An extract from my newest novel

An extract from the first chapter of my newest novel, The Comeback. Read, and if you find yourself enjoying it, do pick up a copy.

There were five missed calls. By the time I got around to calling Asghar back, it was past midnight but he wouldn’t mind, I was certain. We often talked into the wee hours even on weekdays. He never said a word about having to be up at six in the morning and dropping the kids off at school at a quarter to eight. My own brother might say something like, some of us have real jobs, you know? Not Asghar.

I used to get drunk a few times a year and call him, raving and ranting about how I was passed over yet again, the injustice of it, and how I was sick of everyone, mostly myself. Asghar would get me through the night and into the pale dawn of a new day. Me pouring myself cheap gins, him rooting about in the fridge for a midnight snack. He didn’t get fat, no matter how many kebabs and cream rolls he ate, and his eyes never failed to crinkle when I called him a good-looking bastard with his head of curls, hazel eyes, and lanky frame. If he spent any time at all in the gym, he’d have the kind of torso that sells business suits. He could sing and I bet he could dance, too, if he took lessons. I, on the other hand, with my short legs, big nose, and square jaw, would never turn any heads. Yet, I had ended up the actor and Asghar, the bank manager.
It could so easily have been the other way around. Asghar had a better grip on literature and stagecraft. I had a better head for math. But then, I cleared high school with less than 80 per cent marks and all hopes of getting into engineering college died. Not that I especially minded. I didn’t particularly want to be an engineer, or, for that matter, a banker. Because my own father was a banker, I had signed up for a Bachelor’s in commerce but my first week on campus, I ran into Asghar and I never attended a lecture again. Asghar and his group of friends had founded an undergraduate theatre club in Baansa and I had started acting only because he picked me to play the lead in the club’s first production. That’s all I had been trying to say in the Buzz interview that set off a storm and blew all our boats off course.

For over fifteen years, I had hung about on the fringes of Bollywood. While I waited for my big break, I did whatever jobs came to hand. Plays, theatre lighting, bit parts on television, radio jingles, audiobooks. Fifteen long years of auditioning for meaty roles but, zilch. Then a film producer happened to listen to a Hindi novel that I had narrated. He didn’t just buy the adaptation rights, he insisted I play the narrator’s role in the film. This character was supposed to be an unattractive guy, fortyish, and with a mean streak, and the producer thought that I looked and sounded the part. The film was shot on a low budget. I was paid peanuts but the day I was invited to see the rough cut, I knew, from now on, things were going to be different for me. And they were.

The week the film released in theatres, Buzz called about doing a profile. Now, a profile is already different from merely being interviewed. First, the magazine sent a photographer who shot my face with some love, bringing light to its creases, gouging the hollows under my eyes even deeper. There I sat, holding a book under a lamp, cast into shadows that made me look like a man of obscure and dangerous origins. There I was again, leaning against a balcony railing in a rumpled night suit. Unwashed, unbrushed, almost sexy.

Then a journalist came over to interview me. She insisted on visiting me at home because, she said, she was looking for texture. So I made her a cup of tea and talked about growing up in a small town called Baansa, north of Lucknow but south of Bareilly. How I’d cut classes to meet girls, how swirls of dust rose up in the first week of June and how they filled your nostrils and throat until you felt as if you’d choke to death, and how December brought a sort of rolling fog that blinded you and made you jump at the sound of footsteps so that you started to believe in ghosts. That sort of thing.

This chapter was published here: https://scroll.in/article/1078778/by-annie-zaidi-devastated-by-betrayal-asghar-retreats-to-his-hometown-and-rediscovers-theatre

Against the Calculus of Skin

I have a new essay in Ananke magazine's 10th anniversary special edition. My essay is titled 'Against the Calculus of Skin'. I was thinking of how much of a woman's existence is defined by her body - how much skin is (in)visible, and how cultural notions of attractive/acceptable intersect with politics in our times. A brief extract from it, here: 

I am tired of skin. I am tired of the way women’s skin seem to swallow up their kidneys, aortas, phalanges. For all the space taken up by skin in public discourse, it is almost as if these other bits of us had nothing to do with us being women.

Skin. The largest and most vulnerable organ in the body. It protects us with no protection of its own. At one time in history, humans began to cover up skin with more layers. Some scientists suggest it was during the first iceage, 180,000 years ago. Clothing brought us protection from cold, but also sun and rain, from insect bites and bruising gravel. Men needed it as much as women did. But ever since people began to read gendered meanings into clothing, it has begun to mess with our sense of justice. We make assumptions about how others, especially women, deserve to be treated based on what part of her skin can be espied – how low a saree hangs on her hips, how high the skirt, whether or not her ears and neck are covered – at what time of day. And while I am tired of men who look at a woman’s knees and jump to the conclusion that she desires sexual congress, I am thoroughly sick of women who look at another woman in a bikini and call her a prostitute.

Those who say such things surely know in their hearts that they’re wrong. They say those things anyway because, if a woman is neither within grasp nor concerned about how she’s viewed, they feel compelled to punish her. Some punish with rape, others by perpetuating a moral binary whereby women are split into whore/saint. And I am very, very tired of women rationing out their allyship based on skin so that some of us are cast to the wolves of harassment and bigotry.

Reader, I say, ‘we’, although I want to exclude myself from this reckoning. Still, I say ‘we’ because so many women fall prey to one form of categorical splitting or the other. If it’s not the whore/saint binary, it’s the oppressed/liberated one. Can white women in France or Denmark possibly believe that a woman who refuses to show her face does not deserve to eat? Do Indian women across the spectrum of religious affiliation (or even atheists) truly think that a woman who keeps her neck and chest covered, cannot achieve financial autonomy? Are you that brown woman who refuses to accept that there might be a kind of freedom in not showing off your legs or your cleavage in a culture that demands it of you? Do you sit around calculating how much of an education, what jobs, how much of a political voice should be allowed to a woman based on what percentage of her skin is visible? Hands and arms, elbow down, okay? Ankles, okay? Shoulders, great? Waist, mandatory reveal?

I am sick of this calculus. The expectation of majoritarian assimilation often masks a wilful blindness towards the human struggle to balance individual circumstance and choice against cultural norms, and nowhere is this blindness more insistently inscribed than upon the skins of women. Yet, the meanings we attach to women’s decisions to clothe themselves in particular ways almost always turn out to be wrong if only we would bother to look closer. An image that brought me up short recently was a representation of St Hild of Whitby in the Durham Cathedral. At first glance, I thought it was it a painting of an Iranian or South Asian woman in a chador. Indeed, but for the saint’s name written on the painting, anyone would have thought so. I found myself wondering how people might be impacted by the painting with or without the name. How does our response change, knowing that it is not a present-day Muslim woman, but a medieval Christian saint who dressed that way? Would the average white woman looking at that painting think of St Hild as oppressed or subservient to any mortal man? 

You can read the whole issue here: https://issuu.com/anankemag/docs/ananke_10th_29_