls them water’s pimples. He’s angry when I laugh at his diagnosis. Scolded, I ask for a cure—water, he says, and pours the entire bowl on the page, and, of course, the drawing book. The flooded page is put under a patch of sunlight. There it dries unequally, crinkling, losing its flatness. We imagine land as we do water—flatness pleases us, it makes us feel powerful. Sharp undulations, prickliness, bristliness—they trouble us. This comes to us from our body which wants smooth surfaces; even a tiny grain of sand can keep us awake. The eye, like our back, seeks plain surfaces. There is aaram in looking at a straight line instead of jagged lines. But water is neither straight nor jagged. It is a moving line. The closest approximation of water’s movement on land is that of ants moving in a line, untouched by the push and rush of time. For many things move water—feet and machines, pumps and pipes, but time has no power over water’s movement. Time cannot move water, like it cannot move sadness. Another day we try again. This time land is sandwiched between two blocks of blue—water and sky. One of these he can see—and so it is not hard for him to be faithful: he looks outside the window, the blue sky is squatting there as always. He needs no tutoring, no demands are made on the imagination. Blue must be coloured blue. But water, silent in the bowl next to him, is colourless. Why must he colour it blue? It is a lie, he thinks. I try to paraphrase the Raman effect for him, but it’s like chanting a mantra to prove the existence of god. Water can be any colour, he says, and then demonstrates—dipping the brush into the colours one by one, letting it leak and dissolve into the bowl. Water collects all the colours. There’s nothing more accommodative than water. It is more elastic than even the human heart. ‘Making a bucket is a lot of work. Anything that holds water demands a lot of work.’ It is Rath Yatra, and I’m at a small fair that accompanies it every year. The fairs of my childhood are gone—clay, iron and tin toys have now been replaced by plastic. Almost everything squeaks, or runs on battery. I’ve come here to buy clay utensils—miniatures, toys for children. Utensils, fruits and vegetables, even houses with sloping roofs—most of these things don’t exist anymore, not even in villages. They are a part of folk memory, on their way to turning into nostalgia, a space as inert as a museum. This man sits in a corner. He is a remainder, and reminder, from an older time, when men trusted their hands, and when they blamed their poverty on destiny and not the government. In front of him are three kinds of things: kulo, boti, balti, the first for winnowing, separating grain from husk, the second a kind of flat bladed knife, used by sitting on the floor; the third is a toy tin bucket. For the bucket he asks for twenty rupees. Scared that I might bargain, he adds: "Anything that holds water demands a lot of work." It is folk knowledge that it always rains on the day of Rath Yatra. But there is not a cloud in the sky. That humidity which makes rain possible has landed on earth,. Around me is a blind crowd, blind because, like me, they do not know where we’re all going. We’re being pushed, and are pushing each other without will. We are sweating, we have become clouds. People are eager to touch the rope that pulls Jagannath and his siblings. It is endearing, this sacredness of a rope, how belief transforms the common into a thing of wonder. It is what love does too. I notice that the priest who’s sitting in the "ground storey" of the Rath is carrying a black umbrella. But the rains don’t come. It is as if we’ve become skies—water is flowing out of us relentlessly. The man’s words don’t leave me—how difficult it is to create anything that holds water. I kept thinking of god as the old man spoke, and how hard it must have been for him to design our eyes that hold tears. "Because you can’t carry water in everything after all." I’ve watched time lapses of water solidifying into ice. It is still a thing of wonder for me, for I was born into a household that did not have a fridge until I was seven. It was a magic machine. The magician P.C. Sorcar visited Siliguri almost every winter. We watched him cut human bodies into pieces and put them back together, the people, who were dead only a while ago now walked back to their seats in the auditorium. I thought of the fridge as akin to the magician—it could change unwieldy, liquid water into solid square cubes. But, like Sorcar, the fridge kept its technique hidden from me—it would freeze water only with its door closed. These time-lapse videos affect my body. I find that I swallow my saliva more often. I see water freezing into ice and I imagine this is how pain coagulates into sadness inside me. I remember looking at the icy peaks of the Himalayas from the balcony of my rented apartment overlooking Darjeeling’s Happy Valley Tea Estate. When I couldn’t see them clearly, I realised it wasn’t just my clinical myopia but the water in my eyes, which surprised me with its inexhaustibility. At first I dip just my head in the old iron bucket. It is cold—the water feels like metal, cold, solid, and resistant to any entry. When I force my head in, it tries to expel my head out of the bucket. I try again—I push my head in and then pull it out when the resistance seems too strong to bear. My head doesn’t learn to swim. One thing I take from this with some relief, even joy, is how water drowns out and distorts almost all surrounding sound. For a moment, perhaps because of the unexpectedness of the impact, it drowns out the sounds inside my head as well. I immediately begin thinking of this as a cure—this dunking my head in water every time sadness paralyses me. I remember my mother pouring water on my head and forehead to bring down my fever. I will trust in water too. Later, as the day wears warmer clothes, I walk to the river and sit on a rock. My feet enter the water. The river doesn’t push back like the water in the bucket. Head and feet—these are our extreme points, where tiredness accumulates the fastest. But how different the aches, and how different their cures. The water, even though it is colder than my body, as it mostly is when we meet in natural conditions, doesn’t seem as foreign to my feet as it did to my head. I do not know why. All my life I have allowed the water poured over my head to run to my feet. I read that the Indus Valley civilisation came to an end because of water shortage. Civilisations can end because of water. Can sadness end for the same reason? I am sleepy. Sleep feels like a pencil whose nib breaks every day. The history of hurt remains unrecorded. ∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Essay Bengal Personal History Holding Water Epistemology Trauma Temporality Water Sadness Depictions of Grief Grief Essay Form Experimental Methods Banality William Blake Teesta Disaster & Language Intimacy & Disaster River Guilt Privacy Siliguri Loneliness Stream of Consciousness Watercolor Rath Yatra Memory P. C. Sorcar Darjeeling Himalayas Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. 4th Jul 2021 AUTHOR · AUTHOR Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 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:

