Inconvenient truths

These bluebells have sprung up overnight. For winter, spring is an inconvenient truth. But seasons do not have power structures.

The online autistic community is always up in arms about an unexplained ‘hate’ that they draw from allistics, my understanding of it would better align with a different sentiment – discomfort. One of the possible reasons for this discomfort is that we bring inconvenient truths to the table, like pulling out a dripping lobster from underneath in the middle of a vegetarian company dinner and landing it with a thud so that the sauce splatters all over the white sheets, a few drops land on the ties of the bosses. 

My biggest takeaway from my time in the vacuum between my second and third lives (I am unsure if calling them lives or masks is more palatable) is a more evolved understanding of this discomfort. The shattering of my second mask (I believe mask is appropriate in this line, life is more appropriate in the former) entailed facing a few inconvenient truths myself, but it also entailed understanding how exactly I had been turned away from a few tables because of splattered sauces. 

It was around the age of eight that I had the opportunity to go to my first wedding unchaperoned by parents. My inner Rammohan Roy decided to articulate just as we had been seated to eat, and I pretty much shouted in the general direction of the wedding what the dowry had been. There was a moment of silence, a momentary hush not unlike when a striker receives the ball in space just outside the box, before one of my elder cousins made sure to out-scream me into acknowledging that I was a fool, or wicked, or possibly both. This elder cousin is an example of someone I would consider as the neurotypical median, such people are useful barometers to gauge the general air pressure in a room. While she has miraculously traversed across my first and third lives (pretty sure masks is not the word there) and offered her barometric services freely, I will probably not explain to her that if that wedding hall had comprised a 99 Rammohan Roys and 1 of her instead of the other way around, dowry would probably have been abolished by now. 

When I was around four, I found a woman sitting outside a house a few minutes away from mine, crying. I asked her why she was crying. She said she wanted clothes (those blasted things again!), but that nobody was answering the door. This would be years before activation of a Sherlockian lens of the world, so the Rammohan Roy did the only thing that seemed natural. ‘Come with me, my house has lots of clothes,’ I told her. Her tears may or may not have been interrupted with a grin, and she may or may not have mumbled something about the details of the clothes, but I had further assurance to offer: ‘Don’t worry about all of that, I heard them complaining last night they did not have enough space for their clothes’. And so, I landed up at the doors of my house leading a beggar woman by the hand, expecting to be treated as a war hero but receiving instead a reception akin to Sita’s fate at the end of Ramayan. Incidentally, one of the foolish/wicked/both things I had done by this act, I was told, was that I had interrupted lunch at my home. 

The third vignette I offer here is unlike the first two in several respects. Firstly, there are no splattered sauces, at least in the literal sense. Secondly, I am still unsure of the solution, though I have arrived at educated guesses. Thirdly, I was in my teenage years and had barely put on the second mask. This was not a Rammohan Roy being subjugated by a whites-brahmins-combo story, this was more of a Rammohan Roy subjugating his village slave story. Or not really, but my still-imperfect understanding of it means that is the closest Victorian-era power structure analogy I can find. 

I found it very curious why some of my college classmates from city schools were discomforted when I said I was not from a city school. The violence of their reaction was the first clue. A second clue was how this travelled through word of mouth. Further weighing of evidence would have involved analyzing this line a friend told me when we were on opposite sides of a boat resting on the beach on the border between Bengal and Odisha: ‘People from so many places come to our college, why would you think you’re different because your school was 40 kms away from the city?’ It would have involved analyzing how when I brought a schoolfriend over to college and he said the same thing, the reaction was not violent. My question remains why it was an inconvenient truth to state that I was not from a city school, but that is an existential question perhaps pertinent less to me than those on the other side of the boat. 

The biggest problem with these incongruencies of truths for me has been that my obvious truths often become more embedded in me than strictly necessary. For a while in my college years, it became an important part of my identity that I was not from a city school precisely because of the resistance that stating it drew. It soon became clear, however, that there were far more interesting aspects to my differences than schooling. For the longest time, I was under the impression that dowries were the evilest part of the marriage process because I had been exposed very early to how it could not be talked about. My current understanding is that the emotional subjugation and associated paraphernalia that follows marriages marginally outscores dowries in the Evilalympics. And let’s not even talk of clothes and beggars and all that, that’s another 1000 words.