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HOWLING PRESS
POLITICAL POETRY
world where working class realities still crossed path with the bourgeois dreams of Bengali intellectuals, not in conflict yet - those lanes were my first lessons of indoctrination into this atypical strain of identity politics that idiosyncratic Bengalis pride themselves over - my father, doting as he was, let me pick out a pair of fluorescent hair clips, onto which I then latched on the very last strands of my self-expression as I used them to adorn the wig, till one day, the conductor of the schoolbus amused by the apparent paradox, blurted out “but it’s fake no?” we remember different versions of this reality though, my mother and I - she ignores my repugnance and recalls the episode with fondness, though at first she laughs uncharacteristically hysterically, on seeing my neatly shaved head through the safe distance of a video call, and quickly moves on to instructing me to find some rag that I can burn, and mix the ashes thereafter with some aloe vera and apply to my scalp - something I make a mental note of because somewhere I too harbour the desire for the statutory feminine that nurtures, hairwise, otherwise - one that I’m denying myself now in an attempt of deconstruction, because the utopia of reconstruction holds in it the promise of realisation, even if for one brief unadulterated moment - that much like this sentence finds resplendence in the just the possibility of circling back into itself - unsurprisingly, my unevenly cut 12 inches inside crinkly blue plastic bag has rearranged itself into a bun-like assimilation, the kind that “beauticians” use in bridal make up, because tradition dictates that the thicker the mane - the lusher is the promise of childbirth you carry in girth of that sexual identity, one that curiously, Foucault postulates wasn’t even a part of the identity discourse, till such time rigid boundaries necessitated by the moral codes of “nationalism” needed to strong-arm gender politics to either conform or be ostracised - in such a world then to be able to choose ostracization - where subversion is your key tool to conspiracy - is a privilege, because even if for a blip in the spacetime continuum, my indeterminacy makes me Laplace’s Demon - both on the inside and the outside, both the vigilante and the criminal, identities which over time have become prescriptive rather than descriptive, willing, almost forcing the means to be the end, convincing the medium that it is the vessel, the fluidity, now drowned in binary narratives of the haves and the have-nots - something that inevitably made me question my want to be both and none, sometimes at the same time, and at other times to dull the urge to codify the multiplicity of the spectrum at one pivotal point - a point whose boundaries I had to give up on, when my friend-turned-hairdresser made me watch the whole process on video, while she first guilelessly butchered, and then shaved off the very last strands of my approved identity and in a twisted moment of surreality,