Love and Desire Issue

CARVED VOICES THE LOVE AND DESIRE ISSUE

INTERNATIONAL MAGAZINE CELEBRATING CREATIVE RESISTANCE

CARVED VOICES Issue 3 July 2019 Founder Sonali Mohapatra about.me/sonalimohapatra Co-Founder: Shantashree Mohanty about.me/shantashreemohanty EDITORS/TEAM: Sonali Mohapatra Shantashree Mohanty Sherein Bansal Kalpshree Gogte Guest Editor for this Issue: Anchita Addhya Guest Curator: Gunjan Wadhwa Featured Cover Art by: Elias K. Elias is a sleepy trans physicist with a background of fanzine comic artist. They like to fire the drawing tablet in the panic of the upcoming deadline.

Creative Media Designer: Lei Gioia Yang Resident Artist: Jess Dyson-Houghton Instagram: Instagram.com/jessquinnart Website: carvedvoices.com facebook: https://www.facebook.com/carvedvoices/

CARVED VOICES

twitter: @CarvedV Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/carvedvoices/ Write to: CARVEDVOICES@GMAIL.COM Published Annually by carved voices All Rights Reserved.

CARVED VOICES

If you and I have preconceived notions of how our culturally adapted, amorphous bodies -which have danced at the end of so many stringsare beautiful, and if your preconceptions and my preconceptions intersect each other at the right point in space and time, and our eyes meet and all the things the world has taught us in little bits and bursts all through our world lines somehow align, and the world allows us to gender enough That is when our neurons fire non-stop, to concoct the soup of falling in love.

CARVED VOICES

- "Falling in Love", Founder, Carved Voices

i.

EDITORIAL CONVERSATION Women who Envision

1.

POETRY : MON AMOUR

by Archismita Misra

2.

POETRY : DRUNK ON YOU

by Sonali Mohapatra 5.

ART WORK : BLOOM

by Jess Dyson-Houghton 6.

PROSE : A CAULDRON OF MEMORIES

by Debmalya Bandyopadhyay 8.

PHOTOGRAPHY

by Aritra Mukhopadhyay 9.

PROSE : À LA VIE

by Priyadarshini Mukherjee 12.

ART WORK : I PROMISE (YOU)

by Jess Dyson-Houghton 13.

POETRY : UNSAID

by Anchita Addhya

Interview with Author Sharanya Manivannan

15.

ART WORK : REIMAGINING WOFFORD

by Aritra Aich 17.

PROSE: THE SECOND ETERNITY

by Tibra Ali

20.

ART WORK : AND HOLD ON

by Jess Dyson-Houghton

21.

POETRY: THE McALLISTER BRIDE

by Shantashree Mohanty

23.

ART WORK

by Kate Cox 24.

PROSE : POLYAMORY

by Page Turner 31.

POETRY : OUR SHARED POLY-TOMORROW

by Sonali Mohapatra 33.

POETRY: WILD WOMEN

by Srividya Srinivasan 35.

ART WORK: THE RISK

by Sneha Ray Sarkar 37.

ART WORK : EMBRACE

by Jess Dyson-Houghton

Interview with Co-founder, Girls at Dhabas Sadia Khatri

38.

POETRY: A LOVE LETTER FROM ABROAD

by Debadrita Jana 41.

PHOTOGRAPHY

by Aritra Mukhopadhyay

42.

POETRY : HOW NOT TO TALK ABOUT YOU

by Sherein Bansal

45.

ART WORK

by Harsukh Deol

46.

POETRY : THE WASHROOM AT PLATFORM'S END

by Aritra Chatterjee 48.

ART WORK : HELD

by Jess Dyson-Houghton 51/2 TITS BY AUTHOR SRIVIDYA SRINIVASAN

49.

PROSE : FORGETTING FEET

by Sadia Khatri 53.

INTERVIEW WITH SADIA KHATRI

by Gunjan Wadhwa 61.

ART WORK : SLOW HANDS

by Jess Dyson-Houghton 62.

POETRY: A LITTLE WEIRD FEELING

THE SECOND ETERNITY BY WRITER AND THEORETICAL PHYSICIST TIBRA ALI

by Filipe Baldin 63.

POETRY : SWANSONG

by Zaid Zaz 64.

PROSE : CRAVING

by Midah Guilbaud-Walter

66.

ART WORK : CLOSE TO ME

by Jess Dyson-Houghton

67.

ART WORK: PLAYGROUND

by Harsukh Deol

69.

PROSE : AN ARCHIVE OF LONGINGS

by Shantashree Mohanty 70.

BOOK REVIEW : THE QUEEN OF JASMINE COUNTRY

by Sadia Khatri 71.

INTERVIEW WITH SHARANYA MANIVANNAN

by Gunjan Wadhwa 79.

ART WORK : SHARING SMOKE

by Jess Dyson-Houghton 80.

POETRY: HAVING A SMOKE WITH YOU

by Sonali Mohapatra

24

By Page Turner

81.

PROSE : 5 1/2 TITS

by Srividya Srinivasan

We caught up with popular author, writer and relationship expert Page Turner from her popular website Poly.Land and were thrilled when she accepted our invite to Carved Voices. Read on for a first-hand toe dip into polyamory.

95.

Eyes Like Mine

by Miren Bizoumei (Мирен Бeзумие) 96.

POETRY: MELETE

by Tara Kachroo

Love and Desire Love is such a powerful emotion. In fact, it could very well be the emotion which has survived in its most primitive form, without having had much of an evolution curve in its expression.

Love and Desire are interrelated and entangled with all the existing power structures — social, human, constructed as well as abstract — in the world ranging from sex, gender, privilege, bodies, caste, class, economics, politics, law, social norms, borders, sexual orientations, religion, faith, culture, tradition, stock markets, science, arts, language, nationality to the very idea of the normative.

Love and Desire are the two most policed things in the world. Thus, love is radical. It is political.

It is associated with an elusive idea of honour, entangled with the idea of marriage, relationships as well as children and family. It is manipulated and paraded as violence towards loved ones, as veneration of the idea of possession. It is paraded as simple while it is far from being so. The real story of love, my lovely people, mere pyaare doston, is complications, ugliness, desire, simplicity, jealousy, devotion, responsibility and an ache for security to combat loneliness. It belongs to everyone, irrespective of boundaries, genders and structures. But unfortunately, some demographics do not have much privilege to write and the love stories and ruminations of some others never see the light of the day. We are here to make a tiny effort towards correcting the narrative.

Everyone wants a simple, happy, lasting love story. However, not everyone has the right to love as they want. In fact, probably no one does. In this issue, we will deal with the various politics and species of expressions of love. A safe space to ruminate and just be. A space for absolute freedom of creative expression regarding love and desires. It does not aim, nor pretend, to cover every aspect, because that is impossible. Yet, we try.

So we will love. We will desire. From the child bride in India who sends messages in secret, dreaming of one day being free, to the Afghan women singing landays to express their desires in secret, to the middle class savarna woman policed of her love because of her privileged place in society to the gay dalit transwoman who has had to face horrendous crimes because of who they are and who they love.

We will all love.

And we will resist.

As in our previous issue, we open up this issue with a raw heart to heart between our founder, Sonali (So) and co-founder, Shantashree (Sha).

CARVED VOICES |

i

Women Who Envision.

CARVED VOICES |

i

The Editorial Conversation.

Sha: Often in passing conversations, people pop this heavy question…What is your idea of "love"? Have you been able to come up with a functioning answer to that? I mean, I wish I had something convincing to say! But it evolves, doesn't it? The way we look at love and how we operate when we are in love?

So: That’s a great word to use, “functioning”. I believe I might have many different functional definitions of “love” depending on the situation, but an allpervasive definition keeps evolving. I have also felt it very intimately connected to my gender and my caste and my sex and the places I have been to. My privilege and the lack thereof. To that end, I think most love is “performative”. It is what we are obliged to perform without a way to get out of the web of causality. What do you think?

Sha: It's interesting you say that. We're all constantly looking for a worthy patron to bear witness to our being. My God! You just reminded me of this beautiful quote by Jean Genet, where he said 'Would Hamlet have felt the delicious fascination of suicide if he hadn't had an audience, and lines to speak?' For obvious reasons, who we love and by how much, is a reflection of who we are or at least who we think we are, and who we ultimately want to become. I keep saying this, love simply cannot be this thing or that. It's a bit of me and you and everyone we know. Speaking of, do you think the idea of love is at times ill-propagated or overrated?

So: I love that! Maybe it’s just that “functional” love simply cannot be.

However, IF there is a definition of all-pervasive love, then the definition of love that people aspire love to be is that: “it simply is”. It is frighteningly similar to contentment, isn’t it? This makes me reflect on the various ways people perform love in various cultures. In some narratives, love is letting someone go. In others, it is whatever makes you content. In yet others, such as what was started by the Bhakti and the Sufi movements in India, love cannot be separated from devotion, or even more, devotion to God.

And to answer your next question, I definitely think the overrated-ness of love lies in its wanting to be not-human? Something that does not exist? Is an illusion. Does that make sense?

Sha: Yes I see what you're getting at. It's a cultural thing, it's an aspirational thing, it's a you thing and a me thing…

Since this is the Love and Desire issue, and we're speaking about a particular sect of love, I must confess that I've confused many things with love through the course of my life… Sometimes empathy, sometimes humour, sometimes codependency. Sometimes I've let people be with me because I didn't want to offend them, whatever that means. And it's often ended badly. Similarly, I'd like to confess that falling for someone or being interested in them has not always been accompanied with overwhelming desire.

I'd say when intimacy makes you feel small or humiliated or you feel like you're not at peace with your body and mind, it's a red flag. Recognise it. I'm sure you'll agree?

So: This is a very important point. I agree! When intimacy makes you feel small or humiliated, I would say that intimacy is being used as a tool to dominate, or a tool to manipulate. This is a classic power dynamic at play. The aspiration to have a perfect love story, or a perfect love “label” like marriage or partners or commitment, makes us vulnerable to abuse in the guise of intimacy.

Sha: I couldn't agree more. In saying 'I love you', I must make sure 'I' am truly okay.

I've been listening to Dolly Parton all day. Well, let us talk about love songs.

Have any favourites?

So: Love songs? You bet. I am a sucker for melancholic love songs, you can say they are more ‘missing that love’ songs haha! In Odia, it is “Needa bhara rati”. I have a few English favourites, Chris Isaac’s Wicked Games, or Never tear us apart, the Paloma Faith version, But if you want the murky waters of what we call desire, my current favourite is “Apocalypse” by Cigarettes after Sex. Oh and what about Leonard Cohen! His latest album, “You want it darker” portrays for me the khincha-khinchi between the various shades of love, desire, anger, jealousy, wanting and questions about existence.

When he says in “On the level”: “I was fighting with temptation But I didn't want to win A man like me don't like to see Temptation caving in” I can see myself in it. Or from that song called Treaty “I sit at your table every night I try but I just don't get high with you” speaks to me volumes about when we fall out of passion, so akin to being high on someone else. On people.

Sha: Cohen is truly amazing. You know 'Famous Blue Raincoat' might just be the greatest song ever written about love. Speaking of desire, have you heard Zayn's Pillow talk? Ah, so sexy! Sad songs about love always attract me. Probably why Ray Lamontagne is always all over my playlists. Also, we can't not take Arijit Singh's name while we're on this topic. Right?

So: Totally. Arijit Singh’s plaintive voice has captured many a heart’s music which they struggle to sing themselves. Ah, the music! He sometimes also reminds me of Cohen’s heart-rending pleas: “We sold ourselves for love but now we're free I'm sorry for the ghost I made you be…

I wish there was a treaty Between your love and mine”, The messiness of falling out of love. It is strange, because for me, falling out of love doesn’t exist. The falling out of me-expecting-you-to-be-my-savior or distraction does. But if love is something we attach with our family and with people we are born to or born into, or born with, how does one fall out of love?

How does one fall out of the memory of intimacy? Talking about family reminds me of the struggles of loving in a family, loving people close to us. Maybe romantic love is so venerated because there is a freedom is falling in love with a stranger, in having the space to figure out a relationship, and once the stranger becomes family, the thrill of the negotiation goes away and many a time we end up feeling trapped because we have now added one more person to the

menagerie of people we must negotiate our time with. It becomes a responsibility and in that comes the truth, and in truth, things become messy. Someone who has become family or famili-ar has bought the right to expect us to be a certain way we have been, and in being denied the freedom of the possibility of “other”, we resent them. We long for someone to know us like no one did and then we feel trapped in their knowledge, because in their knowledge of one version of us, they make our shortcomings and our ugliness etched into their memory and so permanent!

This memoir called “Educated” reflects on: “How much of ourselves should we give to those we love? And how much must we betray them to grow up?” Don’t you feel heartbroken to have the baggage of growing up? Of betraying people when you change into a series of different people and leave your past self behind and in doing that, leaving the people who connected with those selves behind as well? Without meaning to?

Sha: You know, I have, on more than one occasion, fallen out of this sense of attachment with people or being invested in sharing my life with them. For whatever reasons, I have fallen for people and ultimately realised how little each of us has to offer to our mutual growth or that we simply don't fit. I've hurt people and in return, I've been on the receiving end of hate and resentment. It's been a whole thing... But yes, every person is made up of such poignantly specific attributes, it's not possible to completely forget what it was like to have them around. A sense of appreciation for all their generosity and for the things they taught you, lingers on forever. The mature way forward is be grateful they stopped by. And yet, whatever you said about not being able to fathom falling out of love, I felt all of those things when I met my husband 3 years back. It is surreal. We are such strange beings. And love is stranger still.

So: Do you think we, a lot of us, many a time, fall for love rather than for people?

Or more still, we fall in love with a side of us that is teased out with certain people? Maybe that is what makes love more like a drug.

Sha: Yes! Comes in many shades, provokes many inclinations and so many indiscretions… This conversation is turning out to be so incredibly open ended, I love it.

Before we talk about love some more, let's just talk about the landmark judgment of the Indian Supreme Court last year in Navtej Singh Johar v. Union of India where the Section 377 of IPC was declared unconstitutional "in so far as

it criminalises consensual sexual conduct between adults of the same sex". It took us years to get rid of this colonial-era oppressive law and finally legalize the freedom to love.

Here's an excerpt from the judgment : 'Constitution forming the concrete substratum of our fundamental rights that has eluded certain sections of our society who are still living in the bondage of dogmatic social norms, prejudiced notions, rigid stereotypes, parochial mindset and bigoted perceptions. Social exclusion, identity seclusion and isolation from the social mainstream are still the stark realities faced by individuals today and it is only when each and every individual is liberated from the shackles of such bondage and is able to work towards full development of his/her personality that we can call ourselves a truly free society"' I feel emotional about this. We have a long way to go in terms of larger acceptance and understanding and legislation to protect the rights and liberties of the LGBTQ+ community. It has to be a collective effort. I really hope things get better and better from here on. And I must say, I'm so glad the last issue of Carved Voices dealt with some of these concerns head on.

So: Yes, me too. Emotional doesn’t even begin to convey how we feel about this, does it? What I want to express lies in the lack of a proper expression for all the sadness, guilt, betrayal, shame, slavery, lack of public freedom of expression, and a complicated heady mixture of all of the above. But also regret, and fear of backlash. Sadness because I know that the plurality of law which allows the law to trickled down into the cracks of the society will not allow it to be so simple a fight.

And me, in all of my savarna-middle-class-scholarship-holding-studyingabroad-Indian-daughter who can pass off as completely straight, who has the privilege of being okay-ish when she is pretending to be the version of heterostraight-mono that my parents and society and friends want, because I have the privilege of going away from place to place, never having to pretend too much, feels so much! I feel so much in the lack of my right to freedom of expression in a public space. Right to Loiter. Right to casually hold hands with my lover.

Casually saying “Love you’ on the phone with an uncle on that public bus staring at me for my audacity to love. In (curating myself strictly to be) casually being bi, because there is so much power in pretending you belong. Me in all my privilege, still cannot be free. I cannot even begin to fathom the pain of millions.

Now, everytime I kiss in public, it is political. It is a revolt, everytime I casually hold the hands of my partner, it’s a revolt, everytime I mention the word poly casually, it is a revolt. A revolt against the raised eyebrows and the insults I know are coming, and which I have already accounted for and said fuck-you to.

And so we fight the same war twice. Once in anticipation, and once in the action of someone else feeling entitled to pass judgement on you. And so goes the wheel of the plurality of law.

Love is political. So political. And this is where the idea for this issue of “Carved Voices” generated, didn’t it? The privilege, no, the freedom to love who you want, how you want, how much you want, where you want, without feeling judged and more importantly, without the fear of “punishment” and abandonment from society. Whoever you are is what this issue of Carved Voices stands for.

