From the moment I tie the strings of the ridha under my chin and position the hood carelessly over my hair, knowing it will slip down in minutes, and step out into the wilting Ahmedabadi street, I feel like I’ve draped my body in resentment. Its instantaneous and it builds. Each step I follow, each step I mimic feels like a betrayal. I’ve become a following body, empty of sentiment and sincerity. I walk over to the rickshaw, fumbling with the gaagra, either hiking it up too far and revealing the hidden legs that carry me reluctantly or tripping over the thick, border band of beaded flowers and weight. I feel clumsy. It becomes impossible to guide the me that prefers kids to adults, cannot sleep to a ticking clock, has never felt as free as when on my bike, and the one sloppily layered on top and conjured from past persuasion to keep others happier than myself. Entering the small gali leading into vohradom, my masi and mamu’s muscles untensed as they’re ushered into an environment that happily absorbs their matching wardrobes into its homogenizing herds, I want my only exposed parts to radiate the difference I won’t articulate. I wear conformity awkwardly, the zipper of my gaagra driven open at my hip, my hair refusing to be matted and flattened, poking out in short unruly tufts, my arms often undone until my elbows, because it is hot, because the fulcrum of generosity should not be invisible, because I don’t know how to connect tucked into passivity and passing and pardah. There are no connections to be made here, at least not with the living. Except the occasional met glance of a child, performing just as I am but without the cognizance of contradiction. These moments are pure relief for me amidst the graves. Spotting some careless subversion, some accidental and unknowing deviation from the crowds, in a dance, a rally of bouncing laughter and puffed out cheeks and teasing tongues, not meant to be here, soon to be disciplined back into the collective temperament of mourning, draws out the revolutionary within me, draws out forbidden joy and freedom. So that within a scene of solemnity I can recognize my body and my thoughts are distinct and my own. Such is the powerful transgression of hide and go seek in a place where people come to honor the dead with garlands and maim the living by decapitating consciousness.
I’m struck by the beauty of this place. White gleaming marble underneath us, rows of inverted protruding coffins, reinforced by and reinforcing a steady stream of pilgrimages so that they’ll never sink into earth as they should. We touch fingertips to stone and then forehead and then lips, rapidly, mechanically, repeatedly, sometimes using two hands and increasing speed and coverage. We have a battlefield of living dead to cover. We skip the qabars without red stars because in our resurrection of distant deaths, there is a difference between lives lost and lived. Some deserve prostration, others indifference. Others, still, deserve height. Platform. Stairs that I see a woman ascending using just her arms, grabbing at railing and heaving her body with devotion, the crowd barely clears for her when she reaches the sculpted silver doorway, struggling. I take queues. Bow, bend, kneel and kiss. I skip steps on purpose, miss contact, rush through worship, to plant tiny rebellions by never fully resigning to ritual. With careless contempt, I endure. If I could slip into observer, researcher, as I’ve been trained to, erase the familiarity and my complicity in it, hold my heart high, at arms length from meeting the tragic realization: my thoughts and actions are estranged from each other.
And in a most desperate moment, I look up from guilt and see a peacock. Symbol of resurrection, transformation, gatekeeper of death, immortality…I gaze at its proud pronounced neck and say, “Some things should die.”
