…and then he kissed me

It was my birthday recently and my girl friend took me out to a fancy restaurant in Colombo to celebrate.

After the meal, just as I was feeling blissful and loved, I heard the familiar ‘Happy Birthday’ tune and knew something was up. A few seconds later, out came three waiters bearing a cake with sparklers on top, followed by several other individuals including the chef, all with big smiles on their faces.

All eyes were on me. The cake was placed in front of me and I blushed with delight as they all sang Happy Birthday to me; my girlfriend beamed.

And then a very strange thing happened – the waiter who had brought in the cake with the sparklers came over to me and wished me a happy birthday and – KISSED me on both cheeks! I was totally shocked! Taken fully by surprise I wondered, is this usual?

I was so bewildered that I didn’t do anything or say anything at that moment…..but just felt totally out of place! Is it the done thing for waiters to kiss the guests at restaurants on their birthdays? I knew it was a foreign owned and managed restaurant  but still – is it normal practice anywhere, for waiters to kiss the guests on their birthdays? Has anyone had this happen to them before?

I remember coming home and laughing about it, but even now when I remember the incident, all I can recall is my total shock and how the sweaty waiter smelled of perspiration… eek! Totally repulsive!

I suppose a sort of instinctive sense of etiquette took over at the moment it happened, not to mention total surprise. Maybe I should have said something reproving to him or even to the manager …but I was just plain dumbstruck. Unfortunately.

 

The long-stalked

stiff and strong.

So beautifully soft,

long-petalled.

Half-petals

feather-like.

So many memories.

Laughter,

holding hands,

throat full,

tears,

looking out the window,

the blue curtain,

love on the floor,

silent passions.

One for each petal,

these many memories.

Each time I see

these luscious flowers

vivid colours

of remembering.

So many memories

that no one else got

these

long-stalked flowers.

On a sleepy afternoon in bed would you read a poem?

I have been looking for poems in blogs and found myself wondering: is poetry the pastime of elitists and lovers? It appears to me that poetry is not something people are really ‘into’ these days. When do we really read poetry? Other than in school as part of Sinhala or English literature. Did we ever read it as a leisure activity? As something to do on a rainy day in bed? Would you go looking for well-written poems in cyberspace or go to the well-known classics? Would you have sent this poem to a friend as good reading material, however beautiful you think it is? Would you think of sending this to your beloved as a gift? All these questions whirl around in my mind as I look for poems in blogs.

And now, I wonder why – as a generation – we are not ‘into’ poetry. Is it because good poems are hard to find, especially on blogs? Is it because poetry is considered the posh marginal in literature – people think it is sublime, but not many read it. It is not fiction, which lives on the preoccupations of lives. Is it because many people feel that writing – and reading – poems is a deeply personal thing, at a level that fiction isn’t? That it is something to do when in love and in pain?

Sugar

Smooth
on
my fingers.
Soft
in
my mouth.
Swirl
my tongue
around.
Dissolve
in
my mouth.

 

You.

 

Waiting

 

I know myself now

That I shall wait

As I have waited,

as I will always wait.

Patiently, patiently,

As the earth, as the sky.

Patient as water I will wait.

Patient as death.

It makes no difference

Where I go or what I do.

I know after all this time

That there is no time.

Still I wait and wait.

And whatever happens,

whatever I may look back upon

when its all over

I know that there is no end

no beginning.

Nothing but me and you

And the times I wait

between.

Oh, who would be a security guard?

A security guard is usually a privately and formally employed person who is paid to protect property, assets or people.

Have you noticed how security guards seem to have suddenly proliferated all around Colombo? Wherever one goes – the restaurant, the nightclub, the corporate office or eco-resort – there they will be, ubiquitous as bajaj, standing around in little groups of three until you show up, all wearing those badly tailored mud-brown uniforms with fake badges and fake military caps…whining, intimidating and entirely irritating.

The average security guard has, like Pooh, Very Little Brain. He will manifest himself inappropriately, appearing suddenly in your rear view mirror standing directly behind and as close as possible to your car as you are reverse parking neatly into a space you have found after much blood, sweat and tears. Having made this maneuver as difficult as possible by constantly getting in the way, he will then wait till you have climbed out in the rain to tell you firmly that you have to move the car somewhere else at once.

He also has a habit of looming up out of the dark in empty car-parks at night, minus his badly tailored mud-brown uniform and fake military cap, looking instead like a small serial killer and frightening you half to death until you realize he’s just doing overtime annoyance duty in civvies.

Security guard recruitment apparently doesn’t have very strict regulations regarding size or strength since a high percentage seems to be below average height and size. They can also be found in an aged and feeble model. Either way, one cannot imagine anyone who was planning a burglary or murder (or even a disorderly parking activity) to take the security guard factor very seriously. Indeed the temptation to laugh in the security guard’s face and walk away quickly as he froths about your car needing to be moved two inches to the left is always very great.

