“Sense organs are the parts of your body that you use to feel things.”
The Skin –
Your face is wrapped in skin. It binds your body together like a map binds a country – setting its boundaries, giving the country an outer appearance of a form, a shape. A form of control, with no space for reckless abandon. A very orderly mask. Underneath the skin and within the map, your body is wounded and your country festers. Disorder enthrones itself as Master. In school, they taught you of two kinds of maps – the physical map of India and the political map of India. The physical – a comprehensive whole. The political – like cracked, barren land. As if they were two separate entities, and not one carrying the other. Your body is physical. Your body is political. Its comprehensive boundaries crack it open. Pieces of you fall out. Sometimes you collect them and put them back together. Sometimes, you do not. Sometimes, you cannot. In Uttar Pradesh, a woman, 8 months pregnant was forced to perform panchayat poll duty during the height of coronavirus crisis. Her body was physical, carrying politics within its womb. The news report said, “She was forced to travel 32 kilometres to reach the polling station on 15 April. She spent more than 12 hours on the field.” By the eighth week of pregnancy, a baby’s heart beats at 160 beats per minute. By week eleven, their tongues know taste. By week sixteen, ears form. By week twenty eight, light seeps in through the skin. Eight months is close to thirty five weeks. Across 32 kilometres, the baby saw, smelled, & heard the world outside. By the eighth month, the baby tasted a country; mouthful of sorrow. The political poisoned by the physical. Death by poisoning. A dismantled mother. A dismantled baby. The doctor must call it a case of state induced grief poisoning. Mr. Prime Minister – was that one COVID death or two?
The Tongue –
The body is made of muscles. Their labour is both muscular and emotional. A heart physically aches when overwhelmed. Sometimes calves twitch under stress. The tongue is a muscle – conduit to the heart. It is the only muscle that compels you into articulation. We learn – “P” for Pain, “H” for Helplessness, “S” for Sadness, “R” for Rage. There are only so many words that language allows in writing. It allows much more in speaking – mmnnnnuuulllaaahbll – the sound your tongue makes when it rolls against itself, entangled. Your words never capture the primal your tongue does. The country is mmnnnnuuulllaaahbll-ing. A brave daughter lost her brave father when she was in jail. They never saw each other. What she feels will rest itself on her tongue, seated on edge, gurgling before it has meaning for an audience. For the most part, it will stay within her. She will have to live with its taste. Do you know what grief tastes like? Sometimes don’t you wonder how much of grief is just failure of language? It escapes meaning, it yearns comfort. You have to distract & spoil it with magic tricks – if you hold your breath long enough, you will be able to hold back a sob; if you count backwards from ten, it will end by the time you reach zero. Magic tricks as antidote to grief. Is that not how your parents taught you to swallow medicines? They layered it in jam, so you wouldn’t know its taste. But you always knew. Grief never tastes different. They said the daughter who lost her father betrayed her country. Let us rewrite this sentence. They betrayed the country who lost her father. The country is mmnnnnuuulllaaahbll-ing.
The Eyes & The Ears
They are paired, from one point of the head to the other, as if to say – one is not enough, you will need two; as if to say – if something is not clear enough, it will have to be clearer. If something is not loud enough, it will have to be louder. In the country you live in, only one eye works. Only one ear works. They don’t want you to see and hear too much. The lesser you know the better it is. Often however, too little is also too unendurable. One eye contains a river, dead bodies stay afloat in it. It cries in mourning. In the Yamuna river, dead bodies are floating on water. With every tear shed, a dead body falls. The eye hopes there would be an end to it. But the more bodies it sheds, the more it gathers. Grief doesn’t die with bodies, it multiplies. The other eye cannot see the dead, not even nebulously. It tries to whisper to the crying eye – no one is dead, the news is feeding into your imagination, “Look, her father recovered, he found an oxygen cylinder on time.” It envisions protection for itself, ripping apart trees to build a wall of concrete, opaque as it gets. Perhaps, to become even more blind in the darkness of its megalomaniac cave. The monster inside the cave is growling with hunger. You can almost see its blind eye gleaming. It will feed on a dying country. It will feed on death. One of the ears, on the other side of the country can hear its people screeching. The ear is baffled, decoding the pandemonium, extracting one sound from another. How differently do people mourn – some of us sob, crying out a song. Some of us shift into silence, oscillating between mum and mumbling; incomprehensive even in quietness. The rest are echoes – one ambulance siren after the other. An echo is most commonly understood as sound that repeats itself. There’s an echoing death knell in the gut of this country. “Hello, do you have an oxygen bed. A 20 year old boy cannot breathe”, “Hello, I need medicine, one vial of Remdesivir please. Someone’s lungs are collapsing”, “Hello, please I called yesterday also”, “Hello, thank you for trying, but she is no more”, “Hello, so so so sorry for your loss”. Tring-tring. Tring-tring. Tring-tring. “The person you are trying to reach is currently out of network coverage area.” There are no telephone towers in the after-world, are there? The other ear can hear all of this, only its ego is impaired.
The Nose –
Chiselled, like a sculpture, almost as if intentionally left crooked – to perform the most crooked function of all times – to breathe and carry on the nausea of living. Inhaling and exhaling. It is interesting how well this servant of life sniffs out the poignancy of death. The odour of death is a feeling of home and homelessness. People linger after their bodies just the way stench lingers. There is a sadness in what they leave behind and it rubs itself off to everything that comes in contact. A photo from a crematorium shows a man holding onto his wife’s kameez. It looks almost as if he is breathing in the kameez, for a moment that is all he needed to carry on living. On most days, we need to do more than inhale and exhale, we need more than oxygen. This odour is the feeling of home. Homelessness is not far away. The air of the same crematorium is thick with a massacre. Flakes of burnt wood and burnt flesh sit on every nostril. No one knows what the man smells. Odours of home and homelessness have muddled up into each other. One is no longer without the other. It is possible to experience life and death in one split second. On social media, people say ashes are settling on their rooftops. It is almost as if the dead are raining themselves down for us to breathe them in. You can try to rinse them off, but you cannot. The nose will perform its function, and lifelessness will plant itself within you. It will take thick roots, engulfing your body. Sooty residues will settle into you like home-sickness, permanently suspended within the confines of your body. They will consume you each time you even get close to smelling home. The State will have a new crisis – how to feed the dead residing inside the living?