dear ones, wrote this in 2022 & got way too many “special rejections” for it to count (from the biggies might i add—god it’s like they just want to make out with my writing a little or at most feel it up but never go to 4th base) . There are still places I’ll submit it to. But, for now, I want it out in the world, and since there’s over 8000 of you subscribed to this newsletter i feel like more folks will read it here than in most literary magazines, though if any editor is subscribed and wants to publish it, lmk so I can send you a special rejection :)
Divorce is the thing with feathers
I am in the middle of a divorce. My mother does not want to tell her sister (or other relatives). She says it would only prove them right. That I’m crazy. How could I1 leave such an amazing man? And leaving is not my only crime. I left him and hopped on the express train to whoreville (mom’s words, not mine)2. As in, I am in a new relationship. With a poet. How much money do poets even make, mom demands. Feeling the witching pull of my teenage-self3 long since gone, I turtlesnap a frantic, how much money do you make! I too once thought love was all Bollywood and love letters, she lashes back4.
Her hair is thin and coarse, resembling the kind of playdough that’s been mixed, blended, kneaded, and torn apart countless times over until it is no more than a withering slug. I’m remembering why I first left home. Contrary to my mother’s convictions, it wasn’t just because of my father’s romantic escapades.
For a long time, I enjoyed leaving. To be able to simply walk away in the way one might give silence as a response to a sentence beginning in the infinitive — it felt right. Dad chose to break dinner plates when he was upset. Mom chose to threaten cutting her wrists with the aforementioned broken dinner plates when she was upset. I chose to sneak out the door and walk. I never knew where I was going. The point was that I was going away. And then, at 17, I went really far away. I went to New Zealand5 to join an orthodox religious cult where one of the rules you pledge your soul never to break is No Illicit Sex6. I danced around in saris, proselytizing in malls, subways, a circus once, festivals, crack neighbourhoods7, and lots of random streets all over downtowns all over the world. I sold a million Gitas8. I cooked elaborate meals, sometimes for over 200 people. I woke up at 4 am, mummified myself in the aforementioned sari, and chanted mantras. I circumambulated plants. I cried. A lot. I didn’t masturbate.9 For eight and a half years. And then I was hot-potatoed over to A Decent Man because I was too much10 to deal with for the ashram11 leader. The Decent Man12 and I got married and made a baby.
This is where mom gets more animated. Why, she inquires, if you were going to divorce him, would you first have a baby? Everyone’s going to ask that. Let me break the logic of this question down for you. In this question, past-me is apparently aware that future-me is going to want a divorce but despite that chooses to have unobstructed-fluids-commingling-sex with past-me’s not-yet-ex and make a baby and then proceed to give birth to said baby. Past-me: poor choices all around.13
Except that she hardly looks like a poor choice. She stands two foot eight in dog-poo-soiled shoes. Anasuya-Lilayana on her birth certificate. Ana when I can’t bother sounding out the last bit for strangers.14 Annie if I’m asking her whether she’s okay15. But in my arms, thrashing out the crow-screech-sweet timbre of yet another temper tantrum, she is always Anasuya.
I like Anasuya. I mean, I’m biologically programmed16 to love her. But I also like her. I don’t think mom liked me as a kid. I suspected so for a long time and then one day over the phone while I was fat with a fetus she broke the news: “You know, it was annoying having you around.” Cue tear-duct bombing? Heart palpitations? Yelling match? I laughed as I folded palm-sized hats.17 She proceeded to tell me that she had no idea what to do with me. She was obsessed with my father. Salivated at his sight. Doddled behind him everywhere. Would do a hula-hooping tightrope walk over a river infested with crocodiles to impress him.18 What was a kid doing amidst all this?
Nearing 50 now, mom’s gone through a separation herself.19 So maybe she’s speaking from experience. What’s there to tell, anyway? Divorce is more common than marriage20. Many people have sordid affairs in unhappy marriages. Many marriages are a Botox job on the face of an ungracefully-aging starlet. Impressions, mom presses. You have to be a part of society. Why, she opines, beat the drum of your own nakedness before everyone. Sooner or later, they’ll find out. Maybe, she schemes, we can tell them whenever K21 comes. She gets a little zazzed by her own wit: We’ll say this is her husband — he just changed his face, like in those TV serials22. She moves between humour and hatred like the sun through clouds.