"And for a moment or two she will wonder why the gunmen in her vision won’t go home and huddle in the warmth of an old blanket sewn, perhaps, by a long-forgotten mother, just a girl when she married..." FICTION & POETRY A Premonition; Recollected Jamil Jan Kochai "And for a moment or two she will wonder why the gunmen in her vision won’t go home and huddle in the warmth of an old blanket sewn, perhaps, by a long-forgotten mother, just a girl when she married..." MANY years later, Mor will think back to her vision of two gunmen, whom she will not remember murdered her brothers, and she will see the gunmen in the night, in the snow, huddled at the base of a mulberry tree, at the end of a pathway, waiting for two orbs of light, orbs like spirits, like twin souls, floating through dark and snow, falling snow, and she will see the cold mist of their breaths, the frost collecting at the tips of the strands of their black beards, and she will see their chapped lips, their gentle eyes watering, and for a moment or two she will wonder why the gunmen in her vision won’t go home and huddle in the warmth of an old blanket sewn, perhaps, by a long-forgotten mother, just a girl when she married, a child, kidnapped and beaten and forced into the bedroom of her husband, made to conceive two sons she could never wholly love, before dying in the thousandth bombing of a benevolent American invasion, her boys left behind to be raised by a war that will inevitably lead them to the mouth of an alley in the heart of Logar, and Mor will see their eyes seeing the headlights of her brothers’ Corolla tumbling down upon clay and ice and shadow, and she will see the gunmen step out from under the cover of ancient branches into snowfall, into halos of light obscuring the faces of innocent men destined to be martyred for crimes they could never imagine, and she will see the tips of their fingers, already bitten by frost, inch toward the warmth of the trigger. They must have been so cold , she will think to herself, having forgotten all else. ∎ ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Artwork by Sana Ahmad for SAAG. Digital media and animation. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Flash Fiction Afghanistan The Haunting of Hajji Hotak Logar One-Sentence Stories War on Terror Memory Forgetting Children US Invasion of Afghanistan JAMIL JAN KOCHAI is the author of 99 Nights in Logar (Viking, 2019), a finalist for the Pen/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. His short story collection, The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories (Viking, 2022) was shortlisted for the National Book Award. He was born in an Afghan refugee camp in Peshawar, Pakistan, but he originally hails from Logar, Afghanistan. His short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Zoetrope, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and The Best American Short Stories . His essays have been published at The New York Times  and the Los Angeles Times . Kochai was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and a Truman Capote Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was awarded the Henfield Prize for Fiction. Currently, he is a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University. Flash Fiction Afghanistan 18th Oct 2020 SANA AHMAD is a graphic designer and artist residing in Karachi, Pakistan. She majored in Communication Studies and Design and has been working on various projects in both fields for the past two years. Her work has been displayed internationally at Sharjah Art Foundation for Focal Point 2019 and for Art Book Depot 2019 in Jaipur by Farside Collective , as well as various local group exhibitions throughout the country. She currently works as a Content Executive for Unilever Pakistan, and is based in Karachi. On That Note: The Captive Mind 26th JUN Climate Crimes of US Imperalism in Afghanistan 16th OCT Chats Ep. 1 · On A Premonition; Recollected 13th NOV

· COMMUNITY Interview · Investigative Journalism How Immigration & Mental Health Intersect Journalist Fiza Pirani in conversation with Editor Kamil Ahsan. Watch the interview on YouTube or IGTV. I’ve been very frustrated by the way that the media portrays suicide. Suicide contagion has been on the rise for teenagers in wealthy, suburban American neighborhoods. Financial prosperity does not protect them from mental illness. But suicide deaths still aren’t really reported on. RECOMMENDED: Foreign Bodies , a Carter Center-sponsored newsletter by Fiza Pirani, centering immigrants with a mission to de-stigmatize mental illness and encourage storytelling. One year after teen's suicide, Georgia father continues the fight , The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (Oct 27th, 2018), by Fiza Pirani SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Interview Investigative Journalism Mental Health Climate Change Erasure The Intersections of Mental Health Suicide Contagion Immigration Foreign Bodies Teenagers Personal History Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. 16th Sep 2020 AUTHOR · AUTHOR Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 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:

· INTERACTIVE Event · Panel FLUX · Jaya Rajamani & Bhavik Lathia on the US Left & Media The current mood on the US left is one of extreme pessimism, particularly in the wake of movement dissipation after the end of the Bernie Sanders primary campaign. Such a moment requires reckoning with movement mistakes, thinking about the necessity of leftist media, and possibly even a self-identification with our most doomer selves. Watch the event in full on IGTV. FLUX: An Evening in Dissent FLUX was held at a depressing moment for media workers on the left: all "doomers", as Jaya Rajamani referred to herself at the time. Despite the Democrats winning the White House, dispiriting cabinet appointments by to-be President Biden, especially in the wake of the loss of Bernie Sanders' primary campaign left a sense of a weak Left with the dissipation of progressive movement energy by the end of 2020. Non-Fiction Editor Tisya Mavuram convened with writers, activists, and organizers Bhavik Lathia and Jaya Rajamani to discuss how to rebuild power, the Left's relationship to media, how centrists managed to defeat a historic challenge in the form of Sanders' campaign, and a reckoning with mistakes made. Tarfia Faizullah: Poetry Reading Jaishri Abichandani's Art Studio Tour Natasha Noorani's Live Performance of "Choro" Nikil Saval & Kshama Sawant: On Movement Politics at the Local & Municipal Level, COVID-19 & the Two-Party Structure Rajiv Mohabir: Poetry Reading SAAG, So Far: A Panel with the Editors DJ Kiran: A Celebratory Set SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Event Panel Bernie Sanders Progressive Politics Democratic Socialism Democratic Socialists of America DSA Digital Advocacy Digital Space Funny Twitter Accounts Optimism on the Local Level Joe Biden Wisconsin Wisconsin Democrats Municipal Politics State Senate United States Progressivism Black Solidarities Demographics Populism Progressive Populism Inevitability Doomers Wisconsin as an Electoral Knife's Edge White Supremacy Fascism Republican Vote The History of the Right-Wing Trump's Base Errors in the Bernie Sanders Campaign Woke Politics Coalition Building Media Growth of Left Media Leftist Media Twitch Podcasts Liberals Breitbart Billionaire-Funded Media Messaging Status Quo FLUX Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. 5th Dec 2020 AUTHOR · AUTHOR Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 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:

An anthropologist explores Bollywood creatives to trace BJP's carrot-and-stick strategy with Bollywood creatives: both controlling and regulating Bollywood in order to create a consistent and normative film culture that perpetuates Hindutva ideology. THE VERTICAL Saffronizing Bollywood Kaashif Hajee An anthropologist explores Bollywood creatives to trace BJP's carrot-and-stick strategy with Bollywood creatives: both controlling and regulating Bollywood in order to create a consistent and normative film culture that perpetuates Hindutva ideology. In 2022, India’s Hindi film industry was in the throes of a crisis. Bollywood, as the industry is colloquially known, was still bucking from a pandemic which had injured film industries worldwide. Multiple mainstream movies, helmed by some of the industry’s biggest stars, from Aamir Khan to Akshay Kumar to Ranveer Singh, were failing miserably at the box office. Since the tragic suicide of an actor named Sushant Singh Rajput in June 2020, a rabid social media movement in India had been calling for people to #BoycottBollywood for its alleged complicity in Rajput’s death and painted it as a hotbed of elitism, drugs, and moral bankruptcy. This was coordinated “collusive behavior”, one study suggested, to engineer a frenzy of conspiracy theories. Members affiliated with India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), another study found, especially pushed the narrative of Rajput’s death being a “murder”, driving the hashtag #JusticeForSSR to receive over 65 million active interactions in just six months. Amid this political powder keg and socioeconomic crisis, one film gained unprecedented success. A film with no stars, no popular songs, and none of the typical, crowd-pleasing conventions of mainstream commercial Hindi cinema. Released on 11 March 2022, The Kashmir Files claims to depict the 1990 Kashmiri Pandit (Hindu) exodus, but through crucial omissions—of the Indian army’s pervasive presence, unlawful detentions, and rapes of women across religions; well-documented cases of Kashmiri Muslims risking peril to protect Hindu friends ; and the thousands of Kashmiri Muslims who also died and fled Kashmir —creates a dangerously one-sided representation of Muslim violence against Hindus. In one scene, the menacing, kohl-eyed Muslim antagonist Bitta compels a Hindu widow to eat rice soaked in her dead husband’s blood. In yet another, he shreds open a bright saffron kurta off a Hindu woman and publicly brutalises her. The film uses shock value to incite Hindus towards collective anger, humiliation, and anti-Muslim hatred. The Kashmir Files opened to a modest figure of INR 3.55 crores. The following day, however, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi personally met with its makers and took a picture with them that was widely circulated on social media. “More such movies should be made,” Modi publicly said three days later, praising the film for showing “the truth which has been suppressed for years”. Other BJP leaders also endorsed the film – they organised special screenings and events, while the BJP’s information and technology cell and copious sympathetic media outlets provided incessant buzz and press coverage . The film was also given the coveted tax-free status in several exclusively BJP-ruled states. Though made with a modest budget of only INR 25 crores, with a little bit of “help”, The Kashmir Files eventually collected a whopping INR 247 crores domestically. It was a certified blockbuster. The BJP and Hindutva Founded in 1980, the BJP functions as the political wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a Hindutva organisation active since 1925. Hindutva—the ideology of Hindu nationalism—conceives India as a Hindu nation, relegating Muslims and other minorities to second-class status. Historically, its ideologues drew inspiration from German Nazism and Italian fascism, while its closest ideological counterpart today is Israeli Zionism . The BJP has independently governed India since it won the national elections in 2014 by interlacing Hindutva with populist rhetoric under the leadership of Modi, a former RSS worker who oversaw an anti-Muslim pogrom in 2002 when he was the Chief Minister of the state of Gujarat. His purported victory, according to political scientist Christophe Jaffrelot, ushered in a new era for the nation, characterised by weakened state institutions, a distorted electoral process, and sanctioned violence against minorities, transforming India into an authoritarian Hindu state. The Bollywood industry is ultimately highly decentralised, commercially driven, and blockbuster-oriented. Politics seems peripheral to the eternal quest for the elusive box office hit. Then how has the BJP succeeded so profoundly? The