Back from my weekend in the city. I returned in the midst of a power cut, and Samrad, Ankur, and Manish drove me back in the dark, wheels hard on gravel. After taking a few blind turns on the dirt road leading up to the institution, Samrad seemed awed that I would live so far out. Salute, he said. Today I am down with mild cramps and feeling quiet, gentle, slightly out of sorts. The director taught me about allophonic variations in Tamil phonology in the afternoon, and everything has begun to make sense. I’ve waited two weeks for this.

October 6th, 2011, Thursday

Woke up to a photo of Eddy’s plane ticket to Singapore. This happiness has to be one of the simplest, most straightforward ones I’ve ever experienced.

Sloshed my way through the day, and felt my feet being chained to sleep.

October 7th, 2011, Friday

The caretaker and security guard Thanasi is wildly cute. He’s little and crinkled and old, and buys me bananas. When I speak coherently in Tamil, he says, SUPER!

Madam Ganga Gowri filled the classroom with sleep and sick. I know the feeling, she needs to be under a whirring fan and fed porridge.

October 7th, 2011, Friday evening

6.35pm in Murugan Idli shop, with a sign that says OIL AND PODI EXTRA CHARGE. Outside, the strange strain of indianised hallehlujahs, exactly the way you’d imagine it to be. A neon cross, above the dirt and fruit vendors and rough autos, the jasmine flowers that fall from female heads. You stop for two seconds, disoriented. A French boulangerie beckons in the distance, and it looks air-conditioned and right for solitude. Inside, the clock hand is stuck at three and all is bright and locked. The singing continues. Thiru Hotel, Style Zone Men’s Wear, Jesus Christ looming in the back, a 3D figurine slightly bowed, the way no Hindu deity would.

October 8th, 2011, Saturday

At Vellore we watch the sun from inside the car, an angry red yolk in the sky. Samrad tells us we would have seen the sun rise from the same bridge an hour earlier. A couple putters by on a dusty bike, their faces turned towards the light.

The landscape opens up yellow and used as we drive past the eastern ghats, and Jain temples lead the way towards Karnataka.

October 10th, 2011, Monday

Yercaud, lying 150km away from Chennai city, is described as a poor man’s Ooty, and it is easy to see why. There is a haphazard, small-town feel to it, the restaurants are fancy but dusty, and the lake grimy at its edges. We fish up duckweed from the middle of the lake, which slouches in a corner of our paddle boat, defeated. When we leave we drive round and around the hill, where we see an imploring NO MORE PLASTICS NOBLE TOURIST hammered to the edge of a hair pin bend.

My favourite part of the weekend was the drive back to Chennai, racing the day changing into night. When the last petticoat of light was removed, we found ourselves on a short cut between highways in Chennai driving through agricultural land, the city lit behind tall grass. It reminded me of America. It reminded Samrat of Chandigarh. We only have the places we know, and they return time and time again, to the walls and trees and our view of the present.

October 11th, 2011, Tuesday

Learned two rules of Tamil verb formation today. Potentially very useful, and it feels like I’m collecting stones to lay the base of a house which will hopefully be comfortable to occupy.

October 14th, 2011, Friday

I went to bed and woke up two days later. How is it now Friday? I thought yesterday was Wednesday, and so on. The days become nameless not when one is travelling, but when the tessellation of routine makes one dizzy.

The diglossic nature of Tamil is proving to be more of a challenge than I’d initially imagined. In other words, it is driving me crazy. My tongue feels old and stiff, incapable of the acrobatics involved in this new speech. Even in the instances when my tongue rises up to the occasion, my mind falls behind, tangled in the verbal participles, the infinitives, the tail-ends of each finite verb. I now understand what they mean when they keep telling me that locals have an “inner grammar” I am not privy to, and that each grammatical rule they teach me is inconsistent because they are observations of a form that exist, and are not set rules. I understand now what mother tongue means — it is the luxury of having a home in a language that can be taken for granted, it is the not-thinking before you speak, it is the casting off of names and ripping straight to the root of content. It is safe and second-nature.

October 18, 2011, Tuesday

I have not been diligent.