Love is radical. There is not one aspect of life it doesn't touch, and the performance of gender is something that is enmeshed in how we perform love.

Sha: Truly, the performance of gender, the plurality of the performance of gender in the society among all its institutions, be it capitalism or marriage. The nature of our jobs demands so much from my marriage, it's numbing. I have to go weeks and months without seeing my husband. Couple of days back, Ray Lamontagne was blasting on Spotify and when he sang those lines…

"Been so long since I seen your face Or felt a part of this human race I've been living out of this here suitcase for way too long... " I swear I felt like dissolving into the empty side of my bed. It hurts so bad, I get scared I'm gonna lose my mind.

So: I empathize.... I wish I could do more... Performance of gender in institutions is what makes us torn today. The world is transitioning, it is poised on a knife's edge. The institutions and the evolution of the structures of the world are at a perpetual kheencha-tani. And so are our pronouns and everything they stand for.

I use the pronoun "She". And I am perpetually aware of how "she" performs and how "she" genders and how "she" loves.

She lives, she genders.

She loves, she genders.

She puts bindis up on her forehead, she genders.

She discards her genders, she genders.

She lashes out, she genders.

She holds hands, she performs a gender the street wants her to be.

She sheds a tear, she genders.

She “breaks up”, she genders.

If she decides to spend money on a partner, she genders or bends her gender.

And every single time she performs, love finds a back which bows down to carry it in the spaces between each performance. In the lifted eyes, in the tear stained face, in the left alone bride, in the traffic-light red stained lips of the sex worker standing at the traffic light, in the chudis and bangles of my childhood I used to try on to find something that would give a “noise” in their jangling to who I was meant to be, and then discarded in high distaste soon after because they seemed to turn into nooses. Love always found its way through generous neighbours, familiar strangers, wrinkle lined grandparents, I found a lot of spaces between the spoken meanings of love. What do the spaces mean? Can we ever express the lack of words? Can they be translated into expressions of emotions? What did it exactly mean to live? What did it mean to love? Familial love? Sexual love?

Love has always flown in eddies and whirlpools, sometimes with us as the eye of the storm while it shifts elsewhere. Love evolves. Love screams, love rages, love expects, love lies dormant like a volcano quietly breathing below Mount Fuji waiting its turn for centuries before it strikes, and it never misses. Never ever has love left without a mark, never ever has it not found worshippers, never ever has it not managed to capture prey. In fact, if I am asked what the oldest religion in the world is, I would definitely say, “Love”.

Sha: That was beautifully put. That's the kind of existential debate I'm interested in...'whether love precedes the Constitution'. The set-standards of propriety have always influenced the manifestation of love and at the same time, love has dictated rebellions, the breaking-free and creation of new levels of acceptance.Talking about how the expectations of love affect our mental health, and our relationships with our family, the society, 'love' is the most policed expression of all.

But discussing about the multiple facets of love, how it governs us and how we can best exercise our productively harmless inclinations, can sometimes only achieve meaning in pen and paper. Because, in the process we forget how interrelated money and the intersection of love are. Here we are talking about how to love, because that is a privilege we have fought for and have somehow achieved a little bit of , but it's all because we had some starting point. For a country that spends not even 1 percent of its GDP on public health, and where witch hunting related deaths are a reality, the efforts to ensure the right to love whoever you want and by however much, safely without judgement, seems like a legitimately difficult struggle after all.

It's a turbulent dream babe; A vacuum and a scream babe; And it's a long long battle.

We can't give up.

We can't give up.

Founder and Chief Creative Director Carved Voices

Co-founder and Creative Director Carved Voices

More importantly, Sonali and Shantashree stand for strong female friendships, safe queer spaces, safe mental health, kindness, justice, science, effectively researched and evidence based policies, planned parenthood, empathy, emotional intelligence, sexual education and feminism for the masses.

Editorial

“Love is free, and so is the the happiness that comes tiptoeing behind it.”

Or, at least that’s what a naive teenager still stuck on her first crush used to think! Nine summers, multiple failed relationships and heartbreaks later, I have realized love is anything but free. How else do you justify people getting beaten up just because they chose to be free in their expression of love; how else do you explain people having to protest in rallies for the freedom to choose their partners; how else do you gulp down sermons by homophobic people telling you, that you are mentally unbalanced and your choices are wrong because it doesn’t fit into their heteronormative societal constructs; how else do you explain the fault in your stars that forced you to spend years with an abusive stranger who was deemed to be your match by horoscopes and religion; how else do you live with your marriage that was labeled with a price-tag!

Love is anything but free.

And even more costly and constrained is the expression of it!

The suffocation that follows love sometimes; the abuses and insults we swallow in the name of love; all the unspoken ugliness that makes us afraid to fall in love - we have all been part of it or at least party to these narratives at some point or the other. Yet, people dream of fairytale romances, happy endings, and crave for the freedom to love and be loved . Yet again, love reigns supreme, in the face of all adversities. We yearn to be irrevocably and unequivocally in love with someone; hoping to find someone who will see beyond the scars, the masks and the happy lies, someone who will touch our souls with the sincerity and the silent promises of fighting against the world if the need arises, who will ultimately show us that love is, indeed, free. So, we keep fighting, wading through the muck, learning to shake off toxic relationships and along the way our insecurities about how we look, how we talk, how we walk and what not. We keep the flame alive in the hope that the love we are fighting for and getting abused for, will someday find us, seeking the light that comes through the cracks in our souls and will pick up our gluedtogether-shattered-pieces and hold on to them, like those are the most precious and beautiful things anyone has ever come across. And we will know, in the end, that all of this was worth it.

Love was always supposed to be free. In this fight for a freedom that nobody ever thought was needed, let us not spew hatred in the name of love, let us not forget to love.

Anchita is the guest editor of the Love and Desire issue of Carved Voices. Most days, it's the melancholy infused with rage that awakens the crazy poet within her. Her days are spent in pitch dark rooms making light dance to her fingers, as she mulls over her existential crisis over cups of perfectly concocted coffee. The stage has been her home for quite some time now and outside it, her itchy feet long to find footholds in distant mountains and write stories about people who have lost their way with words.

Editorial

Have you ever returned to innocence, travelling on the notes of opening credits? A TV show, your childhood favourite, rings in your ears so loud you suddenly find yourself in another home, with a different set of friends, in a distant time. Nostalgia captured in a theme song... Such ease of travel. It’s been years since you’ve sung along those opening credits or, for that matter, sat in front of a television, patiently waiting for your beloved characters to visit home for an hour once a week.

You can’t wait to be reunited. You might even cry. It starts! It feels the same!

You’re halfway through and you suddenly find yourself in a strange place that’s neither here nor then. Your ears had stopped ringing with joy five minutes ago when you discovered the homophobic leanings of your childhood favourite.

Heartbreak.

Disappointment and shock plop down on the sofa with you. The show didn’t age well. Many haven’t. You’ve grown up. You met your queer side one day, you grew to love it. But the show can’t grow with you.

Is that how it feels with parents sometimes? Or certain friends? It seems that the waves of realizations that we go through as part of the community are so many, so intense and so frequent in nature, that when we come up for air and look to our family and old friends for a nod of support, we’re shocked by the initial reactions. Not only do they not know about the LGBTQ+ movement, but haven’t felt those letters important enough to look up even when they, on a rare event, see them scattered in a newspaper. They don’t realize that this ignorance is harmful and there are plenty of people whose identities they dismiss by not pushing through their own upbringings. They remind you of the once unblemished TV show that didn’t grow up, that never had to reckon with itself, that might even have deliberately stayed ignorant and biased. And you never doubted it.

You feel betrayed.

You’ve worked hard on unlearning and self acceptance, you have experienced transformation, and your old circle hasn’t even experienced superficial awareness? Does only experience make one empathetic?

I hope not. Within my recently formed associations, there IS evidence of straight allies. They give me hope. Maybe they can help us plant empathy in their fellow homophobic friends and relatives. We’ll need it. On July 12, 2019, the UN Human Rights Council voted on a resolution to renew the mandate of independent expert on protection against violence and discrimination based on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (SOGI). India abstained from voting on our LGBTQ+ rights. The vote, thankfully, was passed by the majority, represented by 27 countries. This means the UN will appoint an expert who will tackle global violence and discrimination against our community. Heartening and significant news, it is overshadowed by the decision the Indian government took on our behalf, thus laying bare the homophobia of the country.

Like many of our politicians, our families and once cherished friends have disappointed us.

The world fed them a lie and they gladly swallowed it. But the members of your old circle were/are your roots. You can’t really hate them. So you love them like you love your shows. With caution so you don’t compromise with your mental health, with distance so they don’t hurt you too much, with understanding that there’s a big room for improvement, with a love that’s only

selective in nature. You like a few episodes, others you love major portions of, and the rest of it you skim through, put on mute or talk back to angrily.

So what do you do in that place that’s neither now nor then — that place where you confronted your childhood favourites? Some of you cite 'the times’ as valid reason for the homophobic narratives, some of you raise your volumes against them, some of you see a lack of acknowledgment of these problems and switch away altogether. Then... you are told to chill. Because ‘Hey, it’s just a TV show, it has no impact on real life’ by the same crowd that acts like a global crisis is on its way when there’s a same-sex couple on TV for a second. You would LOVE to chill. Chilling would be nice.

So to the families, politicians, friends and strangers of the world who do not make sense. Let us love and desire with consent and respect. Let us chill the way we 'allow' you to.

Writer and feminist Sherein Bansal, is the Creative Editor at Carved Voices. She loves being an editor and has worked with Pratham Books for three years. She finds home in the first sight of approaching hills, by the water, in the food she cooks, in a deep-scented page in the corner of a library, with her mum, in her friendships, in oral stories, and in smashing patriarchy by a variety of methods from everyday things to being one of the coordinators of 'I Will Go Out' and 'One Billion Rising'.

Curatorial Message

In the last two years, while writing my doctoral thesis on identity, gender, religion and education, I engaged with questions of love, desire and resistance through the audio-visual arts. Being in Western Europe, which is often assumed to be the ‘home’ of modernity, Renaissance and Enlightenment, I visited some ‘high art’ museums and went to the Opera twice. In my view, a lot of this ‘art’ sustained itself through a heteropatriarchal notion of love and desire, whether it was Bernini’s ‘Ratto di Proserpina’, ‘Apollo and Daphne’ and ‘David’, Canova’s ‘Venus’, or Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa (Mary Beard’s Women in Power provides an apt commentary on the latter). Even with my limited ‘art’ expertise, I could see through the heterosexual impetus to normalise and naturalise particular forms of love and desire as normal and natural.

The two operas that I attended had ‘strong’ ‘female’ characters. However, they were relegated to the margins, quickly reduced to the angel-whore binary, and eventually made to die. Their voices silenced throughout, and/or mocked, and not considered worthy enough to be given adequate face-time with the audience. Like in popular Hindi cinema and television (and my ‘real’ life), women were adjuncts to the story, muses and inspirations, which revolved around worthy, brave, and masculine men. If the story were to go differently, were women to be assertive and powerful, they had to die, cease to exist, relinquish and be rendered invisible. #TrueStory Now, you are not supposed to question the art (and the ‘real’ life) in this way, not on grounds of ‘wrong’ depictions of love and desire and gender at least. You cannot connect everything to gender, said a dear friend. Art is bigger than that. It is not about the colour or race of the artistes, or their gender; it is not political; do not problematize it that much, and enjoy it for what it is instead of what you would like it to be.

But, art, and ‘real’ life, is gendered. It circulates and stabilises heteronormativity. It sustains and secures patriarchal norms. Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette provided us with a heart-wrenching and provocative critique of the ‘high art’, and how you cannot separate the art from the artiste.

It gave us another way to confront and speak of toxic masculinity and question its dominance in our everyday lives. For those reduced and relegated to the margins, to participate in sexist / misogynistic / homophobic / patriarchal discourses, without questioning the terms of its existence, without resisting it, becomes dangerous.

To quote Judith Butler in Critically Queer, “there is no guarantee that exposing the naturalized status of heterosexuality will lead to its subversion…

Heterosexuality can augment its hegemony through its denaturalization… which (can) reidealize heterosexual norms without calling them into question.

But sometimes the very term that would annihilate us becomes the site of resistance, the possibility of an enabling social and political signification.” It is these acts of resistance, of subversion, contestation and questioning that this third issue of Carved Voices brings to the fore.

In this issue, I got the chance to interview two amazing people, Sharanya Manivannan and Sadia Khatri, during CV’s explorations on love and desire through a variety of lenses and bodies.

Sharanya Manivannan’s ‘mythological reimaginings’ through the stories of Sita and Kodhai-Andal is one such act of questioning of the dominance of heteropatriarchal versions of ‘Hindu’ mythology. Cautions Sharanya, if we agree to be dictated to these versions, “if we allow for gatekeepers to inform us that Andal or Sita were epitomes of chastity or blissful devotion – we do the very characters we so love a grave disservice”. As such, she calls for empathy and solidarity in and through love and emphasises that “the most useful resistance is in broadening what we value as meaningful love”.

Almost as a coincidence, Sadia Khatri questions the restrictive notion of love and desire, as one limited to human relationships. Love beyond humans, says Sadia, is a political and radical act. “Especially for those of us who are women/assumed women, who are not allowed to locate our purpose anywhere other than marriage and procreation…If we loved our art/expression/surroundings as fiercely as we do each other…living a life where romantic love isn’t the only important connection we tend to”.

In their articulate brilliance, both Sharanya and Sadia speak of particular forms of love and desire as “power structures” and provide us with ways of engaging with, resisting, and subverting these. Subverting patriarchal marriage, says Sharanya, is painful work which involves confronting both the fear of loneliness and loneliness itself, but we must find a way to love our lives, no matter the apportionments of love they don’t or do contain. For Sadia, her genderfluidity is an act of queering people’s imagination in a city like Karachi which makes queer lives possible and visible. Sadia calls for an agonistic view of identities to compel the collapse of a central power, of the heteronorm.

I open up my dialogue and conversations with Sharanya and Sadia here for all the CV readers and contributors. ‘Identifying’ myself as an Indian woman, resisting heteronormativity, questioning patriarchy, and subverting heterosexual ideas of love and desire have been particularly challenging. More recently, I have engaged with the notion of subversive marriage and a contestation of the public-private dichotomy. I find these to be related ideas.

As a woman with relatively little privilege and mostly confined to the private in my everyday life, marriage seems to provide a way out, like for most of my Indian woman-friends. Being in inter-racial, inter-class, inter-religious, intersex partnerships, marriage provides some access to power and somewhat equal rights of movement. It is not a choice, like my gender, but something that I am “forced to negotiate” (Butler, 1993).

Personally, marriage does not convey romantic or erotic bonds. It is a site of resistance. It is a strategy to navigate the everyday inconveniences in a mostly unequal world. However, being able to access the ‘public’ world of power through marriage does not make my private world of ‘being single’ less powerful or irrelevant. My struggle is to constantly re-define the private where my friends/partners and I feel almost-equally comfortable and not sidelined or marginalised when in the private. And that means thinking about power differently, to quote Mary Beard, and decoupling it from public prestige.

It means thinking collaboratively and finding solidarities through love, desire, resistances as well as vulnerabilities. Thinking of love is/as resistance.

Gunjan is our guest curator for this issue of Carved Voices. She is a poststructural, post-colonial AND feminist writer, (re-) writing on the concepts of gender, identity, religion and resistance. She has a PhD in Education and Development Studies that she’s not afraid to use. She has taken the Carved Voices interviews with people we love and want to feature to the world, to new heights!

Message Love in all its forms is absolutely amazing and totally worth falling for!

There is an enigmatic beauty in love. I hear stories of love and they all have something in common. These stories come from people of variety of age groups.

The new ones, old ones, long distance ones, one-alley-away ones. There are plenty of love stories and yet so few! How can love make you and break you so rapidly? So fast that we fail to even notice its power. It makes us cry and smile in rooms full of strangers because of something vaguely similar weaved in deep-deep neural circuits of our memory. Love is everything between the first birthday celebration together and the first time we forget to even wish that someone on their birthday.

Love is that feeling that we carry without any burden. It's not an emotional baggage. It's an involuntary value-added service to our life. Even if we don't invest the slightest effort in love, it flourishes like cacti in desert. Love is that magic we witness and the beautifully inexplicable feeling we get when we are with a certain someone special.

Love in all its forms is absolutely amazing and totally worth falling for.

Kalpshree is the Creative Intern at Carved Voices. Being both a devoted scientist and a creative writer, Kalpshree has been enthusiastically juggling a master’s degree in gene manipulation alongside the immersive internship at Carved Voices. Keeping it short and sweet, she describes herself as "genetically heterozygous for writing and science. The nerdy intern trying to break the chain!"