Modi government has particularly weaponised the media to fuel Islamophobia. It has widely spread misinformation, enabling what media scholar Shakuntala Banaji has called the “mainstreaming” of intolerance. In his new book H-Pop (2023), independent journalist Kunal Purohit examines how the wider Hindu Right has harnessed popular culture forms such as music, poetry and books to disseminate and entrench Hindutva in popular and mass imagination. In this vein, Bollywood is a crucial fourth frontier. As India’s most prolific and powerful media industry, it is a key source of soft power and plays a crucial role in defining dominant conceptions of nationhood, belonging, and culture. As anthropologist Tejaswini Ganti writes in Bollywood: A Guidebook to Popular Hindi Cinema (2013) , Bollywood is also “perhaps the least religiously segregated place in India today where Hindus and Muslims work together as well as inter-marry”. Some of its most successful stars, directors, and other key members are Muslim. Many of its biggest hits over the years have celebrated Indian secularism and interreligious harmony, according to film scholar Rachel Dwyer, from Mughal-e-Azam (1960) and Amar Akbar Anthony (1977), to Veer-Zaara (2004), PK (2014), and Bajrangi Bhaijaan (2015) . Today, a slew of at least 10 brazenly Hindutva propaganda films are swamping Indian voters ahead of the upcoming national elections in May 2024. It is the outcome of many years of moulding and steadily saffronizing India’s Hindi film industry, most aggressively since the COVID-19 pandemic. This is the subject of my master’s dissertation, for which I conducted three months of fieldwork in Mumbai in the Summer of 2023, and conducted several interviews with prominent writers, directors, producers, actors, and journalists of Bollywood. All names have been anonymized in this essay. The BJP has used a carrot-and-stick strategy to control and regulate Bollywood ’s influence: a combination of bullying, along with promoting films that most brazenly perpetuate their Hindutva ideology. Yet for the most part, members of Bollywood have continued to eschew political binaries between left and right, instead seeing themselves as existing outside of the realms of politics and ideology. “The only God,” a veteran film critic and journalist told me, “is the box office.” The Bollywood industry is ultimately highly decentralised, commercially driven, and blockbuster-oriented. Politics seems peripheral to the eternal quest for the elusive box office hit. Then how has the BJP succeeded so profoundly? Fear and Censorship Alongside its elaborate army of online trolls, the BJP has not hesitated to use its hard power on Bollywood. They have incited mobs, engineered police cases, and orchestrated arbitrary arrests. When the Amazon series Tandav released in January 2021, for example, members of grassroots Hindu nationalist organisations filed police complaints against a Muslim actor Mohammed Zeeshaan Ayyub and the showrunners in four different Indian states, alleging offence to Hindu religious sentiments. The crime? A character named Shiva, played by Ayyub, uses profanity while portraying his namesake Hindu deity in a student play. When Amazon petitioned the Supreme Court to protect the showrunners from arrest while these cases were sub judice , this was denied. In another incident on 3 October 2021, inspectors of the Narcotics Control Bureau arrested Aryan Khan, the superstar Shah Rukh Khan’s then 23-year-old son, in a Mumbai port terminal. Despite lack of evidence, the agents imprisoned him for nearly a month before granting him bail, finally dropping all charges in early 2022. “Had a government agency really imprisoned Aryan Khan without proof, as pure intimidation?” questioned journalist Samanth Subramanian in The New Yorker . “The rest of Bollywood, meanwhile, absorbed the news as the most cautionary tale of all: if they could do this to the king, imagine what they could do to us.” In January 2023, the mammoth success of Shah Rukh Khan-starrer Pathaan , despite widespread calls for its boycott , not only revived Bollywood’s box office slump but was also touted as a victory over the Hindu Right . The social media boycotts, many in the industry concluded, were all bark and no bite. Subsequent consecutive successes of several Hindi films in 2023— Jawan, Animal, Gadar 2— compounded upon a palpable sense of triumph, with proclamations that “ Bollywood is back ”. But beyond boycotts and the habitually extreme ebbs and flows of the box office, the BJP has remained successful in its attempts at stoking fear and a pervading atmosphere of censorship, one that has now become naturalised in the industry. “You don't just deal with these issues when your film or your show is coming out,” one writer-director-producer said to me. “You're dealing with them while you are writing. There is a psychological aspect to it.” Many key Bollywood members I interviewed shared how their creative process now includes several additional considerations, like avoiding depicting green and saffron colours and any religious symbols and erasing any critiques of the police or politicians in the narrative. This was not the case before even 2020. A screenwriter named it the “chilling effect” – a perpetual state of cowering invoked in the face of the BJP’s “bullying tactics.” “You just have to stay in line,” he reflected, “ That builds a self-censorship inside you.” The New Blockbuster While the BJP suppresses, it also amplifies. In the case of The Kashmir Files , the party’s vigorous promotion of the film created a replicable template for a new kind of unabashedly bigoted blockbuster. In 2023, it was recreated by Sudipto Sen-directed The Kerala Story . Early promotions of the film claimed to tell a “spine-chilling, never told before true story” of 32,000 girls from Kerala who’ve been converted to Islam, manipulated into joining ISIS, and “buried in the deserts of Syria and Yemen”. This claim is demonstrably false , with the makers themselves later backtracking and saying they were showing the “true stories of three young girls from different parts of Kerala”. However, in the film, one character passionately declares to a policeman: “More than 30,000 girls are missing, sir. The unofficial number is 50,000. We all believe that, sir”. Simplistic and unsubtle, The Kerala Story cherry-picks and distorts disparate, extremely rare “true stories” and manipulates them to peddle the Hindu nationalist “Love Jihad” conspiracy theory and construct a heightened sense of fear and distrust of Muslims. In