Instead, I have been in a constant battle with mosquitoes, lizards, earthworms, and all manner of unrecognised bugs. Today a lizard banged itself against the wired netting of my bathroom window, seemingly livid. I looked down, and saw two earthworms copulating at my feet, behind the toilet cistern. It’s not them that’s out of place, it’s me and my whole set up. Then there are the dogs, growling and clawing at my door with their paws. I’m not sure what they want, but it feels like I owe nature something. This space, my bathroom, my bed. My incense burns itself into a straight line that hangs. The larger lizard emerges. The smaller one continues banging on the netting in the bathroom. I can hear the dogs pant.

October 19th, 2011, Wednesday

I have been thinking about Arden, the boy once named Seth Miller. Then Arden Miller, then James Arden, and now Sherlock. Somewhere in between he was named Thomas, maybe. I think about him when my eyebrow twitches, I think about him in six month gaps. He remembers my story about mocking the midnight bell. That was a real summer, my first summer, my only one thus far. Him with the discarded pack of American Spirits, burning up the last fag. “Temples of doom”, he had said, laughed maniacally, then kissed me. We watched the illuminated interiors crumble. When I think about him I think about how someone can leave an impression like that in twenty-four hours, the same amount of impression someone else takes a year to leave. The same depth, and so much less sorrow. All that magic, and he was so warm. I remember the hot relief of tomorrow, the panic of the morning, putting on that purple dress. If I had been free, would I have curled, would I have smelt like earth too?

October 20th, 2011, Thursday

My attempt to befriend the Tamil language feels like only half the reason I am here. Most of the time I read, I play scrabble, I fear the bugs. I’m not sure why I am here, but I know it is to not be there. Progress is slow, and in true Indian style, my classes are often cancelled, teachers go on leave, and it is always some such holiday or another.

October 20th, 2011, Thursday evening

Thanasi has dark, leathery skin that hangs off his skinny frame. He’s weathered, but not in the sort of masculine, brave way. He reminds me of my father, a frame for clothes to hang off, pleased with himself in a ratty white singlet. He calls me his kuzhundai, his child. My favourite sight is of him sitting by the big institution gates at dusk, around 5.30pm, reading his newspaper in a plastic chair. He is happiest when he is feeding me and refusing my money.

October 21, 2011, Friday

I am going home, home to Singapore today, only it feels like someone’s stuffed a dumbcane down my mouth, and my throat is closed tight. Slept with chest constrictions and this painful swallowing — it hurts like a sore throat, but as if there’s no way down. I feel like I might retch up a snake. I want to gasp and gasp, undrown. Instead, I google, “Why does my throat feel constricted?” Someone on a forum described it as a sob that is stuck.

November 2nd, 2011, Wednesday

I returned to a season so moist and wet that it seeps through my walls and leaves dark stains. My box of matches have soaked themselves with this air, and the matches will not light.

Chennai in the rainy season (marai kalam) brings the wildest sounds to my doorstep at night; I can close my eyes and imagine a full-fledged forest out there. If I stay here long enough I can study each other, the creak of the bullfrog layered beneath the crying crickets, the insistent throaty vibrations of unidentified insects. I can drown them all out with the fan, the modern whirr of obliteration.

November 4th, 2011, Friday

I never have to think about chests as much as I do in India. It is Friday, I’m heading out on the long rambly bus to the city, and all I think about are chests, covered, uncovered, flat, nipple-less the way an ex-boyfriend thought they should be, hairy. They explode into a myriad of flesh coloured grotesque spiders, and they all run away crying. Only it’s not them, it’s me, and I’m crying on the bus because a man I trusted, who calls me his child, has touched my chest on the pretext of telling me to cover my already covered chest. Then touched my bum, hands firm, fingers more knowing than me. Then told me to go, and I went, dazed, and boarded this bus.