Artist's Message

“You said, 'I love you.' Why is it that the most unoriginal thing we can say to one another is still the thing we long to hear? 'I love you' is always a quotation. You did not say it first and neither did I, yet when you say it and when I say it we speak like savages who have found three words and worship them.”

– Written on the Body, Jeanette Winterson

Savages we may all be, but love is still something that so many of us long for.

There are so many ways to experience love, and yet so few of us are afforded the opportunity to do so freely. In this issue, we have tried to carve out space for those who too often are reduced to silence and allow their voices to shine through for a time.

This issue’s cover art, by the beautifully talented Elias K, hopes to convey the wondrous, secretive nature of love, and its multitudes. Love should never be kept in the shadows, it should be celebrated, and most importantly, allowed to grow.

My love is political; a protest. As a queer person, my love is debated, regulated and policed. I know more than some, and yet still less than others, what it feels like to have their love be a topic of conversation, and I have relished the beautiful learning experience that has come with reading the work in this issue, and speaking to the artists, poets and writers who have honestly, unflinchingly and lovingly filled these pages with their truth. Â I started with Carved Voices in 2017, and since then have seen it flourish from a small editorial team to a brilliant cohort of talented, caring and opinionated individuals, all of whom have incredible stories to share. It has been, and still is, a pleasure to work with such indivuals. Â I hope you enjoy what this issue has become- for love and desire is a sprawling, stunning creature with a life all of its own, and the work in this issue only serves to highlight the many facets of it.

Jess is our resident artist and co-curator. By day Jess works for a charity in the North of England, and spends most of their spare time drinking coffee and falling into endless internet spirals. Along with making art, Jess enjoys queer comics, fantasy novels, true crime podcasts, and music that was released in 2006. Jess is inspired by queer culture, honest conversationalists, liminal spaces, and magical realities.

The Love & Desire Issue

Still from Persona, 1966

Mon Amour

By Archismita Misra

Archismita is a budding chemist by training and a passionate poet at heart, she loves the voyage of words on a pristine paper, the flight of brushes on a mundane canvas, the fusion of spices in her wok and the frolic of colours in her beaker. Blue lakes and rare orchids, fragrant tea and magnificent Alps, European summer and Indian cuisine, would never fail to enchant her.

Someday I want to kiss you In front of your beloved And I know no leaf would dare To stop its swing If I put my wand over space, and time And your woolen curls I would kiss away your faintest fear And frozen shyness I would. I would.

You know I loved you. Don't you?

Still from Rectify Season 1, Sundance

Drunk on You I am getting used to being drunk on you

By Sonali Mohapatra Sonali is the founder of Carved Voices. Physicist, poet, polymath, and a feminist motivational speaker, she is the woman forever in the pursuit of the impossible and in love with the ideation of love itself. She stresses on female friendships, politics of the self, unlearning, cuddles and quantum gravity.

“a literary recluse� so to say they speak of me this way.

I have been drunk on the open book that is you.

Words, words, words and more words and it feels like they are fume wine made to intoxicate me.

I watch your lips move in familiar shapes somehow made strange. alluring. unreal.

They pull me in.

Why? I do not have time to

Think.

I am drawn in. craving.

More.

I could stay in all day, every day Staring at you, at the patterns in your eyes at the intensity behind your stares in those rare moments when they seem to be trying to see into my soul When you said “your face makes me sad” and I, I laughed and choked on my water and I said, “wow, what a thing to say!” and you traced my face, each inch every inch slowly with your eyes, like you were stripping my face naked (if that is possible) and taking in my contours drinking in my details your eyes seemed to want something more

they wanted to touch me slowly, I could tell,

and you said “I can see the sadness behind your smile”, and I laughed shyly embarrassed trying to brush it off, And you looked at me from under your lashes, smouldering, trying to know what I am

keeping from You.

You “felt”

and I could see you Feel.

I loved that.

You said, I smelled like raspberry syrup in white chocolate mocha I do not know if you noticed, my breath caught that time, and it hitches every single time you breathe me in bringing your face right near my neck and the top of my head I am tempted to lean into you and to let you

just, breathe.

And so, you see, once when I told you that “The best way to be immortalised is to break a poet’s heart”, what I meant.

because, have no doubt I will be Broken when you leave.

But I like to think I will patch my cracks with gold and somehow win But maybe, I lie to myself.

Maybe, I just want to, for this moment, Just, “Burn”.

Bloom Artist: Jess Dyson-Houghton

A Cauldron of Memories

By Debmalya Bandyopadhyay Debmalya describes himself as the the usual sleep-deprived sophomore math student. Gets unnecessarily excited by good food, books, music, films and poetry. Wants to travel the world in the name of conferences someday.

"I feel like... we're in a movie." Â We were lying on the rooftop of my ancestral home, counting birds that were flying back home. The evening was long, and the warm breaths of summer were quietly creeping in.

Still from the L'eclisse, 1962

"But we are in a movie." "So what kind of movie?" "Maybe a romcom?" "You know I hate romcoms. They are sappy and unrealistic." "Or maybe, this isn't a movie. This might just be a song." "Maybe you and I are like those couples who appear in the funky music videos. Do you like the Beatles?" "You know I do. But this could be different. This could be a Radiohead video." "You're the creep, and I'm the weirdo?" "Or maybe we are fake plastic trees, surrounding boulevards, reaching out for the sky." "Man that sounds so good. Can I please be a rhododendron then?"

You wanted to be a rhododendron then. That afternoon, I felt strangely happy, with my teenage hormones kicking in, and our hearts young and rebellious.

The fading chill of the air, the long spaces of silence punctuated occasionally by the cry of the martins, and the distant blare of the conch shell all converged into our dream. The only thing I knew then was that you wanted to be a rhododendron, and I was growing up to be a eucalyptus.

Years later, when I opened Facebook one morning, I found your picture on the friend suggestions bar, and I froze. All those evenings and the half drawn banters came rushing back to me, like flood water greeted roots. Suddenly, the odd days of stubble felt heavy around my jaws, and for a moment I wished we had not drifted apart.

"Maybe life is like a Radiohead song."

"One that we could play on loop, over and over again."

The Radiohead records still lay with me, they grew dust now. My guitar had a sore voice, and my laughter reeked of cigarettes. I looked at the phone. You weren't alone in the picture. You were happy now. I opened my music app, hoping I'd find something I had been looking for a long time. Something that reminded me of that evening when our lips crawled on to each other faster than our fingers did.

"And if we ever stop talking, promise me you'd send me a song?"Â I found the Radiohead song and smiled.

You wanted to be a rhododendron once.

Photographer: Aritra Mukhopadhyay Aritra is a part-time physicist and full-time foodie, based in Hamburg with a penchant for travelling and capturing the fleetingly blissful moments of life with his not-soexpensive phone camera.

Still from Blue is the Warmest Colour, 2013

À LA VIE

By Priyadarshini Mukherjee A performance artist and a postgraduate student in the field of Gender and Media at the University of Sussex, Priyadarshini's research interest lies in queer theory and South Asian cinema. A writer and a poet of her own accord, her stories have matured into queer narratives as she grew up to continue her journey in exploring and learning more about alternate sexualities.

"“You’re very beautiful” It’s not like Charu was being complimented for the first time. In fact, the same sentence had been slapped across so many tables on so many dates by so many other people.

However, Yvonne didn’t look at her while she said that.

Instead, she stirred the drink in her glass as the ice cubes clinked against one another. You’re so fucking gorgeous.

Charu didn’t say that, no. She stuck to a “So are you!” For as long as they’ve known each other, a date didn’t seem to be a reality they’d ever live through. She took a big sip of her drink. They were on their second drink and were a little closer than they were during the first. None of it seemed unnatural – the sitting beside each other, the running of hands through the dense, long, wavy hair, the occasional noticing of little details and vocal appreciation of it, unlike before.

In her head, Charu wanted them to be sitting in a veranda on the eighteenth floor of a building against the city lights creating a bokeh as her eyes focused on the beautiful face in front of her. She imagined drizzles outside and a red, cloudy sky. And a night of conversation about all the things they had held back. But neither of them had a house to themselves on the eighteenth floor of a building. All they had were those two high chairs at a bar counter and discounted alcohol bought from their pocket money.

They’d been to a movie before where she had cautiously, yet suddenly, slipped her arm into Yvonne’s and their fingers slipped into the spaces filling bigger gaps than they both could fathom.

The light from the screen danced on her face and created beautiful patterns.

Her eyes twinkled whenever the light changed. Can I point it out? Nah. She’ll think I am noticing far too much and might step back.

A good movie and a lot of overthinking had landed them at this bar where they noticed older, unattractive men casting lewd stares at both of them in the hope of reciprocation. It was met with laughter but Charu detested this. She detested the male gaze and didn’t like how this gaze on a feminine body was so natural to so many. She detested them gazing at her as Yvonne looked down with her hair to one side.

In one of the many silences as she pretended to look at the bottles decorating the bar, she asked herself as to why they’d never hung out before. It was only recently that they’d started having real conversations and skillfully bumping into each other and discovering shortcuts. Yvonne, a beautiful girl with a beautiful name – and a fierce sense of compassion and loyalty. Her honesty flickered in her eyes, her silence, her skin and her bones.

The bartender was being generous to them, he was chatting them up and recommending his favourites. That’s when Charu spontaneously went in for the second round. Her impulsiveness made her very feisty. Her addiction for toxic people and cigarettes was a thing too annoying to endure for Yvonne. She did not mind cigarettes, she just did not like her friend turning into a chimney.

Charu was there when Yvonne smoked a cigarette and cried over a man who couldn’t understand the beauty in her soul. She had slept on a mattress as Yvonne lay cradled in love on a bed in the same room, she had also hugged her after ages on a terrace during a cold winter night because they missed each other.

If hugging her that night felt so right, sitting at the bar with her and laughing felt even better. There were no inhibitions when questions were thrown from either side. The questions were answered openly, with brief pauses to gather the right words. However, Yvonne didn’t need pauses. She spat the answers out like she’d known these questions all along. That’s what friendship does, it provides you with a concrete platform devoid of the threat of abandonment.

It ends with a fin where the cab arrives but there is space for another hug as one walks home and the other flies across a river, preparing to fly miles away – far away from home, familiarity and this beautiful friend who gifted her this beautiful feeling that will remain in the goosebumps she got when they were standing a breath apart, and waiting for the universe to create poetry with their bodies.

I Promise (You) Artist: Jess Dyson-Houghton

Still from Tales of the City, 2019 Miniseries, Netflix

Unsaid By Anchita Addhya Physicist. Poet. Procrastinator.

Not necessarily always in that order!

You pull me close, with a sudden jerk, and kiss the living daylights out of my soul Once, twice, thrice, your insatiable urge gives me nightmares.

What if I am not enough for you, like every other thing in this world Your interests fade faster than the petals of a dying rose; You tell me your heart no longer knows the language of love.

So you can’t love me back.

When I ask you again, your lips quiver, You’re scared, you strangle the words before they escape.

You tell me some days you feel like cutting off your ear, To feel the love that Van Gogh did; or put your head in the fireplace, So you can feel the love burn you from inside out.

And I pray to all the Gods that don’t exist, that someday you feel my love.

But I didn’t cry the day you came to me And said you liked a boy, who lives next door; He gives you hickeys now and then, just between your breasts And makes love to you when he wants.

Sometimes, he hits you and as you laugh it off, saying “love hurts”, Tears well up in my eyes; and I swear I want to bash his head.

But your mom approves for he is a boy.

And gives him extra eggs for he can take good care of her daughter; All I get is a disgusted glance, at my cursed breasts, I hate them too, trust me I do, for I was born with them, But I was also born to love you.

I may be broken, with cracks all over, in the shell I call my body, But that's where the light still comes out of.

So one last time, I burn brightly, hoping to catch your eye, before I turn to ashes, Say something, just once, let words flood the gaps between our strained souls; And mend the wounds, Inflicted by the words you never uttered, when your mom called me a dirty whore.

Doesn’t she see that I love her daughter more, than that pathetic excuse of the boy next door?

And I swear My love doesn’t hurt.

Reimagining Wofford Artist: Aritra Aich "I am not born yet.

Sure, I have a birthday, but still at 23, I am still doing baby kicks. You might notice traits of a physics researcher, a chess player, a graphics designer... But when I will be born, maybe tomorrow, maybe the day after or half a century later, I will buy myself the best art supplies and paint."

Aritra was commissioned by Carved Voices to reimagine and reproduce on paper this beautiful pure love nude statue titled "Dalliance- Embracing my Muse" by Wesley Wofford. CV is thrilled to have worked with Aritra's brilliance!

The Second Eternity Tibra Ali is a writer and a theoretical physicist. He writes to feed his soul and teaches theoretical physics to support his feline family.

He lives in cold Canada with three lovely cats and a library.

By Tibra Ali

Late one evening, as I waited for her outside the public showers of the campground where we were staying with her family, I watched a sky full of white clouds.

Suddenly, the clouds looked as large as they were up in the sky. And in front of me, a tiny firefly was wending its way through the grass doing things that fireflies do. I watched him and the clouds for a long time, as long as it took her to finish her shower and come out.

Hermann Broch, in his trilogy of novels ‘The Sleepwalkers’, says that human beings are only granted negative eternities.

Humans, by their very nature, cannot assert a positive eternity but can only say things like, ‘Never shall I see you again’ or ‘Never shall we meet again.’

But if, for some reason, those who parted ways forever, are to be reunited, only then can we be sure that the bond between them was the real thing— the real positive eternity, not the fake eternity that a man promises a woman, bending his knees.

Modern literature has a strange logic and sometimes it appears to be counter-intuitive. This is because literature explores the subterranean world of human existence, the existence that lies far from the view of man immersed in his sentimental world of received wisdom and borrowed gestures. Many human beings but few gestures, Milan Kundera notes. It is we who belong to gestures, and not the other way around. Like the gesture of a man kneeling down and promising an eternity to a woman. Not that such gestures are not to be trusted, but at least they should be recognized for what they really are: the dissolution of the individual in the stock and generic form.

Still from La Grande Bellezza, 2013

The positive eternity that Broch’s character Bertrand speaks about is a rare eternity— a fragile and poetic kind that survives only in the imagination of a very few. Many a night, after losing the one that we love, we imagine that eternity, but we as humans cannot live up to it— the Sisyphus-like doggedness that it requires is beyond us, and we sink into the easy well of forgetting and happiness. (For make no mistake: forgetting is a precondition to happiness.)

One fictional character who stands out glaringly against the tide of human forgetfulness is Florentino Ariza from García Márquez’s novel ‘Love in the Time of Cholera,’ that masterpiece of unrequited love. The youthful, immature love of a shy young virgin survives his beloved’s marriage and his own metamorphosis into one of literature’s greatest womanizers. There is no contradiction here: the terrains of love and sexuality are not to be confused.

There are two kinds of eternities man comes across (Milan Kundera notes somewhere). The physical eternities of the universe — the mathematical eternity/infinity and the eternity of human history — these are the eternities that can be classified as non-human eternities for they lie beyond the reach of individual human beings (yes, even the eternity of human history).

The other type of eternities is what might be called human eternities. The eternity that is inherent in a Bach fugue — the gleaning of a richness of infinite beauty from a single, simple theme. I call this eternity the second eternity.

And this human eternity is the eternity that literature explores and central to it is the idea of the individual. As Octavio Paz noted in his last essay ‘The Double Flame,’ this idea of personal eternity is tied to the modern idea of love — and it is inextricably tied to the emergence of the idea of the woman as an individual. Modern love is a historical idea, it arose at a specific point in time and it will die at another moment. We will still use the word ‘love’ but it will mean something very different. It has roots in the Sufi poetry that the Crusaders brought back to Europe in the middle ages and infused courtly love with the mysticism of the Islamics. But the conditions in Europe were ripe for the central object of desire in these poems to be the woman rather than Allah or Jesus. Such was the birth of modern love. A paean to Anna Livia rather than Allah the almighty or Jesus Christ the saviour.

The human eternity that modern literature explores is this eternity, more or less. And it is this idea of love that we see in the novels of Broch, García Márquez and many other modernists.

It is a childish concept of eternity but it is also profound: It is the only sense of ‘absolute’ left for us in a universe abandoned by God and overtaken by History.

The individual’s body and the memory of that body become the sacred ground.

And love rescues the generic moment by its particularity and holds it up against the universe— the other eternity— as a poetic charm that preserves human meaning against the non-meaning of the universe. What was profane becomes sacred through an erotic act of the imagination.

(And gestures like moments of watching the clouds and the firefly, and waiting for the girl in the public shower become living gems that ennoble the utterly forgettable time that is human life.)