one scene, the protagonist Shalini’s (now Fatima) husband rapes her, using Islam as justification, and later slaps her for protesting as she cries. In another, a bearded Muslim man lays out the plan for love jihad: “Start giving them medicine, get close to them, make them estranged from their families, ... [and] if need be, get them pregnant”. By the end of the film, this plan results in the pregnancy, suicide, and gang rape of these Hindu girls. Like The Kashmir Files , then, The Kerala Story also uses shock value to arouse disgust and hatred towards Muslims in a Hindu audience. Similarly, the film was profusely praised by Modi and several other BJP ministers and declared tax-free in multiple states. Produced with a modest budget of INR 30 crores, it collected a whopping INR 242.2 crore in India, making it another bona fide blockbuster. Bollywood and literature scholar Priya Joshi argues in her book Bollywood’s India (2015) that since the 1950’s, blockbusters have “vitally captured dispersed anxieties and aspirations about the nation” and are a “testament to some of the public fantasies that accompanied the national project”. In essence, she writes, “Bollywood’s blockbusters have conducted a dialogue over the idea of “India””. As India’s new contemporary blockbusters, The Kashmir Files and The Kerala Story reflect a nation engulfed in Islamophobia and Hindutva rhetoric. “The only trend that seems to work,” a prominent writer-director-producer admitted to me, “is an anti-Muslim trend.” According to culture studies scholars John Hartley and Ien Ang, audiences for films and any large-scale culture industries are “literally unknowable”, forming what Tejaswini Ganti calls “the ultimate site of unpredictability”. To cope with the inherent uncertainty of the business, members of Bollywood use what Ganti terms “production fictions”—“fluid and flexible discourses” made mostly in hindsight to explain commercial outcomes. Production fictions, for Ganti, primarily function to rationalise inherently random, unpredictable, and inexplicable box office events. Commercial outcome, she explains, functions as a “form of imperfect communication between audiences and filmmakers”—a dialectic of sorts. Riding the Saffron Wave The Kashmir Files and The Kerala Story’s unprecedented success has created new production fictions that audiences actually want to watch more anti-Muslim, Hindutva stories, that consumer demand has simply swayed in that direction, and that such films are simply more likely to do better at the box office, not least due to possible, legitimizing promotion by the BJP. Many filmmakers, my interviewees claimed, “are riding on this whole saffron wave”, and many more, they expect, will “jump on the bandwagon” in order to achieve elusive box office triumph. It may be tempting to exceptionalize these films and view them as existing out of the scope of mainstream Hindi cinema, but this is misguided. These movies are only more extreme, brazen versions of an increasingly ubiquitous trend. From historical fiction films about Islamic invaders to cop and war films about fighting Islamic terrorism and Pakistan, Hindutva themes are dominating India’s cultural production and national consciousness. This type of cinema exists on a spectrum. There are those high on testosterone and muscular nationalism, like Uri (2019), Bhuj (2021), and recently, Gadar 2 (2023) and Fighter (2024), which involve masculinized army narratives, enforcing national borders, fighting “invaders”, espionage, violence, and the like. Then there are the rarer, more nuanced films on similar topics, like the female-centred Alia Bhatt-starrer Raazi (2018). Where there are explicitly propagandist, anti-Muslim examples of cinema like The Kashmir Files and The Kerala Story , there are also more subtly Islamophobic films peddling a quieter poison, like Sooryavanshi (2021), Mission Majnu (2022), and Indian Police Force (2023). Cumulatively, the hard ubiquity of these protecting-the-nation-state-narratives and the pervasive uber–Hindu-patriotism at their core reflects what scholars Edward Anderson and Arkotong Longkumer refer to as the mainstreaming of Hindu nationalism. By making Indian-ness synonymous with Hindu-ness, they normalise Islamophobia in public discourse. The BJP has evidently harnessed the uncertainty endemic to the film industry to push it to perpetuate its Hindutva ideology. They are ultimately succeeding at saffronizing Bollywood, not by turning its largely apolitical members into Hindu nationalists, but by influencing market forces to make Hindutva stories more profitable and marginalising dissenting or “deviant” voices. This new political order is increasingly being internalised, naturalised, and taken for granted by industry members, who appear, from my research, all too willing to compromise on their ideals for commercial success. In January 2019, the year of the last Indian national election, a group of Bollywood A-listers, none of whom were Muslim, were invited to meet Modi. They then posted a selfie of all of them together, which instantly went viral on social media. Later that April, Modi sat down for a sanitised, scripted, and avowedly “apolitical” interview with Bollywood superstar Akshay Kumar, known for being Hindutva’s poster boy . The same year saw the release of a slew of Hindutva propaganda films, many of which were officially promoted by the BJP , from hagiographic biopics of Hindutva figures like Thackeray and PM Narendra Modi to a film denigrating the opposition Congress party like The Accidental Prime Minister , to a pro-war, ultranationalist action film like Uri . With India heading towards another round of national elections this May, there is a lineup of propaganda films that peddle Hindutva conspiracies, celebrate Hindutva figures, and glorify the BJP while vilifying all its opponents: the Congress, academic institutions, activists, and of course, Muslims. These films share similar conventions: no A-list stars, lower budgets, saffron colour text in their trailers and posters, sensationalist hashtags hinting at conspiracies, and a neo-realist style colour grade. More importantly, they all seek to recreate the template created by The Kashmir Files and The Kerala Story , with the BJP and Modi’s promotion, tax-free status, and if they’re lucky, virality and box office glory. The first, Article 370 , exalts the Union Government for removing the eponymous article that conferred special status on Kashmir. Like clockwork, Modi praised the film even before its release. “I have heard that perhaps