I’m twenty-four, I no longer need a list from my mother telling me places where strangers should not be touching me. Strangers, she had said. Not uncles, friendly security guards, grandfathers. The bus passes a short shopping complex, supporting a big board rising visible even behind the rain: BECAUSE BUTTONLESS IS HOW YOU LIKE ME. I’m confused for a moment, but of course, it is merely an advertisement for a mobile phone

November 13th, 2011, Monday

Spent a weekend in Triplicane and recovered myself. Picked up a piece the first night at Broadlands when everything was dark and damp, picked up another as I lit bundles of agarbatti to wage a war against new mosquitoes. Picked up one more as I woke up under a soft fan to the morning call, to prayers and light. There are many things I am beginning to like abut this city.

And then a tug at the heart for the optician’s boy who grins toothily at me and tells me which frame he prefers me in. Another on the bus when the conductor yells at me, frenzied, and I grow mad, only to have other passengers tell me to zip up my bag. No one gropes me at the Sandaremkuttu durgah, even though there are more bodies pressed against mine than there ever has been, even though it is night and they would be safe. We sit under the fullest moon on the beach in Kovalam, and I’m the only shawled figure on the entire men-specked beach. A shopkeeper returns me 8 rupees change after I give him 20 for agarbatti and a matchbox and walk quickly away, he calls me back and is only bemused. I am chastised by my carelessness with the 8 rupees. Spend money on the most direct of local economies, I decide. Go only to small ice cream parlours and milkshake shops.

I pay through my teeth for an internet connection here. I have one more month to read twenty books and become fluent in a language I still don’t love.

2) It is difficult not to love a country whose skies split into three every evening — blue, orange, and fresh — whose backyards are burnt only by barbeques, and whose relaxed days can coax a sloth out of anyone, even a well-trained Singaporean. When I leave I tell myself the problem with Australia is that it does not push enough words or work out of me.

3) But where else can we be battlers together in slippers treading the fine clubs, having dinners on sidewalks? Our bicycles, our tent. The boat pulleys snap and bring me back. Somewhere in Dharamkot someone takes a photo of a room we once inhabited, of slated pavements we had to climb. Someone else wakes up crying and asking to be held. We’ve walked so far and there is still the world to go.

So meet me in Melaka. Meet me in Jakarta, meet me in the hills of the north. Meet me in Singapore. Meet me as we spin our own fiction growing damp from below, where our little bed smells like burnt sun and salt on skin. Meet me at the film festivals we will be too poor to afford, in the pie shops, behind the markets already tattooed on our tongues. Meet me at the top of a hill I cycle up exuberant. Race me down. Meet me in Bangladesh, where we’ve already honeymooned, meet me on the carpets where the neighbours can see us, hard-pressed and reflected in a panel of mirrors that watch our skin differ like firmament and sky. Meet me in Perth, the country town trying to be a city that I have grown to love within the lifespan of a book. Meet me in the library, where the light leaks through the northernmost window in winter. On the grass, after class; in the bathroom, I’ve got the warm water running. We’ll run to a dinghy that might capsize in the spaces of panic where brakes might not work. Meet me in the absent minds of grandmothers who remember only how to laugh. Meet me for an astronomic romance in the ghetto or the suburbs in the superbright sky. Meet me where our stories are told in our two languages, where they merge somewhere warm and surprising in my mouth, on your freckled shoulders as they pull into mine with desire that has followed us from Nepal to Noosa, on a leash short with time that your brother broke on a wall dusty with glass that meets the morning with rough hands. For there is nothing except this flight-pathed world that we live in, so meet me where the star ferries ply dirtier skies and where a meal can be had alone. Meet me between the crimson and the ginger, where there is a possibility of a clean bright barefooted future that we could paint blue. Meet me.

4) I answered too quickly when he asked me if I liked Australia. It’s alright, is what I should have said. It’s alright, when the shared nights are warm, when the occasional stranger pushes my bike up an overgrown hill. Alright, but meet me somewhere else, all where else, everywhere else.

The skies are tolerably large, is what I should have said.

Extracts from ‘Extracts from a Banaras Diary’, by Satyajit Ray

March 1, 1956
Set out at 5 a.m. to explore the ghats. Half an hour to sunrise, yet more light than one would have thought, and more activity. The earliest bathers come about 4 a.m., I gather. The pigeons are not active yet, but the wrestlers are…

…In the afternoon the same ghats present an utterly different aspect. Clusters of immobile widows make white patches on the greyish ochre of the broad steps. The bustle of ablution is absent. And the light is different, importantly so. The ghats face east. In the morning they get the full frontal light of the sun, and the feeling of movement is heightened by the play of cast shadows. By 4 p.m. the sun is behind the tall buildings whose shadows now reach the opposite bank. Result: a diffused light until sunset perfectly in tune with the subdued nature of the activity.