She brings up our lavish wedding in India. Everyone was there, she says, we flew them all from Chandigarh to Bangalore for the rituals. She recalls visiting my in-laws’ house for the first time. I wasn’t allowed to come because P and I weren’t supposed to see each other until the day of the wedding. It was a reenactment of the bygone affair of arranged blind-date marriages. Mom said they showed up dressed in their best Punjabi glitz only to see P half-naked in a dhoti being lathered in turmeric and sandalwood paste by many blubber-armed aunties. At least the food, she sighs, was good, but that too they served on banana leaves. The festivities continued for two late nights. The second night was a reception which involved P and I standing for four hours as a line of over a thousand guests arrived, handed us gaudy envelopes of money (promptly slipped to his parents to bear the expenses of the wedding hall) and took a photo with us before walking down to the international mega buffet. I was draped in a sari literally stitched with threaded gold. I had more makeup on my face than I like.23 I didn’t know anybody. Even he couldn’t recognize most. We went to sleep at 2:30 AM. The yajna24 was at 5:30 AM. I woke up at 4 AM and rushed to be transformed into a happy, shy bride. I have a photo from those early morning hours, just before I walked down to the mandap. I look like I’ve just been fed toilet cleaner in a baby bottle.
This wasn’t our first wedding. P and I first tied the knot in Wellington against a backdrop of dew-glazed mountains and windy forests in the cult’s retreat center. The cult had a stipulation of rules couples must follow in order to marry. The truth is, at 20, marriage was not my idea of a next step. But I had three dollars and fourteen cents in my bank account, was living on a temporary visa in a foreign country, had no connection with my parents, and was heavily indoctrinated into the ancient ideas of womanhood propounded by the religious institution. I’d spent three years communally showering, eating, dressing, sleeping. We were on a stringent schedule of “service” from four in the morning until ten at night. We weren’t allowed to make friends outside of the cult.25 Working professionals were heavily lambasted and marginalized within the group. Women, especially, were meant either to serve God under the protection of the Guru or do that while accepting the shelter of a qualified husband who’d allow them to continue their usual services as much as possible. The benefits, then, of being married involved things like spending more than six minutes in the bathroom and the occasional guilt-riddled makeout session.26 And we did make out a few times. Imagine your favourite tween romcom coupled with pseudo-intellectual self-flagellation. In any case, we weren’t allowed to get married until we’d courted27 for three years. But of course I didn’t listen. I was clawing-my-eyes-out ready to stop living in the ashram. I told the seniors28 I’d be getting married a whopping 7 months before their prescribed time.
A volley of accusatory and aggressive text message chains ensued. I was put on a kind of a service probation, not allowed to do any front-facing engagements like giving talks or leading kirtans.29 They said my transgression of good advice rendered me a bad example to the other young women.30 And bad examples ought to stay in the back, shrouded in their inner shame. Ashamed or otherwise, married I did get. First, legally in the New Zealand National Library and then “vedically”31 in an overnight, dual-event wherein I shared the sacred fire with another cult-compatible couple.
So you had three times to say no, mom chirps. Three times, she signs. Three times, she bemoans. But with a baby, now? How much more we are blamed when there’s a little life in our care. Perhaps rightly so. Here’s a two year old girl with scant pigtails and a short temper. She needs everything from you and you need to give her everything. Instead, you’re taking something away. You’re removing things from her life when you ought to be filling, giving, sacrificing. And what have I done? Instead of sacrificing, I have coveted, desired, chosen. And it has been my choice entirely. For the first time ever I can say that choosing to leave my marriage was the most adult decision I ever made. I understood the ramifications, the anger, the hazards. I anticipated the judgements, the financial troubles, the familial pressures. And I also feared it might be tough on my two year old. Still, I did it. I asked him to move out. I initiated the separation. My lack of sensible choices had caught up to me. And now, I needed to be selfish. At 27, without a college education, without a bank account, I was living somebody else’s idea of a happy life. And it was poisoning my gut.
Imagine the kind of lifeforms that might evolve in the aftermath of a volcanic eruption. I was there, in the gentling lava — the cesspit mess I’d made of my life — quietly raging but also self-creating, hardening, cooling, attempting to morph from fire to river, to bleed away, to wash towards something that made sense amidst all the internal desolation. And was I feeling desolation? Is that what one ought to call the creeping, creaking incompleteness that claws at the corners of your eyes no matter how many images of wholeness are presented before you?