Many of the modernist novels that explore love end with a reaffirmation of that faith in this modern concept of love. Which is to say they reaffirm their faith in the internal human eternity. Although fragile (but perhaps because of it), this love is the only sense of sacred we have left. And so, it is not an accident that García Márquez’s great novel ends with the single word that the septuagenarian Florentino Ariza, reunited at last with his beloved Fermina Daza, throws at the universe as an amulet protecting his love: forever.

And Hold On Artist: Jess Dyson-Houghton

The McAllister Bride By Shantasree Mohanty Shantashree Mohanty is the co-founder of Carved Voices and a compulsive lover of words. She has a masters in criminal law. She is a Civil Judge by profession but pleases to describe herself as a 'failing writer' and 'a woman without qualities' who much like a young James Joyce, forges in the smithy of her soul, the uncreated conscience of the world around.

Dearly beloved, You’re so cognizant of the absurd that I’ve never had to idealize our story.

Or to beat around the bush.

Dearly beloved, Your essence is so devoted to untamable solemnity and mine so contained, that it was never super hard to realise: Like salt water, you were to become my cure for everything.

Stills from the Before Series by Richard Linklater

I’ve been meaning to tell you, that these days my dear, as time dissolves in breath, I often find myself picturing our wedding... ...set in a meadow by the river right before the sky falls.

Dearly beloved, hear me out before you shrug and then drag me to kiss the top of my head.

I know all your friends; I know you like your flowers on trees not plucked.

I know you’d like a monochromatic iteration with the seating and the whispers; all curated to a point where strangeness makes sense.

What about me?

I’d just like Bill Hader to be my sister’s date!

Okay, okay bear with me some more.

All your pain and nostalgia would want a safe space to simmer amidst the spectacled grins of approval; and for that I promise to keep Leonard Cohen and Ray Lamontagne on loop grim but tender.

Dear love, my passion for you is resistant to summary.

But it must be expressed that I can carry a soiled name with all the dignity in the world, and I can bear the burden of your guilt; I can fight to bring all the light and hope to congregate endlessly in the windows of our hearts...

I can sweat and bleed and keep apologising for all the things I did not become.

But I absolutely cannot bear much longer

to not be your wife.

Dearly beloved Will you marry me?

Artist : Kate Cox

Find Kate on Instagram @hazy.details

CV met Kate on a New Year's Party room where she was working her magic of capturing people in beautiful sketches instantly. The rest was pure love and CV is grateful to Kate for her support of Carved Voices.

Polyamory

By Page Turner Page Turner is the editor-in-chief of the popular website Poly Land (https://poly.land), as well as an award-winning author. She’s been cited as a relationship expert in a variety of media publications including The Huffington Post, Glamour, Self, and Bustle. Her newest book is Dealing with Difficult Metamours.

Simply stated, polyamory is the practice of engaging simultaneously in more than one serious romantic or sexual relationship with the knowledge and consent of all partners.

But what does that really mean? What’s it actually like? And why in the world would you want to be polyamorous?

Usually, people think polyamory is just about having sexual access to more people. And to be perfectly honest, I’ve met plenty of people who enter into polyamorous arrangements looking for just that: greater sexual variety and more adventurous bedroom experiences!

However that’s far from the only reason to be polyamorous. And people who are first attracted to polyamory for sexual reasons will often come to find a myriad of other unexpected benefits that eventually come to mean a lot more in the long term than the shiny allure of hot, sexy, fun times.

I myself set out into polyamorous relationships with modest expectations. I thought it might be a total disaster but perhaps one that would leave me with an interesting story or two. Also, I was mostly trying it out because though I thought polyamory was a terrible idea in theory, when I was truly honest with myself, I had to admit that I didn’t really know. This bothered me. The fact that I was so dead set against something I had no direct experience with bothered me.

The last thing I expected to gain from polyamory was a sense of belonging, a sense of acceptance and above all a large, mostly queer, chosen family.

So naturally, that’s exactly what I ended up with.

You don’t have to be queer to have a chosen family, but nearly all of the queer people I know have one, including myself.

I learned early on in life that a lot of what other people say about families will not apply in my particular case. Hallmark movies told me that family would be there for you through thick and thin. That your mother was your best friend.

That family was a place of unconditional love and acceptance.

But did any of this actually turn out to be true? No.

The dinner scene from Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have it, 2017

Instead, acceptance in my family of origin seemed to only run one way: I was to accept my parents’ view of the world, abide by it, and that was that.

And if, for any reason, I strayed from what they viewed as proper, their reaction wasn’t going to be acceptance but a reflexive need to steer me back onto the “correct” path by any means necessary. Even if it meant implementing cruel, soul-crushing methods that required me to spend my entire life pretending to be something I wasn’t, they would do that.

So like a lot of other queer kids, I turned to my friends for help. I grew closer to them and found the love and acceptance that I couldn’t find at home. One by one, I built a chosen family. Short stays with my friends grew longer until I was essentially living at my friends’ houses instead of going back “home.” Home had changed its definition for me.

For several years, it worked out really well, until we reached the age where people started pairing off two by two. Friends who had previously lived with me, ate with me, been an integral part of my world, began to regularly abscond with their new flames – to be heard only on the rare occasion when they emerged gasping from marathon making-out sessions.

Before long, I was the only single person in a sea of couples. My entire social life began to consist of making colorful cameos in my coupled friends’ lives before returning to crushing solitude.

I stayed very much alone until my friends set me up with the only other single person they knew. And while this new suitor and I had very little in common, we were both feeling so alone that we were able to ignore our lack of compatibility and eagerly partner up.

The trouble, however, was that partnering up didn’t cure me of my loneliness.

As a person who had experienced a queer chosen family early on in life, I found that many of the restrictions of long-term monogamy made life quite lonely.

True, I had my own person to hang out with by default, one I lived with and had easy access to, but we got tired of each other’s company more quickly than I’d expected. And to make matters worse, I wasn’t very social outside of that partnership. While it was considered mostly okay for me to have casual, distant friendships, close ones were frowned upon — both by my partner and by other people in our lives, who found it improper.

Perhaps if I’d been a straight woman, I could have had close female friends without attracting suspicion. But as a bisexual person, even my same-sex friendships were subject to suspicion and viewed as potential threats. So I did my best to socially isolate myself in a way that signalled to the world that I took my romantic commitment seriously and wasn’t going to do anything to damage it.

Still from The Miseducation of Cameron Post, 2018

I found it easy to abstain from having sexual relationships with other people, but I connected with others emotionally with ease. I forged deep bonds that rivaled the emotional intensity of my romantic relationship resulting in what some people would refer to as “emotional affairs.”

I did this over and over again. “Caught feelings” for other people, formed new secrets, private jokes. And each time I caught myself forming these unapproved extracurricular intimacies, I’d feel miserable. This wasn’t what well-behaved nice people did, I’d tell myself. Why couldn’t my partner be enough for me?

The trouble, however, was that I was trying to replace an entire chosen family with one person, so quite naturally it never really worked. Still, I did my best, stumbling through one emotional faux pas after another, feebly trying to adhere to everyone else’s idea of how a “good married lady” behaves.

And then, one day, everything changed. I found out a married couple I’d been friends with for quite a while were secretly polyamorous. The news came as a huge shock. I’d previously associated non-monogamy with party culture, but this couple was anything but party-lovers. In fact, I’d thought of them both as prudish until that point. They were married for years and even had a couple of kids. They volunteered and he was about to join the service. Their family was like if GI Joe married Barbie and had a couple of Cabbage Patch Kids.

They were polyamorous; had been for a long time actually, that too in a very stable and happy manner.

Prior to this, I’d thought that the only way a relationship could be successful in the long run was if it were monogamous. It occurred to me in that moment that maybe I didn’t know everything I thought I did about relationships.

And within a few months, I made my first foray into polyamory. I went on to date Barbie, spending time together, connecting with her in every possible way, sharing intimacies for the evening, before we’d eventually part and she’d go home to GI Joe. Now, Barbie and I didn’t make it. Not long term anyway. But in the 10 years that have passed since then, I have had dozens of other connections. Many of those people are still in my life, as friends, lovers, or as is most often the case : something in between.

It’s actually the first thing that people who don’t know that I’m polyamorous tend to notice about my life: “You have so many friends.”

And not only do I seem to have a lot of friends, they’re mostly friends I can count on. I see them regularly. I never have a problem getting enough people to help me move or exchange clothes. We do favors for one another.

Do you have to be polyamorous to have a chosen family? No. Do you have to be non-monogamous to maintain so many close friendships?

No. But it helps. Many of these people are dating other people I care about (or have in the past), which leads to us naturally spending a lot of time together. It also helps that none of us are worried that having other close social connections is

going to destroy our current relationships. All of this is a far cry from the way I conducted my friendships before I found the polyamorous community. Back then, we kept our distance.

Polyamory means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. But for me, polyamory is about the freedom to explore the natural connections that form between me and other people, no matter where they lead.

And it’s also about a responsibility to support my partners as they do the same.

Sometimes that means giving my partners some space, respecting their autonomy and the time they spend with other people. Other times, it’s about being a shoulder to cry on when things don’t turn out the way they planned.

And still other times, it’s about being as kind and open hearted as I can possibly be to the other people in their lives that make them happy – our chosen family.

Carved Voices is wonderfully happy to have the opportunity and the honour to host Page Turner in its Love and Desire Issue. To read more from Page Turner, find her on Poly.Land!

Still from She's Gotta Have It, 2017, NETFLIX

Our Shared Poly-Tomorrow Tomorrow, my stories of you will be woven with daydreams, perhaps, what-ifs, and kaash! wo aisa kehta tha!

I can see our, this thing, stretchingstretching- till it has wrapped around both of us continents across.

By Sonali Mohapatra

You are going to love her.

I can imagine you falling for her slowly at first, hesitantly, and then boom her eyelashes hold meanings of a whole world

or maybe a him, or them standing under umbrellas together, you both, books stuck into jeans talking through shared sips of coffees shy, unassuming, perfect hope or electrifying touches over wallets or keys

or maybe liking the same girl,

Again.

Oh!

And when we meet, years later, you will taste of many new worlds

Like I will.

Still from 'Todo sobre mi madre' (All About My Mother), 1999

Wild Women

By Srividya Srinivasan The old man combed the soft hair of the child, rocking himself to and fro.

I must tell you tales of your mother, my grandmother, and her mother, and the women before them. terrible women of their times, powerful and strong,

A free spirit with an exuberance for life, an unapologetic individualist who has blazed her own trail as an entrepreneur in media and communication for over two and half decades, a lover of stories and words, cinema and travel, coffee and conversations, hers is world of imagination, color, movement and stillness. More than anything, she is a believer of life, grace, wit, laughter, beauty and the human spirit.

Entreprenuer, Businesswoman, Author, Poet, Activist, Film Maker, Mom, Cook - Srividya Srinivasan wears her various hats with elan. She is currently based out of Bangalore, India.

Once upon a time, She sat down to write a book, and forgot to cook.

And, they waited hungrily ever after.

As the notes of music floated inside her head, she sat down to compose, stone-deaf to the wailing around her however gross.

She once wore her walking shoes, and taking her bags went sailing the seas, to return with tales of stormy sojourns, bearing crazy gifts from lands unknown.

When she spoke, she made them think.

In ways they felt were too bold For every word of wisdom she spoke The world renamed it as by anon.

The men sing lullabies of the women of yore, The men keep the hearth warm, The gentleness of their love softening the fire of their wild women, as they find their way home.

The Risk "And I'm afraid,

'think I'd rather run away than risk it ever again"

Artist : Sneha Ray Sarkar Not sure what to say about herself, Sneha describes herself as a creative wanderer or maybe just a lost soul, rediscovering herself, following her love for elegance in subtle expressions.

Carved Voices caught up with Sneha to brainstorm ideas and commission this artwork. Sneha is a fast rising star and it was a huge pleasure to work with her!

Embrace Artist: Jess Dyson-Houghton

A Love Letter from Abroad By Debadrita Jana Debadrita is a PhD student at the Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences at Rice University where she studies climates of the past. In her spare time, she likes to read, write and travel. Inspired by her mother, she has been writing poetry on and off since the age of 5. Her poems are a reflection of her day to day feelings and experiences. She is also the parent (in absentia) of a beautiful 4 year-old cat, Shadow; and hopes that her beloved feline will be able to join her in the USA someday.

I'm boarding a plane this evening that will take me across latitudes and time zones To a newer place I've been waking up in a different city every week And the only things constant in my life are the stark whiteness of hotel room bedsheets and strangers wishing me good day in many languages I'm getting used to leaving behind family, friends, memories, and places It's like I'm shedding little bits of myself and walking onwards (Like the proverbial rolling stone that gathers no moss) Along a road that will not let me stop.

And you not being here hits me in the gut again and again and again Harder and harder with each passing day,

And sometimes I find it hard to breathe without hurting my chest..

How long before I forget the details of your face?

How long before my fingers no longer recognise the touch of yours?

Will I remember how it felt to wake up next to you seeing you smile the three creases on the corner of your eyes as the sunlight falls on you through the window and in that moment you look to me like one of the ancient bronze statues of the gods.

It hurts, it hurts so much that I cannot touch you when I want to and when I walk down the street on a beautiful day, I have no one to turn to and say for the fiftieth time how marvellous it all is.

Now I'm in a lovely old city with colour and light and music and buildings straight out of a postcard But it's you, you, you that I want And I want to say so much more than I'm fine At the end of each day I can almost feel you by my side Holding hands and sitting in my balcony We're watching the sunset and the city and the people in the streets Some strolling, some hurrying by, their laughter, their faces... ...and all of a sudden the church bells start chiming and I'm kissing you just a little Because like I said, I cannot help myself when the sun is in your eyes and they look so brown and I just have to melt into you at that very instant.

In my mind I still wake up next to you, we have hurried breakfasts and leave home together We worry if we locked the door or shut the gas and you still hold me every night.

That's why I still sleep on one half of the bed and use only half the blanket and sometimes I think twice before turning up the temperature It's a strange, dual life that I'm living here I dine alone in cafes, walk around window-shopping by myself But in my mind I constantly tell you every little detail But I cannot feel you next to me No matter how much I want to...

And when I go back home, The hallway gapes at me The room feels too empty And the silence is too much to bear, That's when I want to shout I want to come home to you And every lonely day, every hour, in every possible universe

I choose you.

Photographer: Aritra Mukhopadhyay

Still from Transparent Season 2, Amazon Prime

How Not to Talk About You By Sherein Bansal Writer and feminist, Sherein is the Creative Editor at Carved Voices. She loves being an editor and has worked with Pratham Books for three years. She finds home in the first sight of approaching hills, by the water, in the food she cooks, in a deep-scented page in the corner of a library, with her mum, in her friendships, in oral stories, and in smashing patriarchy by a variety of methods from everyday things to being one of the coordinators of 'I Will Go Out' and 'One Billion Rising'.

I have always found myself displayed on a shelf.

Writing the perfect pitch, for scenarios in which, only boys and girls mingle.

All in a bid to act single.

The party begins My throat suddenly grows pins Jokes about married couples are here About men and women, year after year With a punctured voice and a closeted face (it keeps itself straight, not a queer trace)

I eject a grin, Eye roll within.

More of such talk, none of it deep I can perform the answers in my sleep “Ooooo do you find <insert hot male celeb’s name> hot?”

One look at him, I clearly do not.

I pretend interest, don’t want to ‘act strange’ in a hetero city, stating opinions that vary from your heteronormativity.

But suddenly, it happens An utter lack of common sense I practically spit out your name There was no reference frame What just happened? I look around My cover slipped and fell to the ground My well-meaning pal comes to my aid Whispers, “You can’t do that, in this kind of place” What kind of place? The world?

He says, “Yes, where a boy can only meet a girl.”

What else can’t I do?

World, I’ll just ask you.

You seem to know better Right down to the last letter So these are a few things, they tell, I can only do if I rebel.

A photo of us on Whatsapp Keeping my hand on your lap Looking for an extra second, Into your eyes that beckon Being able to hug and kiss, just to tell you how much you were missed,

even when surrounded by couples.

Wouldn’t want to burst their straight bubbles Telling everyone we got together a year back Without the fear of a random attack Talking about our basic rights Without getting into fights I introduce you as my friend Just so we can blend In a world designed to keep us at bay To keep us in shadows, to make us obey.

You throw your hetero on me every second of every day When I talk about myself, I’m suddenly too gay?

Sshhhh. I breathe Silencing the hiss escaping my teeth The party must go on Even though I am torn My cover used to be a glued-on shell Now it keeps threatening to fall like gel It has gathered holes, scratches and bites Old and weary with internal fights So I make more mistakes than I used to Like talking about my life as others do.

I drop you in random chats with people selling me mats Anything to talk about you It's forbidden, so 'us' keeps feeling new Mouthing your name with care No, not with. Without. Cuz I wouldn't dare.