a film on Article 370 is going to be released this week,” he stated while addressing a rally in Jammu on 20 February 2024. "Good, it will be useful for people to get correct information." The film’s lead actor Yami Gautam shared a video of the speech immediately. “It is an absolute honour to watch PM @narendramodi Ji talk about #Article370Movie,” she wrote on X . Eventually released on 23 February, the film has made nearly INR 80 cr in India and is declared a super hit . More carnage is to follow. ∎ ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Watching You Watching Me. Oil on wood. 36″ Tondo. Shyama Golden (2023). SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Research Bombay BJP Bollywood Sushant Singh Rajput The Kashmir Files Films Cinema Hindutva Kashmir Shakuntala Banaji Kunal Purohit Censorship Shah Rukh Khan Rachel Dwyer Aryan Khan Samanth Subramaniam Love Jihad Box Office Commercialization Tejaswini Ganti Fascism Ethnography India Advertising Bhuj The Kerala Story Priya Joshi Article 370 Yami Gautam Ien Ang John Hartley KAASHIF HAJEE is a writer and researcher based in London, with an MA in social anthropology from SOAS, University of London. Research Bombay 15th Apr 2024 SHYAMA GOLDEN is a Sri Lankan-American artist whose oil and acrylic paintings use figuration to explore the complex and layered ways identiy is experienced, performed, and reinforced. Her work has been featured on covers for the New York Times , LA Times , and Netflix Queue , as well as various book covers such as Shruti Swamy’s Archer , Fatimah Asghar’s If They Come for Us , and Akweke Emezi’s PET and BITTER . Her work has been exhibited at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery and Trotter & Sholer, among others. On That Note: The Cost of Risk in Bombay’s Film Industry 5th AUG The Artisan Labor Crisis of Ladakh 3rd MAY Discourses on Kashmir 24th OCT

· THE VERTICAL Opinion · Dhaka Update from Dhaka III With internet services partially restored and the curfew relaxed, the government in Bangladesh is spinning bizarre narratives about student protesters. Sheikh Hasina and the Awami League have variously labeled the protesters as both innocent and as Pakistani collaborators in the 1971 Liberation War. They have also alleged that students were misled by terrorists. Meanwhile, extrajudicial arrests of students continue. Quota (2024), digital artwork, Nazmus Sadat. EDITOR'S NOTE: SAAG received this piece along with other media organizations on 23rd July, with another update the following day. Part of it was published by The Wire. We chose to publish the piece lightly edited, in keeping with the author’s wishes. Due to the urgency of its message, it has not been fact-checked in accordance with regular editorial processes. The views expressed in this piece are the author’s and do not necessarily represent SAAG’s editorial stance. —Iman Iftikhar 22nd July There is a particular type of bowling in cricket called “the Google” or “the Doosra.” It is a rare spin ball that is meant to trick the batsman—one only a few bowlers have mastered. Good batsmen and women, however, can tell from the way the bowler’s arm or wrist acts which way the ball will spin and play accordingly. Except in the case of the deceptive Doosra. Many a famous scalp has been taken by the well-executed Doosra. In Bangladeshi politics, it is actually the infamous spin doctors themselves who seem to be falling prey to the Doosra, the outcome not going quite the way they intended. Bangladeshi citizens are faced with a dilemma. The coming 48 hours may be a “general holiday,” as declared by the government. The quota students, on the other hand, have declared a “complete shutdown.” The Army chief, Waker-Uz-Zaman, announced on TV that the army had brought things under control and the country is heading back to “normal.” At the same time, however, there are soldiers in the streets enforcing an ongoing curfew with orders to shoot to kill. A curfew isn’t what one associates with a general holiday, though sadly, killing unarmed citizens could be considered normal in Gaza or Kashmir. In Bangladesh, with no Internet, no cash, no banking services, and with people using pay-as-you-go accounts for gas and electricity on the verge of having their connections closed down due to non-payment, one wonders whether this really will become the new normal. The “shutdown” moniker makes some sense. Most shops are closed, and while there are people on the streets, especially in the hours when the curfew is called off, the city is tense (the curfew was relaxed today from 10 am to 5 pm. Offices and banks are to be open from 11 am to 3 pm). The only people venturing out any distance away from home, whether or not they have a curfew pass, are those on essential duty: hospital staff, journalists, and fire-fighters. People can be seen in the back streets, where there appears to be no military or police presence, but there are also reports of people being hunted down and killed in alleyways, a source of intense fear. The policing is site-specific. The Maghreb azaan floats across Rabindra Sharani, the outdoor recreation centre in the well-to-do residential area of Dhanmondi. There are no security forces here. Young women and men walk by the lakeside after dusk. Puppies frolic by the amphitheatre as kids play football and parents walk toddlers on the stage. I am also told that life is “normal” in the upmarket tri-state areas of Gulshan, Baridhara, and Banani. Diplomats and decision-makers live there, and it wouldn’t bode well to have an overt military presence in such areas. These are the normal zones. Mohammadpur, less than a kilometre away from Rabindra Sarani, is a curfew zone. Topu, the Head of the Photography Department of Pathshala, the South Asian Media Institute which I founded, rings me at around 7:30 pm to tell me that a graduate student Ashraful Haque Rocky has been picked up by the police. Luckily, he has a press card as he used to work for a prominent newspaper. They’ve taken his camera away, but so far, he’s not been roughed up. We’re trying to get someone from the newspaper to call the police to make sure he is not physically harmed or disappeared. We anxiously await more information from the police station. After lobbying through multiple sources, a message comes in just before midnight that Rocky has been released. He has his camera. For the moment, we know nothing more. News trickles in through our network that anyone taking injured students to the hospital, even if they are helpful bystanders, is getting arrested by plainclothes police. Injured students are arrested as soon as they are well enough to be released. They don’t always get beaten up or put in jail; sometimes, they are just extorted. A friend’s brother was released upon paying a ransom of one lakh taka, just short of $1,000, worth a lot of money in Bangladesh. Newspapers also report Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus bucking the government narrative with a statement to the international community on Monday, “Bangladesh has been engulfed in a crisis that only seems to get worse each passing day. High school students have been amongst the victims.” 