You have always been an unhappy child, my mother says. I remember being thirteen and my mom, ever the soothsayer, painting a prophecy into the stuffy July heat of our scratched up blue Honda Civic: Make some friends or you’ll end up dying in your dorm room alone.32 No one will even find your body for days.33 But I want to tell mom, I am finding my own body. I didn’t find it when I denied my body nearly any sense of autonomy or pleasure. Nor did I find it in the throes of domestic passion.34 I did think I was finding something when I began growing another body inside of me. I did begin to crawl towards the body of my body. And then when she left me, or rather — when I found her, I felt that I had the courage to find myself too.
It ate me up for weeks. The thought of how divorce might ruin her. And then, a memory emerged: Dad wildly steering the car — a secondhand silver Mercedes Benz he’d loaned from a local dealer — with one hand in mom’s hair35. Mom, screaming, biting, pleading. Then, a lionlike silence. Parked before a lawyer’s office, mom and dad turning to me in the backseat clutching the ancient teddy bear my daughter now plays with and telling me, very calmly: We’re going inside and getting a divorce — decide now who you want to be with. I don’t recall my age but I’d pin it around nine. Choice was a raging bull. I felt there were a thousand phantom limbs floating around me. This moment changed me in a way I have not thought of until now. That having to choose something at gunpoint — even if there is no actual choice to be made36 and no actual gun — can alter your experience of reality and selfhood is not surprising. Choice, I realized, was hardly something that happens in the moment it is actually made. We are always choosing. Though much of choice may be an illusion against the tsunami of divinity like time and fate, the power of a good choice (and the hell-shattering consequences of a bad one) governs our drive to live. When someone makes money we assume that somebody somewhere made a good choice37. When someone gets divorced, we assume that someone somewhere made a bad one. Yet that nine year old girl in the back seat of the borrowed Benz knew little about the mathematics of existential binaries. What she chose then she can only put into words now. She didn’t choose the parents. She chose the desire to not have to choose. To build for herself a reality wherein a child — upon encountering choice, whether pivotal or seemingly inconsequential — would be thrilled, not frozen in fear.38
Yes, children suffer from divorce. And yes, children suffer from unhappy marriages that eke on further than their lifespan. I was not going to keep my marriage on life support. Euthanasia was ethical here. My mother winces. Tailing me up the stairs, she’s just entered my room. Poetry can’t solve everything39, she returns back to one of her original40 thoughts. Because there’s still the question about how she will tell everyone that I’m with another man a month after my separation, I suggest something insane: Don’t tell them. Because it doesn’t matter. Society matters, mom says. How the world sees us. Rules exist for a reason!
I’m cleaning up Anasuya’s makeshift destruction lab — a bundle of desecrated blocks, a stuffed penguin, that ancient bear of mine from days of yore, and countless grains of spilled white rice lathering their crumbly starch all over the carpet. Well, my rule for Ana is that she not be such a pig but here is that rule turned inside out and puked up all over the floor. So, what now?
There’s this movie — Federico Fellini’s 8 ½. I told people I watched it for a long time before I actually watched it. In this movie a director is trying to encapsulate his entire life into a movie. There are surreal scenes that merge with the reality of the film and the reality of the film merges with surreal scenes, the camera zeroing in on a stunned face before zooming out to reveal a crew, a dismantled set, mirrors catching sunlight, beautiful women. An affair occurs. A physician prescribes holy water. A critic critiques critiquing. The director’s not sure what the end’s going to be but it’s in a space station. And then the end arrives and there appears to be a circus-like performance in the abandoned space station and every single person from his life (as they were captured in the movie) is holding hands and dancing in a circle. And I think he joins in. And I think I’ve never seen something so pure, so enigmatic, and so stupid all at once. But that’s his conclusion, his e=mc2, his half-enlightenment. His being Fellini’s Fellini, being the man trying to make sense of the man trying to make sense of himself. The music champions the proverbial torch, uniting everyone in this childlike dance of utter joy after the rain of melancholy. Everyone is you, the film appears to be concluding. And you are everyone. All the choices you have made have led you here. All the people you’ve loved, and the ones you’ve left, and the ones you’ve left them for. Fellini wanted to call the film The Beautiful Confusion at first. He settled on 8 ½ though because it wasn’t his eighth film and nor his ninth. It was in between. He was in the middle of creating something wonderful41 after having created eight other wonderful things.42 This was his purgatory. His space for artistic destruction and reconstruction.
I too am in the middle — in the middle of my divorce, of a new relationship, of finishing undergrad and beginning grad studies, of a book43. I don’t know who’s going to be there in my end-of-life circus dance and I probably won’t recognize (or want to recognize) many of them. Social conventions crumble before finality. And a life lived divorced from the anguish that comes with pigeonholing that same life into someone’s idea of a life well-lived — the good life — is one of quiet serenity. The only choice required is willingness. Willingness to not only clean up the destruction lab but to reconstruct it despite the very real possibility that it will be destroyed again.