They'll know it's you But I HAVE told a few.

Finally they ask.

Wait, can they see beyond the mask?

“Who is she?”

They raise an eyebrow at me.

"My friend” when i want to say “My fire” World, you’ve made me a liar.

Artist : Harsukh Deol Harsukh Deol is a digital artist and an aspiring web designer.

She spends a lot of her time creating art on Photoshop and Illustrator instead of studying for her engineering major. Equality and acceptance are important to her and she aspires to make a positive impact on society. She's on Instagram at @goldencentaur.

Still from Stranger by the Lake, 2013

The Washroom at Platform’s End

By Aritra Chatterjee If gender is a toy, I have been playing around with it since my earliest recollections of childhood. Bodies are my muse and their fragrance, their scars, the ways bodies choose to express themselves, how bodies communicate with each other feed the fountain of sporadic verses that shoot out of my mind in the most unpredictable moments. I do not know whether I am a poet, but I find poetry in longing, desire and resistance.

Here within the crunch of space, That barely fits us two, Oh, stranger of the night, We must hurry our lovemaking.

The stench rises to high heavens And the nausea feels like the burden Of gazes that would tear us apart If it were not for the door-lock!

Hurry, hurry you must, Our dicks cannot afford the luxury of time, Or space, There must be a queue outside, Of other hungry lovers, And it is our duty to make way.

I can barely sit on the toilet seat, My stretched legs ache, That’s enough pounding for today, Hasn’t your tool tasted spring yet?

The stench rises high, Wish there a wash of phenyl!

Oh, you, horny stranger, quickly jerk away.

My throat is too dry to gulp down The salt crème you offer me now.

Wait! Shit! I forgot all about the rubber In haste; Why spoil ecstasy with anxiety anyway?

Bang! Bang!

Must be the caretaker knocking away.

Can you slip an extra dime?

That is supposed to keep him away.

Wait! Let me peep through this hole And have a look!

(The banging continues…

And slangs follow suit.)

Fuck! The patrol officer stands outside, What are we supposed to do?

The door slams open, My horny stranger runs away, His collar is missed by an inch.

Now the sturdy jock shuts the door behind, His badge glistens on his shirt, He loosens his buckle and unzips, Another dollop of salt-crème, Gushes into my mouth This time, unsolicited.

Held Artist: Jess Dyson-Houghton

Forgetting Feet

By Sadia Khatri

Sadia Khatri is a writer based in Karachi. She writes fiction, non-fiction and essays on gender politics, cities, sci-fi and poetry. She is the cofounder of the feminist collective Girls at Dhabas. Her first non-fiction book, on the Kashmiri poet Agha Shahid Ali, is forthcoming

by Speaking Tiger.

Still from Ingmar Bergman's Persona, 1966

KARACHI Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a game every morning: to keep my desires in check & decide what I will wear contingent upon the spaces my feet will touch. The city, its skies, the trees, all unfold before me, but the trouble is walking by unnoticed, unfazed. I want to move unhindered, I want to slip into the beat of the city. But my body is inconvenient: it stands out, declaring itself an outsider. Loving streets is hard when they do not contain you so easily, when stepping into them means stepping out of proscribed boundaries.

If I am crossing lines, I might as well go a bit further. AÂ glimpse of cleavage, a bit of legs. Loud, glittering, femme. Jhumkas paired with a sleeveless, maybe a tighter top to define my curves. There is power in provoking. If people must stare, they will do so on my terms. It might not solve everything, but it restores a sense of agency.

Impossible, still, to ignore the looks of the men responding to my out-of-place body. Always in one of three modes: curious, hostile, sexually interested.

Impossible not to place all of my energy into absorbing and avoiding their attention, fortifying the wall I have built around me. Impossible, after taking so much pleasure in curating my clothes, to enjoy my time alone outside, and be present for the thing I am really here for, myself: the self is linked to the body, and the body is wildly alert. Someone throws a phone number at me as I turn the corner. Waiting at the signal, an uncle demands to know where I left my dupatta. A car pulls up, offers to take me home. I am reminded again and again: a woman alone outside is disgraceful, untethered, and therefore loose, dangerous, available. I am piled with so many assumptions I have no room to undo my own: I want to understand my fears of these streets, I want to replace those fears with possibilities of joy. But there is hardly any space for me to do so. There is hardly any room (without interruption) where I can act out ordinary desires: having chai by myself at a dhaba, reading a book, watching the sky change colours, lingering beside a tree. Someone is always observing me. I walk to a khokha, careful not to be too friendly. It could be misunderstood as a sexual advance. How unfair that I cannot see the khokha-wala without suspicion. How unfair for him and me! I just want to gather my thoughts, smoke a sutta in peace. I survey the space around the khokha, is it in full sight of the street? Oh, what the hell, I ask for a Marlboro and light it.

A few heads turn my way. Suddenly I become aware of the space I am taking up, the boundary I must stay within, my bare limbs. Suddenly I am conscious of my gender. So much effort, hardly any pleasure. It would have been simpler to smoke at home, where my thoughts are not so taken over by everyone around me, where the world doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t feel so tight. I might be alone in the streets but I am hardly left alone with myself.

Still from Dallas Buyers Club, 2014

How fortunate are men: able to express their desire of the city. I have seen it in their unthinking movements, the way they reach for a lighter in their pocket, sit for hours by the beach at night, lie sprawled beneath a tree in the park. The way their desires roam free. It is embedded in their feet. But when the body is aware (this loud, glittering body of mine), so are the feet. I end my walk early, and turn back. I am so conscious of where I step. So conscious of how little I linger, how much I hurry, when all I want is to pause and look up. How much of the city do I associate with question marks; how does that spot feel, what does the neighbourhood look like from there, could I have chai here, can I jump, spread my legs, sing out loud. Can I ever love the city properly with fear breathing inside of me.

Another day I manage it, I manage to walk to the dhaba without encountering a single comment, and without encountering (most significantly) my own fears and assumptions about the city. Most likely I am dressed ambiguously: short hair, no jewellery, loose kurta. On days I have low tolerance for the male gaze, I do this deliberately: dress down to make myself invisible, to stretch my presentation to look like a boy. Then the men who usually stare, just skim over.

Or they take time to register, and there is room in their delay for me to slip by.

My clothes create a small bubble around me, allowing me to get away with more. It’s a game I’ve learned to play, dressing up as different characters, understanding that my appearance is an ally, as fluid as my gender.

There is privilege in this invisibility. I take time to cross the street, slowing down to look up at the sky, touch the plants. I sit at the dhaba for hours with a book. There is no uncle to police my body, no phone numbers to sexualise me. I don’t think twice before reaching for a cigarette. The sun is wonderful, just wonderful, why can’t I do this more often? In these moments I am filled with joy: I spread out my body without worrying, I smile at the steaming cup of chai, I walk aimlessly with an expanding rush of pleasure. Ridiculous that such ordinary acts mean so much; what does it say about the kind of desires I am allowed to act upon, and the ones I am denied.

It is a strange luxury, this invisibility earned through attire, so simple yet so astounding in its power. With each desire I claim, another feels possible. The longer I walk, the less I fear the men around me, the less afraid I am of losing myself in the sky. One thing undoes the next; the world opens up, boundaries dissolve, the feet become free as they forget themselves. How easy then, to breathe with these streets for a while, to not have to second-guess my intimacy with the city.

Then suddenly, a voice : “Are you a boy or a girl? Does your brother know you smoke?” Someone is looking a little too closely, and I grow aware of the discomfort spreading inside both of us. I move away, or crush my cigarette a little too hastily and hurry off along my way.

On the following page is an interview of Sadia by our Guest Curator, Gunjan. CV was riveted by the conversation between the two.

Interview : Sadia Khatri

By Gunjan Wadhwa

First off, we would love for you to explain your idea of love to us and our readers.

Thanks to Mary Oliver and Shabnam Virmani, recently I’ve begun to think of love as worship. Where worship = surrender, not submission. To surrender is to yield, which is a powerful act of devotion, attention, prayer. I don’t mean these as religious acts, but rather as intimate rituals that force us to be present, to notice. Love is attention at its source, attention without judgement. Love is to cultivate awareness, to give (care + kindness + one’s senses!) without expecting anything in return. It changes us, transforms us fundamentally, and always for the better.

For me, love has to be the intention I place at the heart of anything I do, if I am to do it well. In a capitalist world where everything is increasingly isolated, segmented and distanced, love can be fiercely freeing and affirming. It pulls us back to the present moment, it connects us to people, nature, cities, creative pursuits, whatever it is we long to connect with, and of course, love helps us survive.

Do you think love is political? What do you think are the politics of love, who you love and how you love? Is love contextual?

There are all kinds of rules about who we are allowed to love (think gender, sexuality, religion, class, caste, family) and so of course, love is political when it challenges those ideas. But beyond the obvious, who we choose to love (yes, I think love is a choice), there’s a deeper political question: who do we imagine we can love? What does that say about our politics, who we consider worthy of our affection/attention/worship? What do our perceived, internalized limits reveal about our own biases and discriminations? How often does someone like me, an upper-class individual, even think about desiring someone from the working class? Desire is inextricably linked with power.

And then, the manner in which we express love/desire is indicative of the processes and systems we value in the world. As far as romantic love goes, this means ideas of how we love and what we consider its ‘end’ goal – monogamy? marriage? procreation? sex? – if these are the manifestations of love we attach value to, it means we are okay with backing institutions that are fundamentally oppressive and unequal, as in the case of marriage. That one has to legalize love through a document is a terrifying idea to me. It is also a kind of gatekeeping, because it limits our idea of love and desire to human relationships, and specifically to monogamous human relationships.

I am interested in love beyond humans as a political act. Love for one’s streets, love for trees, or animals or communities (not individuals) or art or literature…

I think this kind of love is even more radical. To center our love in more than individual human relationships. Especially for those of us who are women/assumed women, who are not allowed to locate our purpose anywhere other than marriage and procreation. Imagine if we did. If we loved our art/expression/surroundings as fiercely as we do each other. I don’t think these things are mutually exclusive; who we love, the way we love and where we love (public? private?) is political, yes, as is living a life where romantic love isn’t the only important connection we tend to.

Is love resistance? Or, is love conformity?

Well, love makes us prioritize our desires, our pleasures, and I don’t for a moment mean only sexual desire and pleasure, although of course, for women and non-binary folks to openly express their sexual desire and pleasure is to claim the agency we have been denied over our own bodies. But again, I am interested in love as resistance beyond sexual desire. Love as resistance to a capitalist society.

Love does not contribute to the economy (romance does!). Love rejects production and places value in attention and care, in connection, in noticing.

Whether towards people or one’s craft or the environment. To me it is a kind of slowing down, an antidote to loneliness and therefore to heteronormative capitalist ideas of what we need to live fulfilled lives: coupledom, stable jobs, nice houses, etc!

Love is resistance because it is the force of creation: intimacy, art, literature, music, awareness. And while these things can lead to capitalist by-products like books or paintings or anything that can be ‘consumed’, their driving force is never money. Their driving force is connection, understanding, empathy.

Love = consciously nurturing empathy. There is no greater resistance than empathy. How many of us have loved someone else at the expense of ourselves? Who hasn’t had a disastrous relationship, whether unrequited or obsessive? Or known a longing that was never met, that was rejected? I know I have. Through failed love (again, whether towards humans or non-humans), we discover our insecurities and fears. And these failures bring us closer to our humanity: we remember it is human to slip. This is where love becomes resistance; in a capitalist world where everything is perfect and manicured and ‘fixable’, love forces us to own up to the ugly parts of ourselves, is the only real measure of our faults, fuck-ups, mistakes, whatever you want to call it. It is tied to pain, and pain, whether our own or caused by us, reconfigures us.

Without love there would be no pain, and without pain there would be no reconfiguration, no empathy. Empathy is what ultimately forces us to be more kind, more forgiving. It pushes us to open our heart. How can this be anything other than resistance in a capitalist world where everything from desire to emotions to expression is pre-packaged and defined for us?

Your idea of love and desire is entwined with the access to public space. Could you elaborate on and contextualise that for us?

What I’m getting at is pleasure, and the right to access and express it. Who we love and how, is not limited to human beings. It is gendered in every aspect of society. Because I am perceived as a woman, I have no right to openly express my desire and love for public spaces. In fact, I am prevented from fully experiencing this love by virtue of social norms that police or curtail my movements. Simple things like where I can spend time alone, at what hour, who I can interact with in public, what I can wear outside. Of course, I am talking specifically in the context of Karachi. It isn’t the same elsewhere.

Here, even when I go outside and attempt to encounter (love, worship, notice) the streets on my terms, I am constantly surveilled and made aware of all the boundaries I am crossing as a ‘woman’. There is always an interruption. Even before I can surrender to the act of loitering (for me loitering is an act of invisibility, of blending in and disappearing) I am reminded that I am watched, that I am out of place, that this experience is not for me. Someone will try to solicit me for sex, or make me uncomfortable, or my own family will object to my movements, and I will never be permitted to have a flourishing relationship with the city the way men do, I will never be allowed to fully intimate my desire of it.

Still from Offside, 2006, where female soccer fans listen to live commentary in temporary custody after getting caught sneaking into a soccer match in Iran, an experience forbidden to women in movie and reality

Is there a need to (re-)claim the public?

Claim, yes. I don’t like the word reclaim, because I don’t think anything was ever lost. Rather, we never ‘owned’ public spaces in the first place. When I say ‘we’ I am invoking all the genders except cis-men. Women and non-binary individuals have every right to public spaces, but somehow, we have been successfully kept out of them. Dhabas and tapris and sidewalks and khokhas (cigarette shops) are the sole domain of men, at least in my city. And it’s not just a matter of claiming these spaces in numbers, numbers alone are not enough (shout-out to the book Why Loiter? for helping me understand this).

How we start existing in public spaces is fundamental to the shift: can we exercise the same level of agency, expression, desire and love that cis-men do?

Can we sit with our legs spread out for hours at a dhaba, just hanging out with our girlfriends and doing nothing? Can public spaces start to exist in our imaginations, too, as default safe spaces of unwinding?

To me, claiming public spaces in these ways is fundamental to our sanity.

These are breathing spaces, these are pockets where we can just allow ourselves to be, to exist without purpose under open air, or even subconsciously absorb and unravel all the shit that’s going on in our lives. It is also fundamental to feminism: the right to access public spaces and exercise our desire of them is linked to bodily and sexual autonomy; it affirms our right to pleasure without purpose; it affords us greater mobility and therefore greater possibility of financial independence; and it challenges the separation of public-private in the name of safety. Women are told to keep out of public spaces in fear of harm, when most physical harm occurs in private spaces. The more we normalize our presence in public spaces, the sooner we bust this myth that sexual assault occurs mainly in public, the sooner we start talking about violence in private spaces, and the sooner we shift the conversation from ‘safety’, the excuse used to keep us from public spaces, to ‘access’ the real issue at hand.

What happens to the private spaces then? Do you think there is a need to re-define private and accord it equal power as the public? Do you think space/place is gendered?

We cannot talk about public spaces without talking about private spaces.

Their relationship, and more specifically their division, is linked. In Pakistan, for instance, women are pushed further and further into private spaces because public spaces are associated with danger and violence. Yes, sexual harassment is common on the streets, it is common anywhere in the world, but we seem to assign all blame to the working-class men in public spaces. We simply do not talk enough about the assaulters in our homes, and the violence in private spaces. We do not talk about the expensive cars that pull up, the men driving them who offer to take you home. The violence we are willing to discuss and make visible is organized along class lines. In our collective imagination, the assaulter is still the vendor/hawker/chaiwalla on the street (the other) not the husband/boyfriend/father at home (the familiar). And so, using the excuse of safety, we teach women to fear public spaces, and push them further into unsafe, violent private spaces.

I believe that re-defining the public will automatically re-define the private.

While public spaces are still not fully welcoming, I have had enough wonderful experiences at dhabas and cigarette shops to challenge my narrative of public space=unsafe as the dominant narrative. I have discovered possibilities in public that I have never known in private. I wear clothes outside that there would be consequences for at home. But as I have pushed at my experiences in public spaces, some things have also spilled over and shifted my relationship with private spaces. Exercising agency and pleasure and desire in public has slowly allowed me to start doing the same in private: while there are things I still never wear at home, I now wear sleeveless around my mother. There was a time I would have never imagined this possible. Every now and then my mother and I discuss feminist ideas, the same topics that once ignited only disapproval and outrage from her. At home, I am learning to express and vocalize and share more. Carving a relationship with public spaces has fundamentally shifted my relationship with home, and therefore private spaces: I have begun to see home as a space where I have greater agency and ownership than I ever thought, that can be experienced in the light of my desires.Â

As for according the private equal power as the public, absolutely. Private is where you curate your surroundings to nurture yourself. It is the space where you retreat, look inward, a space of ritual and routine. It is where one reads or paints or edits their photographs, it is the center of one’s creative process.