Right now people are eagerly contributing to our list of places that employ annoying security guards. This may be published as a public service. (There may be companies and individuals that employ strong, silent, intelligent security guards but we have not discovered them yet. Please let us know if you have met one of them because we would like to go meet him too and you should learn to share.)

But I don’t think I’ll be hiring a security guard to protect my property, assets or favorite people anytime soon. It would make me feel too terribly insecure.

The perfect vagina

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8352711.stm

“Consultant gynaecologist Sarah Creighton and psychologist Lih-Mei Liao challenged the ethics of offering women surgery to address such insecurities, suggesting it was adverts for a “homogenised, pre-pubescent genital appearance” which created these anxieties in the first place.”

Why can’t we celebrate our differences without trying to be homogeneous and similar? People are made differently, we are not all the same colour, the same height, the same weight or size, so of course other parts of our bodies are not going to be the same either! That seems to me to be a basic fact of life.

All men experience anxiety over penis size. Women agonise about breast sizes. But the truth is that we are each different and beautiful in our own way, with big breasts or not!

An alteration to improve the perceived look of a person’s genitalia whether male or female, is not only a complete a waste of money and time but also a futile attempt to achieve an ideal. Who decides what’s ‘beautiful’ anyway? The advertising agencies? The media? Or their close cousin, the fashion industry? And what does that make us – Stepford Wives?

How uninteresting and uninspiring this world would be if we all looked alike!

No dowry to be gained…

Recently we posted a fury about weddings and being forced to go to them. (See: ‘Getting married?’). Everyone seemed to agree that weddings and forcible attendance were in general a pain in the ass and a Bad Thing. But many marriages start with big weddings. These are ghastly events most of the time unless they have been organized by some uber-cool friend and performed beside a waterfall with lots of beautiful people, exotic drugs, funky music, scrumptious food and plenty of garlands. Weddings that the guests talk about wistfully for months afterwards and tell their children about, when they are old enough to handle it. Unfortunately weddings like this are few and far between, and we are usually not invited to them unless we are spectacularly beautiful, obscenely rich or the pusher.

No. Most weddings are formal affairs, conducted in solemn places of worship – the church, the temple or the Hilton. There is a lot of standing around sweating in black suits with tight collars or pink chiffon saris. There are sermons on the sanctity of marriage, love, joy, faithfulness and a hint of the little pattering feet soon to arrive. There is chanting of blessings or singing of popular hymns in three part harmony till finally it is over and everyone heaves a sigh of relief and heads off either to find the black label or to take off their heels for a bit.

Next there is a party with a band playing classic rock covers and the women scheme further marriages while the men consume the black label and start thinking they might look good doing the baila. This happens. Then once they have had a good workout on the dance floor everyone drives drunkenly home, throws up and waits for the next one.

Meanwhile the bride and groom set out on the serious business of Being Married.

This involves having sex, going to work, parties, joint bank accounts, shopping, cooking, seeing the in-laws every Sunday and…babies!

Many are the disputes over suitability, land, caste and creed that have been instantly resolved by the arrival of the Baby. Like royalty entering, all argument is hushed and the cuteness of every tiny infant is guaranteed to melt the hardest of hearts and set them thinking instead about how long it will be before they are old enough to teach ‘em cricket. Babies are great. They will no doubt grow up to torture their parents with boyfriends and drug habits but till then, they are the coolest.

Consider now, the plight of the unfortunate sri lankan gay man or lesbian. Not all the intelligence, education, skills, good nature, wealth, character or evidence of responsibility in the world has given us the right to marry the ones we love. We might wear rings or tattoos as signs of faith. We might write our wills in favor of each other even. We might be accepted by our immediate family if we’re lucky and we might have a few friends to support us, also if we’re lucky. But we have no rights, no recognition and little good will from most of the people we interact with. We hide from public view and occasionally get taunted, beaten up or thrown out of public spaces for no reason. We put up and shut up. We live and we love as best we can. We ‘marry’ in private and only our closest friends and family know when we are happy or sad, ‘married’ for years, having a baby or breaking up.

But what the hell. We’ll have a pretend wedding on the beach. You can keep the Hilton.

My little green snake

This is the time that my little green snake

That wriggly little thing

Comes wriggling into my head

Sinuous and green

She will make sure that my heart will break

Squeezing it tight

And tight and tighter

And I’ll spend the next month in my bed.

Lovers will come and lovers will go

Sniff, sniff

My little green snake is so true

Smell, smell

She stays with me, plays with me

Twists around me

Night-time she lays with me

Turns in me

After I’ve stopped missing you.

Whips around me

You who was once so true,

With the fruit

succulent and dew

Now just the thought of you makes me blue,

Spit out the pips

Crunch on the memories

But I have been and I have seen,

Forked tongue flickering,

tell me what is coming

And I choose now to stay with green.

Black eyes staring,

silky scales flowing,

A snake.

Twisting me around you

What does that me make?