While there is plenty of research showing how divorce destroys a child’s life44, the positive effects are finally beginning to get more attention. It feels like commonsense: happy parent, happy child. Of course, what happens when a divorce leaves one parent ostensibly happy and the other sad or one ostensibly sad and the other happy?45 I don’t know. I do know that Anasuya has truly gained another parent. I do know that she is most often a joyful child, eager to unshroud the world leaf by leaf, moon by moon, to know it by gobbling it up, and showing us all the remnants of her magical reality glittering on her tongue, eager to be sung. And is this next bit allowed? Are you sure? Because I also know that, well, I am happy. Happier, more alive, honest than I’ve ever been. And this has got to mean something for this child of divorced parents, right? That she will grow up with a mother who isn’t quietly tortured every day in a life she feels she did not choose, or if she did choose, than the wrong life with the wrong home and the wrong rain and the wrong….
Ultimately, a deeper part of me feels that our experience cannot be classified into easily evaluative binaries. There is a guttering voice in the bones that rings, the small sobs in our throat that pray. These are the places we must reach down for, put our ear to, as simply as one might bend to the lily face of a child. To be able to hear of some unbelievable but utterly true thing they must share right away. To be able to know what we might have known forever, but never had the courage to realize.
I am aware too, perhaps painfully so, that one good choice is no lottery ticket46 against the ravages of the world. I am free now to falter, to break, to be alone forever. Mom’s aware of it too, painfully and personally. Dad left her and started living with a girl younger than me47. She cared for her autistic son alone, crawled into the deceptively safe arms of depression48 where she still lingers, a ghost of her former self. This is the ghost who leans to me now and appears, from my periphery, to reach out and then quickly pull back. Freedom, as Ursula K. LeGuin writes in The Tombs of Atuan, “is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one. The road goes upward towards the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it.” Here, in our small borrowed time in the season of Spring where the sky weeps constantly, washing away the mud-stained snow and allowing little oceans to form everywhere that will give water to new flowers, baby grass — the three of us — Anasuya, my mother, myself — stand and look on at nothing in particular. The air, perhaps?49 All this new life aching to be lived, to be attempted.
I mean, truly, who am I to make a decision about my own life?
Okay she didn’t use the term “whoreville” but she did use the equivalent of it in Hindi and as a comparison, not directly, but she meant it directly in the way we pretend to drop something when we’re really meaning to show our ass or whatever.
I am, now, on the “wrong side of twenty” as Jane Austen would put it. Wrong side, three steps over.
I was wrong, she means, and you’re going to find out soon that so are you.
From Canada (where I grew up). If you look at a rectangular map they’re at diagonal opposite ends.
This included, but was not limited to, having sex with your spouse (who of course had to be a straight-edge member of the opposite sex) unless it’s to make babies, masturbation, and watching romantic comedies.
If you’re a glass half full kind of person, then a crack neighbourhood is where former or recovering crackheads live and if you’re an is-this-supposed-to-be-an-essay-about-feminism-I’m-really-confused kind of person then it’s where crackheads live.
The Bhagavad-gita. Oldest spiritual book. Song of God. It’s a good book. It’s not the book’s fault it’s being sold by people who want to enslave other people while claiming to liberate them.
You are going to have to take my word for it.
Too arrogant, rude, unruly, unsubmissive, proud, egotistical, individualistic, offensive — me?
Twenty or so girls, all living like contemporary ascetic monks, in an urban city.
It sounds sardonic, but I mean that.
*tsk tsk tsk*
They almost always mispronounce it. It rhymes with booyah.
When most teenagers had Bieber-fever, I had Michael Jackson’s ever-changing faces plastered on my walls. I named my brother after him (and Johann-Sebastian Bach) so the initials remained “MJ”.
That love is a biological response is probably something people debate when they want to avoid dessert because they’re trying to “reduce” (as Esther Greenwood griped in The Bell Jar) but like, love is not not a biological response, right?
Nesting: moms-to-be do weird shit like this to prepare for the baby.
Truly, a feminist’s nightmare.
Though they’re back together again, kind of. The full story involves blood, jail, sex, and time. I assure you this essay will have a sequel.
If you fact check me, I’ll just give you different definitions of “divorce” and “marriage”.
The love of my whole entire life. The Poet for whom I apparently “left” the Decent Man.