Politically too, these are closed spaces where in-group dialogues and conversations happen, where learning takes place ‘behind the scenes’, over chai or drinks or an evening in the balcony. I know this is all general. My point is: private spaces are spaces of intimacy that are integral to creative, emotional, intellectual, physical, spiritual survival, and this is the power we need to define them with. What we need to re-define, or strip away, is the idea of private spaces as automatically safe. As something you are stuck with because it is assigned rather than chosen. For example, no one should have to continue sharing an unsafe private space. Just as everyone has a right to public spaces, we have a right to private spaces that are free of threat/danger/violence.

Yes, space is gendered. But I don’t know if I can say that private space = feminine, and public space = masculine. Even private space is governed by masculinity; I don’t think women experience it the same way when a patriarch is around. I know everything shifts at my home the moment our father enters, we enter a sort of performance mode, censoring our movements and thoughts.

It feels unjust, to have to cater to certain gendered expectations within a space that is otherwise identified as the women’s domain!

You say you identify yourself as genderfluid, could you tell us a bit more on that?

Sure. As a genderfluid person, some days are more woman, some days more non-binary. These days there's a whole lotta femme in my presentation, but my outward appearance lacks consistency. I love to confuse and mix up and move back and forth, especially in Karachi, where I see my presentation as an act of queering people's imagination, and the city's imagination, of how a body behaves. It can be scary, but I think it ultimately forces people to be more tolerant, more kind. I know it has for me.

Do you think identities, whether gender or any other, are always fluid, and it is the aim of power to fix these identities for the hegemony of the dominant (in this case the heteronormative/sexual) to prevail?

Spot. On. Unexpectedly, my gender identity and presentation have given me the power to see everything as non-linear, constantly changing, filled with openings and possibilities. I've come to see identity as an unfixed, shifting thing. And I think that’s precisely what is threatening about fluidity. One, it cannot always be seen, and two, even if it can be seen, it cannot always be named, identified, and boxed. If it cannot be boxed, how will it be controlled, how will the capitalist machinery define it, how will it create products that can be neatly labelled and packaged and sold. And yes, the most troubling concern, won’t heteronorm collapse, and therefore ideas of fixed gender, fixed sexuality, marriage, coupledom, the very morals our lives should be based upon? This is the dream. The collapse of a central power. So that anything goes. So that everyone is allowed to be.

How do you suggest we shift, subvert, contest or overthrow these fixed identities? By engaging more with power? Does that have a ‘corrupting’ influence?

I don’t think power is inherently corrupt. I think power manifests in different shapes or forces that are dangerous/corrupt. Such as patriarchy or heteronormativity: these are destructive powers, but they run on certain fuels and machineries and systems. Engaging with power, for me, is more about engaging with those fuels and machineries and systems in order to dismantle the force. And replace it with something else, eventually: like the power of love, or kindness, or intimacy!

CV caught up with Sadia after being enamoured with her "Girls at Dhabas". Some of them hailing from similar cultures with dollops of east meets the west, they brainstormed on "being gender fluid and exploring sexuality in the context of public spaces. How a freedom of public spaces has defined how we express our love and desires in a public vs private space.

How it has curated our actions. How it has made us real/unreal in certain occasions. Would we fall in love the same way if we felt free in public spaces, with the same kind of people, expressing the same kind of desires? This would connect it to how for some of us, the courage to love and express little acts of love be it towards a partner or a crush or a role model or nature or just a bhada of tea, is a little act of resistance and speaks volumes about oppression which dates back generations. The discussion revolved around why and how we do a tiny gesture in a public space is inherently deliberate and so very intrinsically political and personal in a way somebody else who takes these for granted would never see."

Slow Hands Artist: Jess Dyson-Houghton

A Little Weird Feeling By Filipe Baldin Filipe says about himself, "From Portuguese to English there's a big gap that I've been trying to walk through, using words to connect my thoughts and feelings, and most times I feel lost in translation."

Sometimes I just miss the bad days.

I know that's very uncommon, or maybe even a little weird feeling.

I was used to missing you and staying awake 'til late, with my broken heart, whispering words making me write about love and all that could have been.

Now it's all gone, Washed by every drop of rain that blurred my vision in those good bad days.

Still from In the Mood for Love, 2000

Swansong The day, when it slips into the lap of the night, Beloved, who will, tonight, pity the seekers’ plight?

The veil drops, the moth has no business but to burn, To the tunes of pain to which all the seekers turn.

No one craves respite in this city of pain, Wine sellers all prospered in vain.

Listen! For the flute has no business for sight, Longing for its ravisher is the heart's might.

Why have you left all the mirrors un-shined?

All my rays left confined.

The song of soul in the flute is frozen, No word of love, O beloved, it's brazen.

Come now, all the seekers are dying to sing, The soul is drowning, give it a twig to cling.

By Zaid Zaz I was born and brought up in Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir. Currently, I am a visiting student at ICTS-TIFR Bangalore in string theory and quantum gravity group. I maintain a somewhat equal interest in poetry and physics. I mostly read, write and recite poetry influenced by mystic themes. I also maintain an interest in poetry of exile and conflict.

Still from Wings of Desire, 1987

Craving

By Midah Guilbaud-Walter I am a twenty-year-old lover of language and words who has been writing for as long as she can remember, be it poetry, prose or fantasy fiction. I find myself captivated by language and the number of different things it can be used for.

If I’m not writing, you’ll probably find me curled up in the corner of a coffee shop on my third coffee of the day with a good book by my side; or with my headphones looking at pictures of kittens on social media! Aside from writing, my other passion is Greek Mythology and as of September I will be studying classics at university – my goal is to learn Ancient Greek and be able to read Homer and Hesiod in their original language.

That first tentative touch, the amazement in your eyes as you pulled back.

Then, the desperation as we devoured each other in the darkness.

The way we danced around each other that night, I could feel my cheeks heat, burning from your gaze as you caught my eye across the room. The anticipation as we came close, the shivers that raced through my body at the smallest brush of your hand.

My lips still throb with the imprint of yours. Minutes merge into hours as your smile plays out behind my eyes, that smirk you give me as you bask in how I feel for you. You know what you’ve done to me, you know you’ve ruined me for anyone else. No one will ever compare to the softness of your lips, the perfect way you kiss me, the heedless impulse of two years of waiting that suddenly reared its head. The heady rush you inspire in me, the way my heart beats at double time as I read and re-read your words, that feeling of near perfection as your fingers trace across my waist.

It was one thing when I was dreaming, playing out naive fantasies of an alternative universe where you wanted me, but now those fantasies are our reality, and I long with every part of who I am, for you. It’s animalistic, the insatiable craving I have for your touch, the imagining of all the things we didn’t do, all the things we still can. The constant waiting, counting down to an indefinite date when I can feel you again, when I can slide my hands into your hair and pull you close to me, when these ever-evolving fantasies can become a new reality.

Close To Me Artist: Jess Dyson-Houghton

PLAYGROUND

Art by Harsukh Deol.

Imagine a playground untainted by the biases of the world, what might you see? Who might you see? What might their body languages be? What would the structure of a love unit be? CV is grateful to Harsukh for these wonderful expressions of love and desire.

An Archive of Longings By Shantashree Mohanty Our story, my love, is an archive of longings.

I miss you. I do. A lot. You know that.

We have been so far apart for so long that my composure has begun to elude me.

So has my sanity.

I can't deal with my own mood swings let alone the ballad of other people's dissatisfactions.

I've got to make sense of all these feelings, before the blues take over the parade. Before the demons vanquish what's left of the sand castles. Before the sky falls and daisies go bitter.

Of late I've been having these sporadic bouts of incessant crying. My hands keep reaching for your arms in vain. I'm breaking down from inside and it's making everyone uncomfortable.

I'm sorry I'm not strong enough. I'm sorry that I need you around to light up my whole world and to fight off the absurd. I'm sorry but I can't get enough of your beautiful smile.

You have always taught me that if I were to ever look for absolution, I must do it in my own time, and not walk around like an entitled scum. And although I have learnt from the best, I don't think I can bear this facade any longer.

Must I care for validation or keeping appearances or hedging bets at the cost of your absence? It's clearly not working out.

I am drowning in the quicksand of time and my screams aren't reaching you nohow.

Book Review : The Queen of Jasmine Country

By Sadia Khatri "Sadia's review of the book by author Sharanya Manivannan, as published originally on her instagram."

I could not have picked a better book to end 2018 with. "The Queen of Jasmine Country", by Sharanya Manivannan, is a novel about a woman existing and writing in a world that cannot contain her. Emerging from it is like coming up for air, after a most glorious swim in the deep seas. What are these waters: the teenage years of the 7th century poet Andal, the days she was still known as Kodhai, still figuring out the shape of her desires in the world. This is a feminist reimagining. It speaks of freedom & sexuality & choice: Kodhai’s elation of slipping into the streets to walk is a feeling I have known. It speaks of sisterhood and community: the cowherd women & Kodhai’s mother are lanterns that guide her way, the kind I have found myself when lost. but the novel does not preach. It is not anger but yearning and curiosity that lead Kodhai’s quests. And while Kodhai feels in extremes, the writing does not collapse under their weight, nor does it compromise the significance of each moment for Kodhai. In fact it slows down time, making you linger on each detail as one with new eyes — “laughing flowers”, “humming streets” — I don’t know how @sharanya_manivannan does it, writing with a simple beauty that is also grand, yet *present* in almost a trance-like quality, so even the most ordinary everyday encounters, like walking and eating and bathing, feel sublime. But you cannot enter this book in just any state of mind. It is a fully sensual, sexual experience — you must bring your whole body and mind with you. You must read with all your senses, and be ready to give them up too, so that you can (to borrow a concept from the novel itself) immerse yourself fully into its waters.

Interview : Sharanya Manivannan By Gunjan Wadhwa

First off, we would love for you to explain your idea of love to us and our readers.

All my writing, all my theory and all my practice, on love springs from loneliness. In the absence of love, I developed a theory of the same. A holistic theory of love must necessary be formed from a lived practice.

By love I mean all forms: from the erotic-romantic to the familial to the spiritual and the environmental. Because love is an intangible, and is often most vividly described synecdochally rather than completely, Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll try to explain my idea (or ideas) of and on love as we keep talkingâ&#x20AC;Ś

Do you think love is political? What do you think are the politics of love, who you love and how you love?

Love is political. Anything that is concerned with power is political, and we need to look at all the ways in which things have been misnamed as love in order to manipulate. Nationalism, or love for the nation. Marriage, or love for property, caste and misogyny. Those are broad examples. They play out in subjective ways, but in discernible patterns. The ways in which the family unit is held sacrosanct, even when it commits and feeds abuse. Similarly, for romantic bonds, in which abuse is deemed negligible when compared to the social legitimacy, sexual satisfaction and other benefits provided. Make no mistake: these are power structures, and deeply linked to the patriarchal status quo. When I speak of love I do not mean bonds which are assumed to be love (between siblings, between married couples, between peers who socialise together), because this automatic assumption is at the roots of what creates and maintains these power structures.

When I speak of love, I speak of the thing that both goes beyond these structures and its expectations, that is esoteric and powerful (though not necessarily power-full). That is difficult to describe. That is impossible not to have felt, even if not having been its recipient.

You canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t choose who you love, for the heart wants what it wants, but you can choose how you love. Do you love in ways that excavate your deepest wounds and hold them to the light, transformed? Do you love in ways that reject the ways that your family normalised abuse? Do you love in ways that are based on trust and respect, and not control and façade? Do you love in ways that flip the script? Do you love honestly? Do you dare to love deeply?

Your idea of love and desire is entwined with the idea of resistance. Is love resistance? Or, is love conformity?

Conformist love can only exist in comfortable situations. If you are basically okay with the socio-political status quo. For instance, if you think you are progressive because you had sex before marriage with your same-caste partner, whom you met on a dating app rather than a matrimonial website.

Thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s nothing wrong with this on an individual level, because life gives us only the opportunities it gives us, and we make our choices based on the same.

However, the inability to see how all these situations were made possible only through privilege not only renders this sort of love not meaningful politically,

but also guilty of maintaining that status quo. Should love be politically meaningful? Look, I cannot preach from my pedestal as someone who has not been partnered in many years (as I said, life gives us only, etc…). Love and desire are complex, polyvalent, strange, consuming, wondrous and devastating. These are also forms of meaning. I will not knock any person’s experience. I only ask that they be empathetic.

Radical love, or love as resistance, has empathy in both its roots and its flowers. In a heteropatriarchal world, all queer love is resistance, as are intercaste love, inter-racial love, inter-religious love. And those are just the eroticromantic variants! To treat friendship as primary partnership is a form of resistance, and is not just the modality I operate in but is in fact crucial to my survival. I continue to struggle against toxicity in my natal family, without yet having resorted to abandonment or the use of marriage as a means of escape, and this is something that I think more people would take seriously if healing discourse around the family unit was not so Western-centric, and accommodated experiences and realistic ideas in our own contexts. And then there’s love as service, as dedication to work. Love for the earth and the environment. These are all passionate forms of love, yet we privilege only the erotic-romantic kind above all else.

Still from Angels in America, 2003

Even when we consciously reject the institution of marriage, erotic-romantic love is still what we are conditioned to seek and cherish most of all. The most useful resistance is in broadening what we value as meaningful love.

As a post-structural, post-colonial and feminist writer myself, your ideas of love and desire have resonated with me on a personal level. You have written a bit on language itself, how language is more than linguistics and has materiality of its own, the colonial influences on the language and categories that we use specially to describe women. Do you think it’s the language that we use to name, and label love and desire produces the dominant notions of love and desire as these exist today? And if so, do we require a new language?

Languages are living entities themselves, and I will say that it is not that language is inadequate, but that usage should be more imaginative, as well as more introspective. Languages constantly evolve. Constantly. So, the project of creating or remaking language to better express and parse our experiences, questions and desires is something we are already and always engaged in. I think it’s possibly the reverse. The modalities of partnership, and the manifestations of love and desire give rise to the vocabulary and phrasing we employ. So, we can be coy, or devastating, or manipulative (have you noticed the clichés used by, or forced on, couples embarking on arranged marriages?) depending on what we seek to gain from or through an engagement or encounter. At the same time, we are deeply conditioned to use certain vocabularies, and reach for them without thought. I would say, in all, that it's not new languages that are needed. The old ones are versatile and beautiful, but we need to engage more deeply. What needs remaking are our relationships with them. As a writer, I would say that this too is a kind of love.

You are re-writing mythology in ways that provides us with a new language and vocabulary so to speak, to take on the dominant versions of it, with the stories of Kodhai-Andal and Sita.

Why do you think this is necessary? And, do you think this is dangerous?

For me, mythological reimaginings always begin from the seat of the human heart. Sita in a state of aranyarodhan (weeping in the wilderness), KodhaiAndal “wayfaring on the hallucinogenic of words” as she writes by lamplight – and the emotions and events that led to those pivotal moments, and what follows from them.

The myths have a hold on us because beneath and beyond their pomp and dogma is something that speaks to the core of who we are. I begin from this core, always. And I believe that to see the characters of mythology through this compassionate but clear gaze in turn changes the way in which we relate to one another as human beings. If we agree to be dictated to – if, for instance, we allow for gatekeepers to inform us that Andal or Sita were epitomes of chastity or blissful devotion – we do the very characters we so love a grave disservice. What always strikes me as most surprising about mythological revision is the suggestion that those who work in this area are seeing anew, and in a way this is deeply sad. It cannot be true that no one who heard or read Andal’s poems, in our century or another, wondered about who wrote them.

Wondered about the life of one who beseeched so passionately in verse. About the lonely and gifted young woman named Kodhai, as I did in The Queen of Jasmine Country. So, what does that say, that we heard her vivid words but didn’t think of who made them?

So, I would place empathy as the first and foremost element of my own work with mythology (this is a distinction I make from writers for whom subversion is the fundamental interest).

And my hope is that this empathy forges more. That it creates small spaces in which it’s possible to think of people in less abstract terms, and for this to affect everything from the way one votes to the way one speaks. And perhaps, some day, it will be less dangerous for us all, for the world is unkind not only to those who write in it.

India is going through an interesting churning as we speak, with debates around LGBTQI++ movements with the striking down of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, decriminalisation of adultery (Section 497), Sabrimala temple debate, marital rape. Almost parallel to all this is the #MeToo movement. Do you read these as resistances to the (hetero-)normative ideas of love and desire?

