UnfortunatelyLit By Ahimaz Ponrasa
CW: mentions of rape/sexual assault
Living amidst so many words, and having to remember some non-words too, Abe tends to forget passwords. I type menschenheitsstaat before he could type geeraapbeevarsee and he enters the anti-caste system.
Hmi hmi{ logger, gnosis, glossary, data, thisPort, peerAddr, peerPort};
On his last hour in school, a nearly black, half-full bramean teacher brrl said, pointing to Abe, to a sweat-soaked class just out of the football field: You must be at least of his skin tone to belong in Tamil Nadu.
During the first hour in his classroom outside Tamil Nadu, in Mangalore, Karnataka, a nearly white, half-empty boy referred to a place in the city Abe had no clue about and told him that he must find for himself a Black (using the n-word) girlfriend there, and as he sat there perplexed, mentating on how to convey mooditu poda in English, Fuck off said the boy, his brother from another mother, who sat left to him.
White and wheat-skinned girls who wouldn’t dare even think about dating Abe, during annual-day event, would shake their hips, lip-synching La Bouche and Dr. Alban songs. The wheat girls, caste-Hindu or not, wouldn’t date the white bramean boy who couldn’t kill the priestly cop inside his head drrl, either for obvious reasons, although one of them would date the boy who said fuck off to him but wouldn’t marry him as they were girls who maybe couldn’t kill the devotee inside their heads dbrrl, so the self-fellating bramean boy lied about having a supermodel for girlfriend in Delhi, would SpeedPost Valentine’s Day cards addressed to himself and get caught but deny his ruse all the same.
Amid the assault of formaldehyde on eyes, lungs and throats, at the dissection table, a wheat girl once remarked that she found only Abe to be bold and unperturbed inside the anatomy lab.
The magazines that Abe happened to lay his hands on had established those days that you couldn’t be a boyfriend if you didn’t have a girlfriend. There was someone he thought he was interested in among his juniors. Around second year, though, excessive application of aftershave and fairness cream turned Abe’s nearly brown face black.
namespace CoreAGI {Wait, he says and disconnects from the AGI, perhaps perturbed.
I assure him that he isn’t reliving trauma, that he’s merely recalling it, and that while recounting his past, he’s also giving it back with the aid of homemade CPSC AGIHope that feeds on anti-caste datasets and the like.
So go on, remember further, free me maybe, I say, looking inside the mirror.
He reconnects his memory tunnel headgear to the Collective is Personal Selective Consciousness, and begins to show, brrl nay, to tell, drrl nay, to dance his fingers in the air like a spider weaving a web, with the memories at fingertips, spouting, Shut up, you bevarsi.
tests/unit_tests/openvpn/Makefile* * *
Abe never quite looked like someone who’d refer to himself in the third person. Yet upon hearing Abe was going to quit his master’s and join a seminary, Vinay said the missionary life wouldn’t suit him at all seeing as how he chose to tilt his head, build his shoulders, and dress himself. Vinay garu could somehow picture him with no clothes on, and to do that, he didn’t even have to be a Christian.
Of course, in addition to being a proud Christian, Abe would spend every rupee he got from home for the month before it was even half over. He’d buy, say, God in the Dock from St. Paul in Connaught Place, spending the first five hundred on it, and bust the last hundred at the music store in DDA Flats Kalkaji on The Best of the Doors cassette. And in between, he would have visited the OM bookstore at the YMCA twice and been to the Tibetan Market once. He’d spend the second half of the month half-starving but would fill the other half with reading and listening.
Above all, he was fond, of all things, of chocolates. This was why, at first, he thought Eve grew fond of him.
Abe, you find lots of pleasure in small, insignificant things, and you’re a patient listener. Eve would say at times. I realized that my old boyfriend wasn’t a genuine Christian when he tried to date rape me and then broke up with me and left for Chennai. Eve would say at other times.