Morning scenes in the ghat must be shot in the morning, and afternoon scenes in the afternoon.

March 4
Visited the Durga Temple. People who come here with the intent of offering a prayer to the deity usually do so with half a mind, the other half being on the monkeys. These animals go about the place as if they owned it. Irresistibly funny, they sometimes go for your bag of peanuts with alarming viciousness. But when they swing from the bell-ropes and perform an impromptu carillon, the sight and sound are no longer merely comic.

Rich possibility of a scene here, with Apu.

March 15
At the ghats at 5 a.m. to shoot the pigeons. Memorable fiasco. The shot was to be of the pigeons taking flight in a body from their perch on the cornices and making enormous circular sweeps in the sky, as is the way with them. We had a fairly potent looking bomb which we meant to explode to set the pigeons flying. The camera was set up and Subir had set the match to the fuse when, with barely half a minute to go, Nimai started making frantic but indefinable gestures. We could sense something was wrong, and Subir made an eloquently mimed appeal to the bomb to refrain from exploding. The bomb went off, the pigeons performed nobly, but the camera didn’t turn. And then we discovered that the motor had not been connected to the battery.

Luckily, after three of four sweeps the pigeons were back on their perch, and with the second bomb (we had four) we had out shot.

Took the 9 o’clock train to Moghulsarai. Ramani Babu (seventy-year old resident of Banaras we picked up on the ghat) with us to play Uncle Bhabataran: also Karuna and Pinky. Shooting inside a third class compartment. Sarbajaya and Apu leave Banaras with Bhabataran. Train crosses bridge. S and A look out of window. B eats an orange, spits pips out of window. We give the old man an orange but he consumes it before the camera is ready, so we give him another.

1) Where did the year go to? Packed into luggage and bags of different sizes, and shipped off to different parts of Asia. A hardy canvas reeking of dirt for India, warm clothes for Nepal, jute bags for Bangladesh, and a dainty cabin-sized suitcase for Hong Kong. I have spent the last few months travelling chameleon and so the rest of the year will follow suit, dressed alternately in boots and chappals, coats and dhotis. Two months in Australia, and the rest of the year in India. The gap between this year and the next closes.

2) He left me with a homemade video of space, and then returned a Buddhist. It is Jeremy’s last transit in Asia, and a bearded man greets me at the door. His clothes smell familiar, the mix of train surfaces and and a smokier air reminding me of a farther home. We spend our first afternoon together on the couch discussing happiness, then head for Indonesian Padang to solidify it. Under the whirring fans of Warong Nasir he tells me happiness cannot be external, and that inner knots must be untied. I visualise a sailor’s knot, double-looped and simple; I imagine combing it out, setting strands of fibre free.

When he leaves, I discover a note on my pillow, and a packet of toilet paper and mosquito coil. Nothing is entangled, they are instead rolled neatly and plastic-packed.

3) I am spending my day with microfisches again. This time it is with the War Office, and my task is to scan now-transparent intelligence files for information on the Indian National Army. I instead find love letters of a disintegrating colonial-era marriage, affairs with local Tamilian women, and diary entries of Chinese communists wedged between a constant search for higher peace. At work I am a supermario munching on words, running into the occasional hundred point bonus of recorded scandals.

4) The route grows familiar–a hurried climb up Oxley Rise, past the Thandayuthapani temple I once examined for its Shiva reliefs, past the river and its merrycrabmakers, past the bridge–still too early to be littered–and then round the bend at the Central, into Hong Kong Street. We spend our nights close to the architecture firm Gladys is now working at, and we’ve already named the dishes nearby and starred our favourites. I have only a month left of these evenings, only a short glimpse left into the frenzied life of my friends, a ten-course meal of love affairs and hard work salted with our youth, hand-delivered and unstamped.