India’s answer to the Spanish Telenovela and the All-American primetime soap. Sometimes, a single episode may contain a faceswap, a fainting woman getting trapped in a suitcase which falls down the stairs into a water fountain somehow getting flown to a different country, monster mother-in-laws, colourism commentaries, extended family showdowns, and jejune hijinks by preteens flocking around an old matriarch.
I don’t like any.
In a traditional Indian marriage ceremony, the couple sits before a fire parroting after the pandit vows involving things like the woman saying she’ll never step out of the house without her husband and so on.
Not that I was looking forward to making friends. I couldn’t even make any within the cult. Misery makes one narcissistic.
All the couples in the community proudly lauded their sex-free lives. I recall one woman in particular boasting that her and her husband didn’t even hug. She’d spat the word hug, as though she were saying “we don’t even lick each others’ assholes on a public stage with toddlers in the front row, you know?”
Yes, ‘courting’ is exactly as it sounds. Victorian fucking bullshit (minus the fucking). 6 hours a week for the first year, chaperoned. 12 hours a week for the second year, chaperoned. Final year, 12 hours, unchaperoned.
These were practitioners who’d been around some 10, 20, even 40 years.
Communal chanting accompanied by instruments like the harmonium, mrdanga, kartals, pot pans, etc.
‘Young’ being a conciliatory term here. Most of the other women were edging to 30 and — as if this isn’t already a difficult transition for women — there was a lot of talk about them becoming withering fruits on the vine unless they chose to forgo any romantic aspirations and decide to commit fully to the Lord (aka cult). The sexism of the people in the cult went hand in hand with their ageism.
The word ‘Vedic’ is commonly used by pop scholars and laypeople alike, but it has no basis in true linguistic meaning. The Vedas are the foundation and, sometimes, containment, of the wide variety of texts connected with the sprawling Hindu faith but there is nothing that can actually be defined or barred from being seen as ‘vedic’ according to the Vedas themselves.
I never had a dorm room. I never went to college, until now.
I don’t know what kind of movies she is watching but she needs to stop.
My sex life was a pastiche of three-second-moans and uncomfortable wetness.
At this time, her hair was a pasty auburn decorated with snowflakes.
My parents wouldn’t separate for another two decades.
We don’t immediately jump to bank robbery or drug cartel. Unless you’re like K, in which case your mind is first pulled towards the fast and furious.
I know this is very serious and all, but speaking of yourself in the third person sounds so cool. I see why Ana does it all the time. This is Ana’s banana. Don’t touch Ana. Ana made poo-poo. And on and on we go.
I’m happy — some part of me is, anyway — that she’s used “everything” and not “anything”.
The thought itself, of course, is hardly original. I read it first on a black card flashing between two scenes of The Big Short: Truth is like poetry. And most people fucking hate poetry.
Because, in theory, everything that doesn’t yet exist is wonderful, right?
Because, all artefacts of and in the past are also by essence wonderful in that they are no longer here and yet remain present, ever-open to be opened up.
I mean writing one, but yes I am also in the middle of reading several.
It’s also, perhaps, the more “popular” research because as a society we appear, sometimes, to be wowed far more by gore than goodness.
Or fuck ostensibly.
Truth be told, I’ve only read about miserable lottery winners whenever I google this shit. Now that might be because people are too envious to report the happy ones. Or it might be true that money really can’t buy you happiness.
I’m not judging older men getting with younger women. Maybe I should, but I’m not. I married a much older man. I’m now with a younger one. Outside of the obvious legal age of consent, I’m not sure that age ought to matter so much in matters of love. Of course, it’s another thing entirely that my father seems like someone either utterly incapable of honest love, or extremely, overly, sickeningly capable of too much of it.
Remember how as a child you wanted to sleep on a cloud and then as you got older you learned how clouds are fucking bastards and you’d just fall through one? Depression’s kind of like that.
Anasuya’s illegal graffiti sprawling on the walls above my bed.
Dazzling as the clear blue sky! Thank you.
Amazing. So much intensity and your writing is brilliant. I was drawn to it bc at 71 I left my marriage of 46 yrs. No affairs or drama. I was just waiting to die. I had buried my need for passion and intimacy deep and thought I could muscle through. But there were other costs that eked out. I too was a child of divorce and didn’t want to do that to my kids. But I had some sort of spiritual revelation this summer that shifted everything. So I start anew in my 70s. Terrifying but I have hope now. No longer waiting to die but to live once again. Thx for your insight.