For Ameen’s birthday, Ameen said idea machaan, and they went to Old Delhi with a bagful of Kit Kats and distributed them among the impoverished kids roaming the sidewalks. The idea was to treat the kids with something they would’ve never tasted in their lives. And for Abe’s birthday, Ameen said machaan idea, and they went to Nizamuddin Dargah and bought food coupons for the impoverished people standing in the queue over there. This was why she loved him. Eve said so. I will love you forever, Abe. I will be so good a daughter-in-law, your mother will never be ashamed that I’m a girl from another caste.
auto USES = glossary.entity( "uses", { gnosis.VERB, gnosis.IMMORTAL, gnosis.IMMUTABLE } );
At first, she was an earthworm, who came with her family all the way to Delhi on a train from Palayamkottai, who lost her heart to this birdie calm young man. Days and years of hardship and hurdle that hurt like decades and eons of humiliation passed by. And he was a bird that flew to Delhi on a flight all the way from still deeper south. They met during a Tamil church service.
The Lord showed me in a vision that you will be my soulmate. She’d say it with so much conviction. He wouldn’t doubt her for a second and would believe in whatever Eve said.
An American boy, son of a missionary who befriended me through jiju, expressed his desire to marry me because he thinks he’d never find a girl like me in his place, but I declined because I know I can never find a boy such as you anywhere else. Eve did say that too.
She’d say I love you on the phone, to which he’d say, I like you. I will say I love you only when I’ve told my dad about us. Then, during their auto-rickshaw rides, they would savor each other’s lips and, during India Gate visits, tongues.
But unseen purity rings encircled their fingers.
Just petting. Eve would say. What’s petting? Abe would ask. Whatever we were just doing! God does not approve of premarital sex. Or petting. God, I know, but who’s premarital sex? Forget premarital sex.
Abe would ask Eve’s brother-in-law while eating pizza whether masturbation was a sin and convince him that if performed in a certain manner it wasn’t really. Eve’s jiju had a degree in theology and was waiting for his visa. Eve’s sister, after her MBA, was working in Singapore. Eve too was studying MBA and she always was the topper in class. Eve sang like a bird. She’d record tapes for him in the noons, sitting under a fan switched off, soaked in sweat, singing words of love and songs of worship for him to listen to on his Aiwa walkman which his aunt, who was working in Kuwait, got for him.
He was so impressed by her voice and her passion for singing that he got the CD of Come Away with Me gift-wrapped for her to listen to on her mini hi-fi system just as he got himself the cassette of My Own Prison. Eve would sing, love, study, and Eve would sing, love, study, and study.
Abe, once again, wasn’t interested in studies. He was instead mentating on the predestination/freewill conundrum, Sultana’s Dream, and stuff like that between his I love you’s to Eve’s miss you’s. How long could one sit on the balcony and watch cows going crazy and berserk after grazing used rubbery Kama Sutra, plastics, shattered glass pieces, and such from the garbage pile of a field? Seeing his unquenchable interest in theology, she surprised him with the promise of a gift and that it was going to be the very expensive NIV Study Bible, but then when he met her after the Christmas holidays with his gift of handmade glass birds, she apologized to him, saying she was saving for a rainy day.
My ancestors, I think, were philosophers and so am I. He would say. By ancestors, he meant neither his caste men nor just his countrymen, but the likes of Blake, Buddha, de Pizan, Rokeya, and Valluvar. He knew, though, for certain, whatever he could think up would’ve been already thought up by someone else.
Abe would just sit there for hours together, after penning down short treatises, searching The Bible in vain looking for answers to specific societal and local/global problems, things it remained rather silent on. He couldn’t reconcile the fact that more often the scripture was at odds with his perspective and that a modern problem needs a modern solution even if it were a modern reinterpretation of an ancient solution.
Back in Palayamkottai, even in the church, they used to stare at us and treat us as if we weren’t human. We came to Delhi hoping for a better life. You do not doubt or feel jealousy, but many men I’ve met are sexual predators. Eve would say to Abe, and he would listen and console her. Her community was second-generation Tamil Christians and his third generation. Although they belonged to the same circle in terms of economic location, as for their social locations let’s say, in a non-essentialist sense without rigidly categorizing the categories they belonged to, Abe came from group CAD and Eve from FEB.