It’s been a while since I’ve had time to sit and be silent. I thought it would happen when I took off abruptly from a ridiculously over-packed life in Singapore into India, Nepal, and Bangladesh, but buses were never quiet, maps never still. It was one mad adventure after another, with barely any time to write or record–or perhaps I didn’t make any. I returned to the insanity of putting a show together with Winnie and Amanda for the Substation, and then spent all free computer time writing articles, reports, and emails, exploiting my experiences for money to get by. And then came the elections. Anyone living in Singapore will know how intense the atmosphere is, how odd and exciting unprecedented political chatter sounds at home and out of it, how strangers will now speak to each other on the streets, share copies of the Straits Times to sit on at rallies (and deservedly so)…in short, making the most out of the most important two weeks of Singapore’s political trajectory for a while.

Then it happened tonight, at Bani Haykal’s gig at The Pigeonhole. I made a date to take my face out of #sgelections, but was feeling regretful even as I read about rallies beginning whilst I rushed to (the real) Tanjong Pagar. I first met Bani at the Substation when he wandered in on the last day of our exhibition after we’d taken everything down. He was almost barefoot, curious and interested in everything. His music is similar: in it I found the silence of a narrative that can only be present because it listened to me listening, it was pure, unselfish, and it brought words back to an original form, before it got mixed up in work and money. He alternated tunes that in my limited music vocabulary I would describe as experimental and discordant, with the more melodic harmonies b-quartet is known for. It interrupted the listening fatigue I usually experience with homogeneously styled albums (we all know this…the ear drift), and provoked an intensity in listening that I’ve forgotten. I think I listened with a frown, but only because I was trying to examine the patterns of light behind each framed loop, to tightrope walk each linear boundary laid out gently by Bani.

There are quiet connections between us all, Woolf’s invisible lines that stretch, distort, and thin-out, criss-crossing relationships and humans and trains, the overweight tree and the terrier across the road. Reading about the elections, watching passionate (and impassionate) speeches, listening to hope and change and fairy-words bake and brown have lifted these connections out from the underground, have dusted them off for everyone to see dressed up in coats like Nationalism and Citizenship and Singaporean. Everyone holds hands. When Bani sings “all our stencils quiver/maps distorted skies” and behind my eyelids is the dark that children learn not to fear, the stretch of these connections cease being measured in distance and time. They melt into an intimate hum, viscous only with the vibrations of the chord all humans have in them. It is the skin-feeling part of hand holding, the only part that can provoke a tremble.

Millions of babies watching the skies
Bellies swollen, with big round eyes
On Jessore Road–long bamboo huts
Noplace to shit but sand channel ruts

Millions of fathers in rain
Millions of mothers in pain
Millions of brothers in woe
Millions of sisters nowhere to go

One Million aunts are dying for bread
One Million uncles lamenting the dead
Grandfather millions homeless and sad
Grandmother millions silently mad

Millions of daughters walk in the mud
Millions of children wash in the flood
A Million girls vomit & groan
Millions of families hopeless alone

Millions of souls nineteenseventyone
homeless on Jessore road under grey sun
A million are dead, the million who can
Walk toward Calcutta from East Pakistan

Taxi September along Jessore Road
Oxcart skeletons drag charcoal load
past watery fields thru rain flood ruts
Dung cakes on treetrunks, plastic-roof huts

Wet processions Families walk
Stunted boys big heads don’t talk
Look bony skulls & silent round eyes
Starving black angels in human disguise

Mother squats weeping & points to her sons
Standing thin legged like elderly nuns
small bodied hands to their mouths in prayer
Five months small food since they settled there

on one floor mat with small empty pot
Father lifts up his hands at their lot
Tears come to their mother’s eye
Pain makes mother Maya cry

Two children together in palmroof shade
Stare at me no word is said
Rice ration, lentils one time a week
Milk powder for warweary infants meek

No vegetable money or work for the man
Rice lasts four days eat while they can
Then children starve three days in a row
and vomit their next food unless they eat slow.