Yes! These are interesting times, and even if we disagree, the discourse itself is so enriching. This is something that I try to keep in mind when I get frustrated.

That the heatedness of this political climate is because people are demanding change in favour of a better and freer world.

And of course, some things seem to have more mileage than others. The decriminalisation of adultery should have been less of a priority than the criminalisation of marital rape, for instance. Baby steps. Along with a refusal to be led off track by symbolic wins. Sometimes that’s all we’ll get; but I hope that eventually, we will look back and know that leagues have been crossed.

Talk us a bit more through your idea of love as resistance. You have written/spoken elsewhere about subverting marriage and patriarchy, possibly through polyamorous and like relationships. Could you elaborate on that?

Let me be honest: polyamory is not an area I have really developed meaningful thoughts on. I believe I’d answered a direct question about it in one interview, which may give the impression that I have more to say on it. I don’t, because I don’t identify as poly. However, I respect polyamory as a necessary part of queering marriage and love.

What I am better prepared to speak on is the subversion of heteropatriarchal marriage, and as we discussed earlier, the roles of both love and loneliness in the same. And even within this, what I can best speak on is being single as a consciously feminist choice, particularly for women.

To do this, you have to confront both the fear of loneliness and loneliness itself. This is not a one-time event. Over and over again, the wave will break over you – cold and mighty – and over and over again, you will stand up, saltstung, and affirm that you are not afraid of being alone. And that you are not afraid of feeling that wave again. I will not lie to you, my dear ones – resisting the paradigms of partnership as they are now, subverting patriarchal marriage, is painful work. Here are some of the things that have helped me: valuing and treating my friends as my significant others, seeing friendships as romantic bonds (though not, for me, erotic bonds, even if they do contain strands of the same), observing the life choices of those outside the bounds of marriage/family/society and learning from them, and investing in daily ritual as a necessary component of self-love and self-care.

We often reduce the last two to simple activities like, “I deserve an ice cream after the day I’ve had”, but it does us good to deepen our introspection on these activities. Especially if you don’t have reliable kinship, this can mean everything from living alone to having friends who are mostly in other cities to being in an unfulfilling partnership or dysfunctional family situation or more.

Then you must pay more careful attention to daily rituals. They are not only about indulgence, and it’s dangerous to associate only pleasure or reward with them. They can be things like the three minutes you spend in the morning making your to-do list for the day. Hour follows hour and day follows day and year follows year. We must find a way to love our lives, no matter the apportionments of love they don’t or do contain.

We at CV are interested in the intersections of love, desire, resistance with gender, ethnicity, caste, class, religion, and nationality. I know that you have made strong linkages between love and religion, especially in your (re-)writings of mythology. How significant do you think religion is to your idea of love?

Organised religion is not a force for goodness, and therefore not a force for love. Let me be clear about this, because religious fundamentalism and colonialism (as a purported extension of missionary practice, rather than as an actual extension of material greed) create and perpetuate the very situations that social justice work challenges and tries to change.But spirituality is a force of love and for love. A deep engagement with life will always reveal a kernel of the sacred. This has nothing to do with religiousity; it has to do only with the spark that animates life.

I am veering into the abstract, so let me bring it back to a story. To speak again of Kodhai-Andal as an example. Although she became a part of the pantheon, even in the most conservative of her hagiographies is a story of transgression.

How audacious for a girl, how anti-Brahminical, to take the flower garland meant for the statue of Vishnu and wear it herself, to “pollute” it with her touch, her body! Was that girl, Kodhai, behaving in a religious manner?

Obviously not. That was a wholly irreverent act on her part, but could it have been driven by the spiritual (which encompasses just as much the idea of communion as it does the idea of pleasure in the sight or scent of flowers)?

More likely.

If we reframe a personal relationship to the sacred as being about love, rather than about fear and control, everything will change. This cannot be done in word alone, which is what all the major religions have claimed and failed to prove. Lived practice. Every day, we must try.

I started this conversation by asking you about the politics of love and if love is a political act.

Does that link power with the ideas of love, desire and resistance? Do we need a greater engagement with power to be subversive? And if so, does that engagement ‘corrupt’ us?

Power is at the core of it, because love as we discussed at the start of our conversation is political, when conscientiously used to resist political systems such as patriarchy and caste.

But what we need to do as people who want to subvert those systems is to take a closer look at how we define power, what its value to us is, what we fear about it and why. This does not necessarily mean gaining material, cultural or other forms of power. Merely interrogating, as we have been all along, our relationship to it. And our dynamics with others, especially those in which we have an upper hand (i.e. confronting privilege). This is ongoing work. We keep learning as we go along. We keep changing too, and must be kind about past ignorance (which isn’t to be equated with past violence, for which understanding is insufficient as amends).

To redistribute power, you need strength. Or perhaps we have misunderstood something, when we dichotomize the two. Still, it all comes back to this: to self-work and self-love. To move in the world with a wise and wide heart. To cocoon in the home with a wise and wide heart. And always, to hold many threads at once – the private, the subjective, the abstract, the collective – and to see how everything is connected. Love is gestural, and love is grand. So is oppression.

Sharanya Manivannan is the author of five books: a short story collection, The High Priestess Never Marries, which won the 2015-2016 South Asia Laadli Media and Advertising Award for Gender Sensitivity (Best Book – Fiction) a novel. The Queen of Jasmine Country; two books of poetry, Witchcraft and The Altar of the Only World; and a children's picture book, The Ammuchi Puchi. Her long-running column, The Venus Flytrap, appears in The New Indian Express. She grew up in Sri Lanka and Malaysia and now lives in Chennai. CV has been enamoured by her writings and her interviews and are super grateful to have an up-close and personal with her on this issue.

Sharing Smoke Artist: Jess Dyson-Houghton

Having a Smoke with You By Sonali Mohapatra

Yesterday, I was on the terrace In the chilly winter night My nipples straining to push through my bra On multiple fronts You kissed the joint and Passed it to me I kissed the joint and Smoked rings out Into the city light And for a moment as our fingers Slowly touchedour naked waists and traced symbols, Oh! so lightly, The smoke blocked out the world, One, two, three, gone.

And we Fell Headlong Into each other’s Skin.

5 ½ Tits By Srividya Srinivasan

The storm was raging outside. The rain lashing wickedly against the window pane, while the wind shrieked and rattled the old glass. Yet, the silence inside the small room was palpable, oppressive in its tension, almost like a rubber band about to snap. The three women sat there by the flickering light of the naked bulb, each acutely conscious of the otherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s presence, longing to be free of the heavy, claustrophobic sense of sisterhood that supposedly held them bound.

Each, very unlike the other.

The baby slept on.

Still from Martha, Marcy, May, Marlene, 2011

Ammuma would cackle and proclaim that four tits can never get along in a room. Rita remembered that old, wicked woman, as she sat there in the tiny jungle watch-room with the others. This was worse. 5 ½. The number of tits in the room, for she only had one left. The babyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s male breasts or nipples did not count.

They were stuck with each other until the road to the valley cleared and the rain stopped. Rita had slowed down a little earlier, gasping for breath and had turned around to find the young woman with the baby - Mitra - right behind her. The young kid Dia, who had kept wandering away from the group had joined them from some secret detour. The three had looked for the others in vain, walking slowly until they had come to the bridge, only to find it broken. It had started drizzling, and so they had walked back through the semi-darkness to the tiny watch-tower room they had espied enroute. High up in the mountain, a small room, with limited heating and power, and some emergency rations. There was nothing they could do now except wait to be rescued. No phone signals. 3 women and a baby, in the middle of obscure nowhere.

Rita looked at her body as she sat slouched against the wall, her legs stretched against the dusty floor, her hands impatiently pushing her hair back. Her short, boyishly cut hair, Parisian style and lined with grey. Her clothes hung on her - pale, pastel shades, elegant and European in sensibility. 55 years 3 months and 2 days, said her French passport. Everything about her screamed sophistication in a snobbish, subdued manner which only the very rich could wear carelessly.

The itching started. The place where the right breast used to be. She longed to scratch it, but held herself back. Six months ago, they had decided it was best to remove it, to nip the cancer in the bud. And,here she was, stuck with a left breast. The smaller one of the two, with the inverted nipple. Sometimes, in a moment of dark humour, she would wonder how it would have been if this breast had gone, and the other had stayed. The fuller, rounder one on the right with perky nipples. The only one that afforded her any pleasure, while the other that remained had always required a lot of effort to cajole it out of its shyness. Yet, every lover in the initial days of wooing would swear that they loved the smaller breast, often ignored one of the two. She always knew when that affirmation of love came, that the days for the relationship were numbered. It spelt the start of politically correct lies leading to a nasty, premature end to the relationship.

Except Jeanne, who had pulled a face on seeing her mismatched breasts the first time they had made love. Jeanne who had fallen in love with her, Jeanne whose face she had anxiously looked at after the operation. Jeanne, who had sat by the hospital window, her legs crossed and made faces that it was the wrong one that had remained. Rita had looked at her, trying to read meaning into Jeanne’s flippant manner, and finally blurted out, ‘Does that mean we are not ‘it’ anymore? Is it over?’. And, Jeanne had laughed in that easy, loud manner of hers and declared, ‘Tit or it, we are in this together Ma chère chérie.

We just have to suck it up till the end’, and the two women had laughed. And she had relaxed, in the knowledge of Jeanne’s love.

Still from Orange is the New Black, 2013-2019

15 years was a long enough time to test love of any kind. But the question of what to do with her missing right breast had remained. They had discussed at length if she should have a false one put up, or stuff kerchieves so they look balanced. Jeanne had come up with the most outrageous suggestions and ideas, almost making losing a breast sound like fun. Finally, Rita had defiantly left it unresolved, preferring to wear her scar until she knew how to heal.

Every time, someone glanced at her chest, they averted their eyes. She knew the day it no longer mattered, or could no longer catch it in their eyes, she would have healed. But right now, it itched, reminding her of what was gone.

Her anger and the scars remained.

Lesbian. Ammuma had cackled and laughed so much when she had finally found the courage to confess to her, one hot summer afternoon, as they sat on the verandah outside their taravaadu. Like a bird that flies away seeking sunnier shores, she would come home every summer from Leon, France to Ammuma, to brave the sweaty Kerala heat, relish the juicy mangoes and jackfruit, perform the annual family Perunaal (the big day) and fund the home feast in God’s own land. They would sit in companionable silence as the fireflies lit up the dusk, while she wrote her critiques by the dull yellow light, and Ammumma ground her betel leaves and areca nuts to pieces, chewing slowly as the juice stained her black teeth.

Ammuma would regale her with tales from not so long ago, where women from the ‘lower’ castes bared their breasts and walked around, and there was a tax to be paid if they wished to cover their breasts. Ammumma hailed from Mulachiparambu, ‘the land of the breasted woman’, where a brave, lowercaste woman Nangeli, had chopped off her breasts in protest against the unfair breast tax, only to present it to the tax collector in a plantain leaf. In Ammumma’s presence, Rita felt a kinship that she could not explain, that transcended their ages. Ammumma herself had never worn a brassiere nor bound her breasts, instead wearing a shapeless white blouse that covered her flat chest, rendering her safe and sexless.

After her initial cackle of laughter, Ammumma had curiously asked her about Jeanne and how it felt to make love to a woman. Rita had shut her out in her head and studiously continued working, while Ammumma had cackled on, with wild ideas on how two women could make love.

Her eyes took on the others in the room. Mitra, the young mother with the baby. Madness to come on a trek of this kind with a baby, she mused. She had been mad too, coming barely a few months after her operation all the way from France. Mitra looked like a normal, average home-maker; not the mad kind, who went for treks, carrying a six-month-old baby, but the kind who married early bowing to family compulsions, had a baby within a year and waited in the evenings for their husband to come home from work to enjoy a hot, homecooked dinner; the kind who gave in too easy, was always on good terms with the world, and lacked ambition. What strange impulse had then made this young woman take that leap from conformity? She looked out of place here!

The baby woke up crying, and Mitra started nursing it now : a supposedly beautiful scene. Rita averted her eyes. It still hurt, losing a breast. The other girl was whistling a tune. Dia, tattooed, toe-ringed, with piercings all over.

Bone thin, with very little fat on her. Her breasts were flat, resembling a boy’s chest. They looked like Rita’s right chest. She closed her eyes, the prick of tears warming her face. Luckily, the shadows hid her. Cancer! She hated what she had been reduced to, what she was forced to be grateful for. The vulnerability of gratitude was an ugly garment to wear.

Mitra sat there, not bothering to cover her breasts as the baby suckled, indifferent to the picture she presented. There was no one to cover up for. The other two in the room were women, and somehow, she did not care if the sight offended their sensibilities. She looked down at her large breasts, the heaving movement of her full bosom, as the baby sleepily drank its fill from her nipples.

It still shocked her at times, this tug at her teats. It felt wicked, to feel a stirring in her loins, sometimes making her feel aroused. She was supposed to feel motherly. There were other times, when this whole feeding process felt disgusting -- the oozing of fluids, the straining of the breasts against the fabric as the milk flowed on its own staining her clothes, the ache in her breasts on days when she was too full and the hardening of her breasts when the milk refused to flow. On those days, she felt like a cow. Her clothes smelt, and she often felt nauseated by the stink, the bile rising in her stomach. To the world, she was the placid mother feeding her baby. She hated the fact that her love for her baby was determined by the milk she produced.

Oxytocin: that cursed love hormone, that raged within her. She softly stroked the babyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s hair as it slept on, slowly removing her breast out of his mouth.

Oxytocin, the internet proclaimed, was the reason she felt aroused while her baby fed. Oxytocin was the reason she was here, trekking a mountain with the baby much against her husbandâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s wishes, hoping to get her answers at the end of it; a baby that was not his, a fact he did not know, a secret that was eating her up.

Sitting in the small room, holed up with two of the unlikeliest companions she would ever chose, she felt lighter than she had in a long time. Seven years of an emotionless, almost sexless marriage that she had been unable to handle any more. Seven years of her life, where she had burnt her warmth to become stone-cold, frigid almost, forced into severe depression that she could scarce reveal to the outer world. He had continuously blamed her for her lack of spirit, accusing her of not being sexual enough. His small penis doing nothing to her body, his hands touching her in a cold, emotionless manner, often making her feel like an unpaid prostitute. And, he came too soon. Something in her told her that making love was not this. It was supposed to be a singing celebration of her senses, but she had feared his anger and its consequences, and held her peace. She would have had no answer to the question that would arise- how could she know what making love was supposed to feel like if he had been the only man she had ever known? But deep down she had longed for more, and ached. Her spirit knew more. Her depression had grown so much that he was finally forced to act. They had reluctantly visited a counsellor.

The arrogant superiority of her husband had come crashing down when they had found that he needed the help and the treatment and not her, if things had to improve. As he had sat there grappling with his ego, she had met her destiny in the man across the table, the man who was counselling them about relationships and how to have better sex.

And, it had been wonderful. The sex. Only, it was not with her husband. She had come shockingly alive, feeling like a virgin, every nerve of her singing as she did exactly whatever the doctor ordered. It had made the pathetic attempts at lovemaking by her husband bearable. Sometimes, the cloak of tradition made for a safe cover. No one would have suspected her of a roaring affair. No one would have suspected she had been dying within for seven years.

No one would have suspected that she had hated being married. No one would have suspected that she hated being a mother, and was just training herself to be one. She had longed for more sex, and had paid the price for her desire too soon.

She looked down at the layers of fat. Pregnancy was an ugly blot, a weapon to put a woman in her place. Pregnancy had de-sexed her again, stripping her of the aliveness that she had briefly enjoyed. Her husband had however, come alive in their marriage for the first time, fawning over her every move, taking care of her every need, a slave to the child that was not his.

She closed her eyes. She was in the doctor’s room now, and he was listening to her soft voice, gently stroking her hands.

'I wake up in the morning. A small heaviness in my heart soon snowballs into a deep welling pain, that almost threatens to choke me. I mentally shift my thinking to a happier frame of mind. I need to. As the coffee pot bubbles, my spirits lift and sink like the boiling milk on the stove. My most precious part of the day and I feel incredibly lonely. I am happy to be by myself, to be myself. I feel joyous about the million things being me implies. It is when my pot of happiness and sorrow bubble over that I long for a shoulder, an answering look in a partner’s eyes, the squeeze of a hand, the occasional brush of teasing lips on mine, the promise of laughter, life and hope. None of these I have ever known. In my moment of triumph or in my moments of pain, I long for my feelings to matter to someone. I want to matter to someone. I want hugs. I want kisses. I want to belong in someone's arms, to ramble every day nonsense, to talk profound sense, to be held tight like I matter. I want to feel like a woman. I want someone to embrace the warmth and sunshine that is in me. Instead, I have this cold mechanical life that is a dead marriage. I know what awaits me. Some days, the grandfatherly brush of his lips against mine, sometimes the giggly schoolboy and other times the abusive, indifferent sadist. My heart aches so much that I fear it would burst. Sometimes, for a woman, marriage is merely a journey from one house that does not want her, to another house that does not want her.