In his grandfather’s time, as unseeables, they were considered impure, not just to touch, but to even be seen, until a missionary from London came along and cried, hallelujah oh dear goodness gracious that’s enough. Brrl Sci-Hub is inaccessible right now. No. They weren’t unseeables except in some select pockets, but even so, they mostly lived in misery, stripped of their lands and cast away from resource-rich regions by despotic lascivious kings heeding manuvadi brameans, holed up in godforsaken arid regions—a hellhole Rajan would call the arse end of the universe—and this missionary, and his predecessors and successors, planted trees, built roads, schools, care homes and hospitals for us. While the white missionaries bestowed us with some vital infrastructure, they mostly misjudged the deep and widespread rot within the shitty caste-Hindu culture. They also reasoned their being against the use of caste surnames and caste pride among converts would put a limit on conversion. Thus, when the caste Hindus, burdened with graded inequality, embraced white Christianity, it just became this bullshitty caste Christianity. It was more like an assimilation of Christianity into caste Hinduism than anything else.
I’m sure I came here not to study, Eve, but to fulfill your vision.
return reinterpret_cast< Type& >( u );
I’m so sorry, Abe, it was just a false vision. Haven’t I told you already?
The Lord does not show or tell, and whatever we think the Lord shows or tells isn’t worth setting on a stone tablet, for we change constantly. Eve said to herself.
What. No. Why. But. Yes. It so happened. At last, she was a bird that flew away to Switzerland, and he was an earthworm that took a train to Hyderabad. Eve would be a blessing anywhere she went. She would be just fine. He knew it but wouldn’t admit it. Instead, with the aid of his voracious reading and reflection, he’d channel all his frustration into the class system that made most of us work like slaves. To hell with the system that made you want to take pride in material things. He’d say to himself, also cursing organized religion.
Yet those days and even these days, on the unreserved day train, an old uppered caste woman with grandkids would not allow a rural Dalit family with kids to sit on the opposite seat in her compartment. The Dalit family then would sit in the compartment half-occupied by an Other Backward Class (OBC) family. The dominant OBC woman who’d allow the Dalit family to sit beside them would not allow the Dalit kid to lean on her. When the OBC family, while getting down, passes by the compartment of the well-off uppered caste woman, you could witness the look of envy in the eyes of the uppered caste woman staring at the almost well-off OBC family with their perfumed neat attire and their fat faux leather bags.
This brahminical self-centeredness that’s malignant, that’s never considerate of people that belong to other lowered castes, is pervasive across the system of castes, and it isn’t simply about what class one belongs to. And the look, the look of envy, that bathetic look, makes a mockery of affirmative action, and it has the power to make policies that would undermine the meager social justice that’s been gained over the decades with so much struggle and the power to reverse all the progress made. Such vicious policies are made, say, with the confidence that the OBC Bahujan woman wouldn’t allow the Dalit kid to lean on her, with the knowledge that the lowered castes afflicted with brahminical descending sense of contempt will not stand in solidarity with Dalits, and that’s what makes it stick like mist to the foundation of social justice. That’s what makes justice and equity rust and decay.
This is the world wherein Eves and Abes live, toil, fall in and out of love or worse.
As a school kid, in the casteized society he lived in, through certain incidences, Abe had been made to feel bigger in relation to some castes and smaller in relation to others, but since he’d read a few issues of Bruderhof’s Plough Quarterly in Trichy at his cousin Chris’s home after graduation—and this was long before he read any anti-caste literature—he had felt all were equal, no one being superior or inferior, before God without yet realizing how caste operated in the world he inhabited. If the caste system were based on one’s occupation, behavior or so-called personality, it would still be a great injustice, but it’s all the more disastrous because it’s based on a person’s birth.