On Jessore road Mother wept at my knees
Bengali tongue cried mister Please
Identity card torn up on the floor
Husband still waits at the camp office door

Baby at play I was washing the flood
Now they won’t give us any more food
The pieces are here in my celluloid purse
Innocent baby play our death curse

Two policemen surrounded by thousands of boys
Crowded waiting their daily bread joys
Carry big whistles & long bamboo sticks
to whack them in line They play hungry tricks

Breaking the line and jumping in front
Into the circle sneaks one skinny runt
Two brothers dance forward on the mud stage
Teh gaurds blow their whistles & chase them in rage

Why are these infants massed in this place
Laughing in play & pushing for space
Why do they wait here so cheerful & dread
Why this is the House where they give children bread

The man in the bread door Cries & comes out
Thousands of boys and girls Take up his shout
Is it joy? is it prayer? “No more bread today”
Thousands of Children at once scream “Hooray!”

Run home to tents where elders await
Messenger children with bread from the state
No bread more today! & and no place to squat
Painful baby, sick shit he has got.

Malnutrition skulls thousands for months
Dysentery drains bowels all at once
Nurse shows disease card Enterostrep
Suspension is wanting or else chlorostrep

Refugee camps in hospital shacks
Newborn lay naked on mother’s thin laps
Monkeysized week old Rheumatic babe eye
Gastoenteritis Blood Poison thousands must die

September Jessore Road rickshaw
50,000 souls in one camp I saw
Rows of bamboo huts in the flood
Open drains, & wet families waiting for food

Border trucks flooded, food cant get past,
American Angel machine please come fast!
Where is Ambassador Bunker today?
Are his Helios machinegunning children at play?

Where are the helicopters of U.S. AID?
Smuggling dope in Bangkok’s green shade.
Where is America’s Air Force of Light?
Bombing North Laos all day and all night?

Where are the President’s Armies of Gold?
Billionaire Navies merciful Bold?
Bringing us medicine food and relief?
Napalming North Viet Nam and causing more grief?

Where are our tears? Who weeps for the pain?
Where can these families go in the rain?
Jessore Road’s children close their big eyes
Where will we sleep when Our Father dies?

Whom shall we pray to for rice and for care?
Who can bring bread to this shit flood foul’d lair?
Millions of children alone in the rain!
Millions of children weeping in pain!

Ring O ye tongues of the world for their woe
Ring out ye voices for Love we don’t know
Ring out ye bells of electrical pain
Ring in the conscious of America brain

How many children are we who are lost
Whose are these daughters we see turn to ghost?
What are our souls that we have lost care?
Ring out ye musics and weep if you dare–

Cries in the mud by the thatch’d house sand drain
Sleeps in huge pipes in the wet shit-field rain
waits by the pump well, Woe to the world!
whose children still starve in their mother’s arms curled.

Is this what I did to myself in the past?
What shall I do Sunil Poet I asked?
Move on and leave them without any coins?
What should I care for the love of my loins?

What should we care for our cities and cars?
What shall we buy with our Food Stamps on Mars?
How many millions sit down in New York
& sup this night’s table on bone & roast pork?

How many millions of beer cans are tossed
in Oceans of Mother? How much does She cost?
Cigar gasolines and asphalt car dreams
Stinking the world and dimming star beams –

Finish the war in your breast with a sigh
Come tast the tears in your own Human eye
Pity us millions of phantoms you see
Starved in Samsara on planet TV

How many millions of children die more
before our Good Mothers perceive the Great Lord?
How many good fathers pay tax to rebuild
Armed forces that boast the children they’ve killed?

How many souls walk through Maya in pain
How many babes in illusory pain?
How many families hollow eyed lost?
How many grandmothers turning to ghost?

How many loves who never get bread?
How many Aunts with holes in their head?
How many sisters skulls on the ground?
How many grandfathers make no more sound?

How many fathers in woe
How many sons nowhere to go?
How many daughters nothing to eat?
How many uncles with swollen sick feet?

Millions of babies in pain
Millions of mothers in rain
Millions of brothers in woe
Millions of children nowhere to go

November 14-16, 1971

This is what I used to wake up for in Bangladesh at 4am! And this is what I’ve come home for. One more crazy day of work till the exhibition begins!