I see couples going for their morning walk, a simple act of togetherness and I long to be one of them. I can only watch on, with that ache, an outsider to that blessing called “companionship”. I feel like a widow with a partner who is mentally dead and physically alive, like a woman divorced while still married.

I feel old and beaten while I am still young and beautiful. The sun is not yet risen, and tears sting my eyes.

He is away on a work tour. My phone rings and I pick it up. There is very little to interest or excite me about the conversation. I know what we will say. How it will be the same conversation, played out every morning until he is back. I dare not say anything or ask anything or even be impatient in my answers. I must be careful with the other who is like a child, an abusive child who can hurt me due to his own insecurities. If I am bubbly, excited, alive or eager, I share that mood, so he could have the pleasure of killing it. For my safety and sanity, I need to act like I am fine, for the drama, that we need to play for the world's sake; for the failure, that we cannot show even to ourselves; for the kindness, I need to summon from deep within for an abuser because I am mentally stronger than him and kinder. And because I can. And he cannot. I need to strengthen myself from the pain of abuse and I need to continue to make him feel good about himself, boost his self-image because it is so fragile.

So he stops hurting me. I shrink myself a little more, and clip my wings a little.

I need to. If I want to make this work, I cannot fly in the skies, even in my mind. I need to clip my wings so that we are both broken without wings, and I never desire to fly higher than what he wants me to. That is the only companionship that is possible, that is the promise of the years to come.

All around us laughter spills, as we celebrate the coming year at his office party. There are couples dancing, their eyes flirt, and their hands own their partner's bodies in familiar, unfamiliar ways. I sit amidst the whirling couples, a lonely, married spinster. I would have given anything to have a man hold me with pride and joy as we twirl away. I think of all the ones who would have loved to have me in their arms, and I pretend I have many. But I ache alone. I turn to look at what should be the joy of my life. He is fast asleep. I can only politely refuse the offers of other gentlemen and ache alone and wait.

These are dark secrets I can speak to no one about. No one cares. And, they will not understand. They have not lived the million lives I have. They do not know the hundreds of times I have fallen and risen. I wake. I exist now. I come alive in occasional moments sparkling with my old vivaciousness, my mind and spirit free and soaring. Then, my daily life reminds me of what I should be.

And, the old, familiar, icy coldness descends into me. I remember that I am a married woman, a woman in a dead marriage that I cannot talk about.

Tears are still a sign of hope. My tears had dried up. I wondered how long this can go on? Then you came into my life, reminding me of all that I was, bringing a promise. And, I ache for you now. I ache for the life I know we cannot have.

The child here is ours.'

Mitra did not realise that she had been speaking aloud until she heard the gasp in the room. She opened her eyes. She had forgotten the presence of others in the room, forgotten where she was. She was not in the clinic with the man she loved. She was in a small room on some unknown mountain with strangers, spilling out her secrets in the darkness. The mask had slipped, and it was too late to put it back on. The baby was still sleeping blissfully.

Dia and Rita had not spoken a word, merely looking at her without any expression. Dia got up slowly, and went to the corner of the room and came back with a glass of water which she silently handed over to Mitra. It was then, that Mitra cried. Like she could never stop.

Rita’s hands were trembling. She was shaken to the core. What lies below the masks that people wear, the stereotypes that we reduce people to? Who would have thought Mitra would hide such a deep secret? And, the words! The way the child had articulated her pain. So poetic and beautiful. The whole scene looked like a set from a movie she would have shot. The flickering candle light.

A young mother nursing her child, hiding her secrets. And, a thin flat-chested girl hovering over, another misfit to the scene. She herself was out of place in the scene, she noted wryly. Three unlikely characters thrown into a silent drama, in which one had spoken her lines out loud; the wrong lines in the wrong scene to the wrong characters. Was life too precise or was it too random? They suddenly ceased to be strangers. They were a part of Mitra’s story now, keepers of her secret.

Dia lit a smoke, her hands trembling. Then, looking at the sleeping baby, she snuffed it out. The atmosphere in the room was too tense, and her nerves were at a screaming pitch. The room had become too small to handle all their pain.

She had to ask something that had been eating into her the last two days. She walked up to Rita and sat beside her. She put her hand on Rita’s chest on the right. Rita flinched.

Still from 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, 2007

‘How did that happen?’ she asked.

For a moment, it looked like Rita would ignore her question. She was glaring at Dia, daring her to continue. The warmth of Dia’s hands seemed to seep through her clothes, to scorch her scars.

When Rita had her first period, she had told no one. Hiding her stomach cramps, she had waited it out, hugging her dark moment of crossover to womanhood to herself. But they had found out, when her clothes were stained red, altering the confidence with which she wore her clothes forever. She had been deeply embarrassed and profoundly relieved to know she was normal and now a part of the older girl’s gang. For some reason, that memory played itself out in her mind now. She felt found out, exposed in her vulnerability and abnormality and somehow relieved.

‘She could have been my daughter’, she thought, looking at Dia for the first time. She noticed her beautiful eyes with their dark lashes. Earlier, all that had caught her eye were the tattoos and piercings.

She was in the room with the doctor who was telling her the results from her reports. They were wheeling her in. She was waking up now, her right breast gone. Jeanne was there, holding her hand. Not Jeanne, it was Dia now holding her hand, stroking it, Dia who could have been her daughter, except she had no daughter. She closed her eyes. She was sobbing now. Mitra put the baby down gently, and came over. They were holding her now, and she was slipping into blackness. Anaesthesia. She is gasping to come out of it. She was floating. She was being tossed around. Up. Down. Up. Down. Crying. Someone was stroking her back gently. Ammumma. Jeanne. Mitra.

Looking at her, Mitra remembered the exact moment, the baby had come out of her. Push, push harder. How…. She cries. Like you would shit. Shit! The baby comes out sailing. Come here, not there. Come look at me. I am delivering a baby, damn it. Don’t crowd around the other woman, just because she is screaming louder. Her husband’s ugly face surfaces beaming. Where is the father? Which one? He is the father, the beaming, ugly man. He is the father, though he is not the one.

Here, feed this baby. Says the nurse thrusting a squealing, red-faced monkey into her hands. No… she cries and smilingly takes the monkey. It latches on hungrily to her teats. Her husband looks on proudly. She feels sick. She is in pain. She smiles her most motherly smile. She is part of the tribe now. She has delivered. The nurses hover around. Sit in this hot tub now. It is boiling. Are you mad? It will relax your muscles. Heal your insides. Nooooo…. She screams, as they push her down in the boiling water. Up. Down. Up. Down. Crying. Her breasts are heaving. They hurt. Squeeze them, so the milk comes out for the baby.

The evening lights are dim. The long road is empty. Dia is on the bike, screaming at the top of her lungs. Singing. They come from nowhere, laughing madly. They block the road. And, she is flying. Flying far away, to land with a thud. Her head hurts.

Baby, where is your chest? Let’s rub our tits against each other. The ugly man is pushing himself down atop her. She is protesting, pushing him away. Look at this one, she has even less tits than I have. Someone was pinching her nipples hard, she is crying with pain. Her bike lies on one side, the wheels are still turning. She is pinned down beside the road. The three men loom over her. One is yanking at her piercings, while another is unzipping her pants. Nooooooo, she screams. No one listens. Up. Down. Up. Down. Crying. An hour later, she rides home, unable to bear the pain. Three of them have had a go at her for an hour, taking turns. She is a bleeding mess. But, who would believe that a bike riding, tattoo-sporting, piercing galore girl alone at night was not asking for it?

A girl with no tits or hips.

She was crying now. Hard. The soft flow of feminism washes over her as she rocks herself to and fro in Rita’s arms. She needed to own her body again. To love the flatness of her chest, that even a rapist ridiculed. Flat chests were ok. #Metoo she types. She is standing on a podium. Spoken poetry. She is crying.

Shouting out her journey, the tears flowing down, her voice broken, her spirit fighting for fresh air. They are clapping hard now, drowning the slapping noise of the three men over her body. As she steps down from the stage, she cringes in fear as arms reach out to congratulate her. At night she wets the bed again.

She is at a survivor meet. “The first thing a girl must be taught and taught hard is to live for herself. To become a custodian of her own journey through its joys and pain and not have her story taken over since the day of her birth by others. To discover who she is, to own her thoughts, to be proud of her mind, to accept her body. That is the one thing she is never taught. It is hardwired in her to always consider others first, to put others before her needs, it is drilled into her that she matters the least in her own story, like she is some invisible character. Her feelings are trivialised, her emotions made to look silly, her self-expression branded. The sham is worse in our generation. Except we won’t take it lying down.”

Her speech ends. They are clapping now, their faces close to hers.

I am just 21. Such an old 21. All covered in tattoos, piercings, every act a scar to be recorded. My young skin bears many scars. Yes baby, my skin bears more scars than your body can dream of. And, I am still fighting. Yes, I am still fighting. She croons twanging the guitar.

Dia looks at Rita. ‘At least you have half a breast, I have none. Flat chested.

Add that to your story of pain. Beneath the don't care masks I wear, every taunt is like a whiplash, biting into my skin to leave a scar. Do you know who was the first person to pinch my breasts and tease me about its flatness? My father. Do you see this skin scar? Burnt skin? That was my mother for daring to protest about my father. I ran away from home that night and have never gone back.’ They stroke her scars and somehow, the scars seem less in number than she remembers. Do scars fade with touch?

The rain continues to beat against the window. The candle is almost done.

The room feels stifling from the heat of the naked bulb. The night seems endless, weaving a thick tapestry of tears and smiles, secrets and fears, a blanket of cover for three women.

The little stove is bubbling. Dia tosses in some instant noodles. They sit huddled together, dipping into the hot, soupy concoction, talking, crying, laughing through the night.

Three can be a tribe.

5 ½ tits. It is not a bad number.

Some secrets are best shared.

Are you going to tell him?

I don’t know. I may.

Two flat tits are better than just one.

It takes the same effort to get those nipples out.

This is the breast party I have ever been to.

I am giggling. I am crying. I feel I am finally home.

Can I put my head on your lap, for just a little bit?

Let me put that cream on you. Does it itch less now?

Someone is knocking at the door. It is early dawn.

“The rescue party is here!” Dia cries.

The three women look around, at the small room that had been their prison for the night, loathe to leave its warmth now.

Mitra is taking pictures.

They are taking a selfie now.

Let us take a breastie! Dia cries.

They laugh.

Still from Workin' Moms, 2017-present

5 ½ breasts and how they get along just fine. Someone should write about this!

Will be funny. The women will understand.

The men?

They may.

They come to the broken bridge, the jeep is crossing it now. They pass a group of tribal women, who are walking through the mountain path, their children slung over their shoulder, their uncovered breasts jiggling as they walk. They catch each other’s eyes. Dia rolls her eyes, and putting on her drollest expression, juts her tiny, flat chest out. They giggle. The sun is out bright, after the rains.

Some aches disappear, some itches stop, and a few things you outgrow, just like that, over a single night. Especially, if you find your tribe.

Jeanne read the message, chuckled and typed, ‘The left works just fine even if it is not the right one! Can’t wait to see ya!’

Eyes Like Mine

By Miren Bizoumei (Мирен Бeзумие)

A deep brown, much like bromine in water, Liquid in ecstasy, reticent otherwise.

A slight squint that ensures I know not where you're looking, Much like your secretive mind, because I know not what you're thinking.

Years of sorrow I see in them, a deep anguish, I would take all of it, I would, I would And drown it in my river of love.

Yet those deep brown eyes reveal only so much, I can't distinguish, I look at them, I see them, I feel them rove.

Across my face and into my own eyes, sometimes transfixed as they take in My naked body and when I allow it, of much more.

Is it wonder I see? Longing? Is it kindness I see? Anxiety? Or gratitude maybe?

Mostly it's myself I see in those eyes of yours.

Myself I see, in all of my flawed glory, in those eyes of yours.

Miren is a multi-passionate busy bee. She likes to write about things that make her mad. One will always find a notebook with a black pen and her BlackBerry Passport with her at all times because who knows what might prompt her to write. In 'Eyes Like Mine', she explores masculine fragility and the emotional labor women perform very often, almost unknowingly, when they try to make a safe space for expression for their partners.

Written from a female lover's point-of-view, as she gazes upon her male lover's eyes and contemplates what goes on within, it is a reflection on vulnerability and trust in romantic relationships and how we as human beings are the same in our search for love and belonging.

Those eyes of yours.

Eyes like mine.

But no, if your eyes were eyes like mine, they would cry, They would pour all the agony out as salt and water.

And I would lead the salty stream to my sweet river of love, So it would dance away from you into the ocean, That is the universe.

You would be left a little lighter, But you wouldn't have that, would you?

That salt and water is for you to weep and no, they were not for me.

Not for eyes like mine.

Even so, my river flows, hoping for the day It could carry your salt and water to meet the ocean, That is the universe.

That ocean I see in those eyes of yours.

Eyes like mine.

Melete

By Tara Kachroo Tara Kachroo explores the integrated experience of human somatics through her work as an Integrative Movement Therapist. She is queer and polyamorous, madly in love with her romantic partner and deeply devoted to her domestic one.

She reads comic books, takes cold showers, primarily writes non-fiction, is the mother of one precocious 6 year old, and has been accused of being blunt more times than she can count.

My mouth, your neck and this longing

How possible we are when entangled, pre tangled Blurred at the edges of your/my limbs we are Lost from rather than in, nah, bigger than Time Time that is for me like concrete blocks, like bricks, my mind the mortar heart strickly inventoried

But with you For when your eyes open on mine we are graced this dilation a widening glance, and Time’s soft chiasm enveloping its own shape Guess you are my muse born from the movement of water eroding the banks Melete you Mark me And I sing, I cry, I break to pieces, and find myself standing with bricks scattered, a ruined landscape, this heart unaccountably wild.

Meet the CV Team

Sonali is the founder of Carved Voices.

Physicist, poet, polymath, and a feminist motivational speaker, she is the woman forever in the pursuit of the impossible and in love with the ideation of love itself. She stresses on female friendships, politics of the self, unlearning, cuddles and quantum gravity. She is soon to have a PhD in theoretical Physics, is a gender strategist and is the author of the book "Leaking Ink".

Gunjan is our guest curator for this issue of Carved Voices. She is a poststructural, post-colonial AND feminist writer, (re-) writing on the concepts of gender, identity, religion and resistance.

She has a PhD in Education and Development Studies that sheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s not afraid to use. She has taken the Carved Voices interviews with people we love and want to feature to the world, to new heights!

Among other things, Lei is a developing physicist, a sporadic singer-songwriter, an avid home cook, an experienced traveller, and a passionate learner. She aspires to be a considerate and outspoken voice for those who are not often heard. She is the face and brain behind the beautiful social media graphics of our artists and writers we manage to present to the world.

Shantashree Mohanty is the co-founder of Carved Voices and a compulsive lover of words. She has a masters in criminal law.

She is a Civil Judge by profession but pleases to describe herself as a 'failing writer' and 'a woman without qualities' who much like a young James Joyce, forges in the smithy of her soul, the uncreated conscience of the world around.

Anchita is the guest editor of Carved Voices. Most days, it's the melancholy infused with rage that awakens the crazy poet within her. Her days are spent in pitch dark rooms making light dance to her fingers, as she mulls over her existential crisis over cups of perfectly concocted coffee. The stage has been her home for quite some time now and outside it, her itchy feet long to find footholds in distant mountains and write stories about people who have lost their way with words.

Being both a devoted scientist and a creative writer, Kalpshree has been enthusiastically juggling a masterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s degree in gene manipulation alongside the immersive internship at Carved Voices. Keeping it short and sweet, she describes herself as "genetically heterozygous for writing and science. The nerdy intern trying to break the chain!"

Jess is our resident artist and co-curator.

By day, Jess works for a charity in the North of England, and spends most of their spare time drinking coffee and falling into endless internet spirals. Along with making art, Jess enjoys queer comics, fantasy novels, true crime podcasts, and music that was released in 2006. Jess is inspired by queer culture, honest conversationalists, liminal spaces, and magical realities.

Writer and feminist, Sherein Bansal is the Creative Editor at Carved Voices. She loves being an editor and has worked with Pratham Books for three years. She finds home in the first sight of approaching hills, by the water, in the food she cooks, in a deep-scented page in the corner of a library, with her mum, in her friendships, in oral stories, and in smashing patriarchy by a variety of methods from everyday things to being one of the coordinators of 'I Will Go Out' and 'One Billion Rising'.