They may never be birds or worms at the same time, but they’re each both bird and worm at once. Brrl beside a few other things. An earthworm regenerates and goes on about its business. And so does a bird that’s also a worm. She only plucked with her beak a part of him, the very heart of him. Skip the month wherein he woke up every single morning with bloodshot eyes and see a severed earthworm regenerate. The worm would also grow a spine, read Dostoevsky, sink in deeper and deeper into himself, and become a calm-child with a habit of unintentionally breaking hearts (saying things like, Then why you think I’m bearded? in response to, You must be interested in girls because you’re long-haired—only a goest who can look outside in knows that if You’re only interested in someone who’s not that interested in You is one territory, then You’re utterly uninterested in those who’re very interested in You is a parallel territory within that territory hidden in plain sight), and then eventually, after refusing tens of proposals, get married to a girl whose father wished to get her married to a rich missionary but couldn’t. A seemingly sophisticated but hell-bent bookish boy married to an equally hell-bent Bible-glued girl.
In the market. Once. A hungry dog ate. Its puppy. First the head. Then the rest. Abe, strolling with Ameen, witnessed it. Most likely, it was the mommy dog, but Abe would swear it was the irresponsible daddy dog. I’ve seen a wandering tomcat stealing to consume kittens one after another from a queen during the intervals when it had to leave behind its kittens and go out hunting. He’d say to reassure himself.
So a bird hurting a worm when feeding on grains could actually be deemed an accident or not. Yes. No. What. Maybe. Why. There are strategies to forget. I see. Then there are strategies to remember. You see.
At the internship place, the manager wanted sexual favors so I wanted to quit right away but didn’t know what to do so I prayed, sang the first of the Psalms and I prayed, sang and sang. Yesterday, the boy next-door came up to me and said that he jacks off in his bathroom just listening to my singing gospel songs standing on the balcony. Today on a crowded road, a stranger walked past me from behind, and before I could realize it wasn’t bird poop dripping on my hand but his just ejaculated semen, he vanished in the crowd. Abe, I feel dirty. It feels stupid and disgusting, Abe. Eve would say these things the moment he used to be available in person or on the phone. Why do you not snap at me, Abe? You’re such a good person. You’re so godly and so composed.
if( type == gnosis.INTEGER ){ result.push_back(
if( separator == EOL ) break;
if( type == gnosis.RATIONAL ){ result.push_back(
What. No. Yes. But. Abe would say to himself.
I being trouble bring pain. Eve would say to herself.
I don’t want to give the impression that I mention all the agony that you subjected me to and the agony that I subjected you to. Eve and Abe said to themselves.
At certain times, two years into their relationship, Eve would say something to Abe, but he wouldn’t listen to her or wasn’t in the mood to as if he’d tuned out to a foggy frequency. At one point, in the end, Abe would say certain things to Eve, but by then she’d stopped listening to him.
The anchor that keeps the ship safe from the storm gets left behind as the ship takes off, the storm having subsided. The worm gets used as a bait to catch the big fish, to get a good life. You tell him such pedestrian theories, and he’d tell you to get the eff out of his face. You were never there, moron. I was there with her, there for her.
He wouldn’t snap at her, let alone slap her. If anyone deserved to be slapped, snapped at or worse, it definitely wasn’t Eve.
It’s not like you’re a bird about to take flight, but the world shrinks you to a worm. No. It’s like you’re a bird about to take flight and the castpitalist/claspitalist world shrinks you to a worm.
Recently while walking along the shore of Thiruchendur, an insistent palmist said to Abe that he’d soon be a rich person having made his living in a distant shore. She was holding my hand, sure, but, see, she’d already read me from head to toe from four feet afar. Even a palmist goes by external appearances, dah. Abe would say to Rajan. No, dah. It was our conversing in English that gave her the hint. Rajan would say. She sees, she hears, and in short, the palmist does both, observes and puts two and two together. Favorably so, for her lunch is involved here. I would say. And seeing as how her wellbeing hinges on such positivity day in and day out, she might not wish to encounter the owner of the same palm twice. She can point it out to you, but what can she do if you don’t want it for yourself, right? Bdrrl wrong.