23rd July Local news channels reported last night that there had been “no untoward incident,” though a friend provided eyewitness reports of two students and two passersby being killed by the police in the Notun Bazar area of Dhaka. A young rag picker was shot dead in a different part of the city. She also talks of the smart tanks stationed outside her house in Gulshan. Foreign Minister Hasan Mahmud summoned the diplomatic community to brief them on the current situation with a presentation. It didn’t go quite as planned. Unusual for diplomats, the UN Resident Coordinator asked the FM about the alleged use of UN-marked armored personnel carriers and helicopters to suppress protesters. The outgoing US Ambassador Peter Haas, who had been instrumental in the US government’s sanctions against the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) for its human rights abuses, was the one to respond to the FM: “I am surprised you did not show the footage of police firing at unarmed protesters.” There are dissenting voices among civil society personnel despite the fear and repression. 33 eminent citizens have asked the government to apologize unconditionally to citizens for the deaths of protesters since 16th July. The Communist Party of Bangladesh has demanded fresh general elections, while Rashtra Sanskar Andolan (Movement for State Reform) has demanded the government’s resignation. 25 women’s rights activists and teachers termed the Supreme Court’s verdict on the quota system “a trap to confuse the ongoing just protests against the fascist government.” 24th July My partner, Rahnuma, and I are both aware that martyrs don’t do good reporting. Working with limited resources, along with our wider team of dedicated activists, we’ve been looking out for each other. I’ve been out on the streets, on most occasions Rahnuma being my bodyguard. Even in this warlike environment, some show solidarity and want updates. A few even ask for selfies while heavy-set Awami League types scowl from a distance. Curfew and trigger-happy security forces have made it difficult to visit friends in the hospital, find safe homes, and get supplies. Finding ways to beat the Internet ban and get messages such as this one out has been far from easy. We’ve managed so far. It is for you readers to take the next steps to freedom. The broadband connection was restored last night, but selectively. We now have email and WhatsApp access at home, but no YouTube or Facebook, nor social media. My niece, two roads down, has none. Meanwhile, the spin doctors are working overtime. The students, who were called “razaakars” (war of liberation collaborators) a week ago, then became “komolmoti shishu” (sweet innocent kids) a few days later, and are now “obujh chhatro” (naive students) whom the “dushkritikari o jongi” (miscreants and terrorists) have exploited. The PM met with the business community on Monday afternoon. They were concerned about the effect this “problem” has had on the nation’s economy. Part of the discussion was aired on TV. The PM absolved the quota protesters of any ill deeds and reminded us that they were not the reason the army had been brought in. Strange then that one of the protestors' demands is that all charges against them be dropped. There is silence about the ongoing arrests of students. The spin doctors are working overtime to fit the quota protests, which spilled over into a nationwide uprising, into the government’s hold-all explanation, “the BNP-Jamaat-Shibir are responsible.” They will not be spared. They are the ones trying to hold back the country and turn back the development process. The entire cabinet nods. Some of the party faithful come to the podium to hail the PM for her leadership and for thwarting the opposition’s evil plans so successfully. They assure her that the nation will continue in its glorious journey under her able leadership. They would like her to be Prime Minister “for life.” The images of Sheikh Hasina and her father, Bangabandhu (friend of Bengal) Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, plastered on every wall across the country, the billboards and banners that litter the countryside, the Bangabandhu corner, required by law to be present in every library and prominently placed at the airport and all-important buildings, collectively create a North Korea-like adulation of the great leader. As in North Korea, the Bangladeshi leader has total control. The Argentinian army’s loss in the Malvinas (Falklands) Islands, while a loss for the nation, resulted in an unexpected gain. It broke the aura of the army’s invincibility, which allowed the resistance to build and eventually overthrow the military regime. It was one of the few instances where military rulers have been brought to trial. This aura of invincibility is important for the leadership to maintain. That is why the photo of the soldier on the receiving end of a flying kick by a student way back in 2007 was quickly hushed up and has disappeared from official archives. It is probably also the reason why the recent attack on the home minister’s house, though instigated by the helicopter fire on protestors down below in the first place, never made it to print and electronic media. Even the acknowledgment of such temerity, even if provoked, is dangerous. The business community needs the Internet to be up and running immediately. The downtime is costing them, and they are getting agitated. The great leader informed them that she had explained everything to the naive students, and they had understood. The students were no longer the problem. What was to be tackled were the terrorists and the miscreants, which she would take care of. You don’t bite the hand that feeds you. The business community knew where the red lines were and was careful not to cross them. They bowed and retreated. The media in Bangladesh long stopped behaving as the fourth estate and has morphed into a PR network for their corporations