Chitra Ganesh

Chitra Ganesh was born and raised in Brooklyn, NY, where she currently lives and works. Buried narratives and marginal figures typically excluded from official canons of history, literature, and art inspire her drawing, installation, text-based work, and collaborations.
Ganesh draws from a broad range of material, including the iconography of Hindu, Greek and Buddhist mythology, 19th century European portraiture and fairytales, song lyrics, as well as contemporary visual culture such as Bollywood posters, anime, and comic books. The process of automatic writing is central to her practice, and emerges from dissecting myths to retrieve critical moments of abjection, desire, and loss.
By layering disparate materials and visual languages, Ganesh considers alternate narratives of sexuality and power in a world where untold stories keep rising to the surface. In this process the body becomes a site of transgression, both social and psychic, doubled, dismembered and continually exceeding its limits.

www.chitraganesh.com

 

If you kiss and tell, are you still unfaithful?

Once, weeks after a relationship ended, I was told that we had not been in a relationship. What did we have, I wondered at the time. Is there a word for what we had had? Once, after discovering that the person I was in love with had been holding hands with someone else, I was told that that was not unfaithfulness. What is it then, I wondered. Is there anything in between faithful and unfaithful? I sat down and thought, ‘how is it, that it is so clear to me that it was unfaithfulness, and it was not ‘unfaithful’ to the other person!’ Had we been taught at different schools? had we seen different things in life? had we just not interpreted the dictionary in the same way?

I think the latter. I mean, what else could it be? And I sat down to think about being unfaithful. Randomly, I checked dictionaries. What does it mean, this word? It meant too many things. In the British National Corpus, a search for ‘faithful’ came up with faithful to causes, religion, thoughts, people, and then finally, faithful in love, but a search for ‘unfaithful’ showed everything to be related to love and sex! So the BNC doesn’t help either, I thought. I would just have to sit and think it out.

Would I consider my beloved to be unfaithful if she looked at someone across the room, in that special way that said ‘I see you’? Or maybe if she dances sexily with someone? Or if she holds hands with someone secretly? Would I be unfaithful if I met someone suddenly for coffee and didn’t tell her I planned it? (‘it was just a coffee and not a date!’). If I make plans to be with someone in a different life, is that unfaithful? or is ‘unfaithful’ a term that we use only when sex is involved?

Sex with someone else. That’s it. Yes, definitely unfaithful. But no, another friend said. ‘I don’t care that he slept with someone, it would be worse if he cared for her’. ‘What?’ I said, outraged. ‘You don’t mind??’ Well, maybe it’s not just the sex then. Just maybe. Maybe its the thought that there will be sex! ‘No, no’ she said, exasperated. ‘You are too hung up on this sex thing’. So, yes, maybe I am.

When I sat and thought about it over a cup tea, I realised that even handholding was unfaithful in my eyes. Actually, handholding was worse than sex with another person! Hand holding was romance, chemistry, electricity. And the more I thought about this, I realised that I was actually mixing up faithfulness with something else.

Knowing you know everything she does, and thinks, and feels. Really. Being certain.

Yes, that terrible word that some call trust. You have to be able to know that that person will not hurt you. You have to be able to know that you are told the whole truth and not parts of the truth. You want to feel that you are so important to the other person that she will tell you everything. Everything. That even the hand holding will not be hidden from you. And that ‘knowing’ of the other person is a different ball game altogether.

Herstories

A friend of mine was traveling to New York recently and because I wanted to grab the opportunity to order some good lesbian books online and have her bring them back home, I started my search very excitedly on Amazon. I typed in the search words ‘Asian + lesbian’ but very little turned up. I then added the word ‘South’ before ‘Asian’ to the search words… but again not much came up. So I added the word ‘queer’.

This produced far more results than the other categories so I started browsing the titles and reading the excerpts. But sadly in spite of the volume of results of the search, I found very little of relevance to my life…or to what I think is representative of my life.

I tried searching other online stores as well. All of them had a large selection of gay and lesbian literature and many of the titles seemed interesting. Most of the literature was out of America and not by Asian writers. I was looking for something more Asian – more South Asian really and more Sri Lankan to be precise. That would have been perfect.

And I was looking for something lesbian – not male-centric. Comics, novels, novellas, fiction, non-fiction, I searched all the categories but found almost nothing. Two choices did come up though: Facing the mirror: Lesbian writing from India which i have read and have no great opinion of and Stealing Nazreen – a novel which I have yet to read.

Besides these two books there was nothing of real significance – and certainly nothing from Sri Lanka.

And then it struck me. We need to write our own ‘Herstories’!

That is the only way we will gain more visibility through literature. It really is our responsibility – to ourselves and to the next generation of young soul-searching Sri Lankan lesbians – to make them feel less alone and that they are not the first to be this way and will certainly not be the last.

We need to write our stories to ensure we are not omitted from the pages of history. We have to create our own language where none exists – to describe our lives and what and who we are. We can’t keep expecting other people to write the stories of our lives when we are the ones living them. No. We have to write our own stories and our own histories…and the time is now.

So I sat down and started writing…