Eve released herself from Abe as one would release oneself from a trap. Drrl. No. A worm can trap a bird, so can a bird a worm. So can a bird a bird and a worm a worm. Yes. If a trap can trap a trap, then the traps aren’t traps but people who function also as traps. The self is a trap, so is the world. Brrl. No. The world is a maze, so is the self, let alone the self that has internalized capitalist meritocracy. Class is a trap, so is caste drrl.
You can’t discontinue your master’s and join a seminary. An unfinished degree will not look good on a preacher or a missionary, brother. Brother Mark said that to Abe and Eve concurred.
Annan, I read somewhere that Petra’s frontman has double doctorates. When his cousin Chris said that to him, he went quiet after uttering a muffled hmm. Thus, it slowly dawned on him that to be a missionary in this circle, you can’t give off the whiff of a quitter. It seemed if you had a double doctorate, people listened to you better when you preached to them. The more educated you are, say, the better. That, to Abe, sounded like something a prosperity theologian would preach.
But, eventually, Abe would quit his master’s.
You’ll see they’ll say that your father thinks like a middle-caste, middle-class person, but you don’t and how dare you! A voice from six feet under said once.
Brrl he learned the fact that Petra’s frontman only has a bachelor’s just five minutes ago when I looked up the matter. I think you still believe at least in liberation, if not in theology.
Alright, talk about firing all the wrong kind of signals while being oblivious all along.
Eve realized I was only into compulsive spending and not interested in earning or saving. She realized that I wasn’t going to own a car or a home. She realized all of this about me even before I could realize it. Loving, caring and consoling aren’t enough. Eve realized that her parents wouldn’t find me presentable. She would let me meet her sister and brother-in-law, but never her parents.
That was what Abe told himself ten years past his bewildered existence after their breakup. That it was because she resolutely sought upward mobility to make her parents proud, the crucial factor he was clueless about all along, despite being clued in on, just wondering all the time instead about WTFWJD. Thirty thousand ads and trackers blocked.
Abe’s maybe right with regard to Eve being a crypto-classist, but he remembers not that day at the café when she showed him her college photo album, his eyes lingered too long on her white and wheat-skinned northie classmates encircling her, maybe mentating on the utter oddity of it and maybe not, and maybe she noticed; then he forgets that the lines of class system drrl cuts across the walls of varna system—living in a world where you witness things every day and not see casteism thinking people are just fucked up—which in turn cuts across the lanes of caste/sub-caste system, how it inculcates self-policing with regard to caste endogamy; he forgets too when she asked him whether it’s her image in his mind every time he jacked off his answer was in the negative; also he forgets that we live in an unimaginably repressive, patriarchal, unconsensual, androcratic world and he forgets as well to remember how he wouldn’t finish reading Redeeming Love—a book that was very dearly beloved to Eve—that she so wanted him to read and appreciate.
Identity readAndDecode( std::function< void( Identity ) >f, FILE* src, char EOL = '\n' ){
* * *
This isn’t everything bdrrl, says my self-flagellating self in the mirror, disconnecting from the AGI. He then drops his hands and smiles so wide the underbite shows—something that he only does like once a week standing before a mirror.
I take off my headgear and hear the silence of printer. Of course it isn’t, I concur, lighting up his warm manuscript.
But almost and a bit more.
The lashes by a Future Goest Past a Present Self that landed on my faux leather backpack have created many a shapeless cuts and holes—places spacious enough for several spider nests.
One shouldn’t expect, I suppose, anything less from a Future you mistook for a Past.
The self is a hall of mirrors—and suddenly, I find myself inside the mirror lighting up my joint, except, I smell, it isn’t a joint but a firecracker. I spit it out before it goes off, WHOOSH, and Abe isn’t outside any longer, just the burning manuscript, so who the heck is looking outside in?
He forgets to reflect me. Or maybe it’s me who’s forgetting to reflect him. When you remember too much you tend to forget certain things and vice versa.
My self may be a hall of mirrors and it doesn’t exist, only my mind does along with my body, so I step out of the mirror and find the scattered pages—half burnt, and in what remains of the one thousand and one pages, there isn’t a single drop of ink except for one single page with one thousand and one words.
I’ve tried to squeeze, it’d seem, one thousand pages into one thousand words and maybe I’ve failed at it, but wait, because the last line on the page goes:
took a train to Hyderabad. Eve would be a blessing anywhere she went. She would be just fine. He knew it
log.vital( "Finish" ); log.flush();
return 0;
* * *
Annotations
Editor’s note: As you may have noticed, this story has a lot of non-English words and caste-system references. If you’re unfamiliar with any of them, the author has provided some annotations below. Definitely worth the read.
- Select source codes were gathered from GitHub.
- “Mooditu poda” means shut up and be gone in Thamizh (Tamil). The Union of India is a republic containing many linguistic states. When students enrolled in neighboring states come across speakers of various languages, English often functions as a link language. Schooled primarily in Thamizh medium, Abe initially had trouble with English so much so that once while midway through narrating the twists and turns of Baby’s Day Out very excitedly to his roommate in broken English, he began to stutter and then fell silent at the sound of Why because the word Kidnap hadn’t yet made its way from the dictionary to the tip of his tongue.
- “Bevarsi” is a swear word in Kannada (while fluent only in Thamizh and English, Abe knew some swear words in six languages, this one by far being his favorite).
- “Machaan” in effect means “dude.” While it literally means brother-in-law in Thamizh, it’s also a word exchanged between male friends (although Ameen’s first language is Malayalam, being also fluent in English, he’d begin speaking a broken Tanglish whenever he got too excited).
- “Garu” is an honorific suffix in Telugu.
- “Jiju” is a diminution of “jijaji” and means brother-in-law (elder sister’s husband) in Hindi.
- “CAD and FEB” are acronyms that don’t really mean anything except for the fact that they’re just ABCDEF shuffled and split in two.
- System of Castes/Jatis. There are thousands of endogamous people-groups in India. Other Backward Class (OBC), for instance, is a collective term used by the Government of India to classify (some marginal, some dominant — that is, heterogeneous) castes which are socially, educationally and politically disadvantaged. It is one of several official classifications of the population of India, along with Scheduled Castes (SCs), Scheduled Tribes (STs) and General Class/Forward Castes. Dalits, known officially as SCs, are ex-untouchables. Although the jati/varna system, cunningly enforced and vigilantly reproduced by people/groups (and their feudo-liberal governmentality) with vested interests, shifts its gears, as it were, from time to time (pre-feudal, feudal to ‘liberal’, neo-liberal), and its function varies from region to region based on local variations, it remains unabolished in Indian society to this day and thus continues to be a harsh reality for many millions of people who dissent and resist day in and day out, especially Dalit and Adivasi (ST) peoples, amid co-optation and insensitivity.
- “Manuvadi” is a Hindi term for a proponent of the jati/varna-based graded inequality laid out in Manusmriti, a brahminical law book, one of those texts that must belong only in the museum, but tragically continues to live on in the minds of Hindu fundamentalists.
- “Annan” means elder brother in Thamizh.
Ahimaz Ponrasa (a.k.a Rajessh, @ahimaaz) has been published recently with Feral Poetry, The Babel Tower Notice Board, Blood Orange, Fever Dream, Giallo, Drunk Monkeys, Nymphs, TERSE. Journal, Jellyfish Review, Burning House Press, BEST BUDS! Collective, RIC Journal and Minor Literature[s]. He lives in the Union of India.
Why we chose this piece: This story is an experimental mindfuck that made us sit up and pay close attention. We enjoyed the voice a lot– there’s a sarcastic bite to it that really resonated with us. Ahimaz interweaves the complexities of caste, race, Christian identity, and love quite deftly.