and for the government. With extremely rare exceptions (the daily New Age being one), independent media has perished. Embedded journalism is the norm. The few free-thinking journalists who still survive in this space worry about the moles surrounding them. Media owners confide that their headlines are dictated by military intelligence. Their own culpability, they conveniently ignore. Even the headlines, some say, are dictated by security agencies. Even so, there are brave journalists who do what journalists must. Rigorous research. Detailed fact-checking. Connecting the dots. Good reporters find holes in the spin doctor’s statements, who are caught in their own web of lies. Different ministers making contradictory statements create traps for each other. Why the police opened fire and killed “komolmoti shishus” is not an easy question to answer. If the attackers were BNP and their allies, why they were chanting pro-Sheikh Hasina slogans is also unexplained. If there was nothing to hide, why, after the claim that the internet shutdown was due to a technological issue was debunked by the industry experts, was the Internet still down? The government accuses international agencies who are reporting on the situation, of providing fake news. Why, then, is Dhaka Medical College Hospital refusing to provide figures for the dead and injured? In recent years, tyrants across the globe have often deployed the “fake news” accusation to deny human rights violations that are abundantly clear to the public and the rest of the world. They’ve also used the full spectrum of repressive state machinery, including media, to deny culpability and hide their own guilt. They have also banded together to share resources and copy from each other’s playbook. Sheikh Hasina, a long-standing member of the tyranny club, has been playing the game for some time. But arrogance has its drawbacks. It would be wrong to underestimate the public, and the Doosra can only take one so far. Especially when the spin doctors seem to be getting wrong-footed by their own ball. ∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Opinion Dhaka Quota Movement Fascism Student Protests Bangladesh Awami League Sheikh Hasina Police Action Police Brutality Economic Crisis 1971 Liberation of Bangladesh BTV Zonayed Saki Internet Crackdowns Internet Blackouts BSF Abu Sayeed Begum Rokeya University Abrar Fahad BUET Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology Mass Protests Mass Killings Torture Enforced Disappearances Extrajudicial Killings Chhatra League Bangladesh Courts Judiciary Clientelism Bengali Nationalism Dissent Student Movements National Curfew State Repression Surveillance Regimes Repression in Universities Argentina's Military Dictatorship Dhaka Medical College Hospital Doosra Fake News Razaakars July Revolution Student-People's Uprising Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. 23rd Jul 2024 AUTHOR · AUTHOR Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 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 AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR 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. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Tags Tags Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. DISPATCH Tags Tags 23rd Oct 2010 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. ∎ 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 Next Up:

“Take Lorraine Hansberry's 'A Raisin in the Sun.' Well, it's a working-class family, and it's about upward mobility, but systematic racism is preventing them from having upward mobility. I remember seeing the film first and not even realizing that it was a play. Of course, it's a story about economic apartheid, but I only later saw the resonance in the tradition when I read August Wilson, Amiri Baraka, and later, Lynn Nottage.” COMMUNITY Theatre & Bengali Harlem “Take Lorraine Hansberry's 'A Raisin in the Sun.' Well, it's a working-class family, and it's about upward mobility, but systematic racism is preventing them from having upward mobility. I remember seeing the film first and not even realizing that it was a play. Of course, it's a story about economic apartheid, but I only later saw the resonance in the tradition when I read August Wilson, Amiri Baraka, and later, Lynn Nottage.” Aladdin Ullah How do you give dignity and humanity and a platform for people that are not being represented in the arts, in film, TV, and theatre? How do you give dignity and humanity and a platform for people that are not being represented in the arts, in film, TV, and theatre? 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 Bangladeshi Diapora Bangladesh South Asian Theater Working-Class Stories Bertolt Brecht August Wilson Amiri Baraka Lorraine Hansberry Avijit Roy Mel Watkins Black Solidarities ALADDIN ULLAH is a playwright, comedian, and performer based in New York City. He is a pioneer of the past decade as one of the very first South Asians to perform stand-up comedy on national television on networks such as: HBO, Comedy Central, MTV, BET, and PBS. He was the co-founder and host of the multi-ethnic stand-up show Colorblind, a member of Joseph Papp's Public Theater's Inaugural Emerging Writers group where he wrote and developed Indio during the Spotlight Series and workshops at Joe's Pub. He was also a part of the New York Theater Workshop Residency at Dartmouth, and Halal Brothers directed by Liesel Tommy (The Labyrinth's Barn Series at Public Theater). Aladdin has had staged readings/workshops of his plays at New York Theater Workshop, Cape Cod Theater Project, Classical Theater of Harlem, Lark Play Development Center, Shakespeare in Paradise Festival (Bahamas) Labyrinth, and 1 Solo Festival. His acting career includes American Desi , and the award-winning animated film Sita Sings The Blues . Aladdin is a Recipient of the Paul Robeson development grant to produce a documentary called In search of Bengali Harlem, which inspired the recent book Bengali Harlem by Vivek Bald. His most recent play is Dishwasher Dreams , a one-man show drawn from the story of his father’s migration from Noakhali, East Bengal, to New York City. 11 Sept 2020 Interview Bangladeshi Diapora 11th Sep 2020 Nation-State Constraints on Identity & Intimacy Chaitali Sen 17th Dec Bengali Nationalism & the Chittagong Hill Tracts Kabita Chakma 9th Dec Musical Genre as a Creation of Racial Capitalism Vijay Iyer 8th Nov Indentured Labor & Guyanese Politics Gaiutra Bahadur 11th Oct Movements in Pakistani Theatre Fawzia Afzal-Khan 24th Sep On That Note: