11: skye arundhati thomas, the wistful life, marxist kefir, a decade of palestinian joy
This weekend I went back to Brighton Beach and swam in the sea for what might even be the very first time. Probably not, considering the broad span of my existence but I’ve always been a little terrified of the ocean, of the currents that seem poised to pull you under. At most you might find me wading in up to my knees, gamely, doing the beach thing. It’s nice to overcome yourself in small ways.
The thing that I’m most excited about is a simple one, waking naturally in the morning. Left to my own devices I’ve always tended towards the night hours—the coolness, the calm, the quiet. Over the past few months, with two people in a small studio, working through the night and sleeping at sunrise became the only way I could get anything done—or perhaps the pandemic just enabled these nocturnal tendencies. Everything feels fresh, and the day full of possibility, the optimism of sunlight.
This week’s diary comes from writer and critic Skye Arundhati Thomas in Mumbai. These maps are from Bosnian-born Ottoman polymath Matrakçı Nasuh.
spiky bois
Lockdown in Karachi. Stealing away in America. How do you make movies in a pandemic? Ask horror directors. Long-haulers are redefining Covid-19. On the next economy. America’s terrible internet is making quarantine worse. This patchwork top has become the summer lockdown look. In 14th century Florence, some residents socially distanced while others hit the bars. The pilgrimage to prison. Please! Hold off on that novel coronavirus novel! An inheritance of loneliness. What researching the cremations of the dead in colonial India taught me about life in our cities today. 🎥Summer headstones. Colleges are getting ready to blame their students. Paid domestic work [in Brazil] during the Covid-19 pandemic. As Americans retreat from the long war, Afghan and Pakistani journalists come under attack. For 70 years, Dalits have been denied freedom of religion—through presidential order. Broken glass, blood and anguish: Beirut after the blast. Who gets to tell the story of Wuhan’s lockdown? Tenant unions for the future. A decade of Palestinian joy.
glouglou and snackchat
A taste of antiquity: what’s it like to eat 2500 year-old food? Is the world ready for this gelly? Eating beetles on a shrinking island. Drinking with food media’s flamethrower. 🔊Curry: the social history of a globalised dish. Mangoes. Nettles bread and the fall of the USSR. Tenancy: on recipes part one. Part two. Asafoetida’s lingering legacy goes beyond aroma. 🔊Systems of knowledge in the bar world. The boundary pusher. Malfunction at Swiss cocoa factory sends out plume of cocoa snow. How former samurai and farmers cultivated the first Japanese apples. When the next big thing in food isn’t actually next. 🔊Food media’s moment of reckoning? An ice cream truck’s racist jingle has caught up with it. Inside Ethiopia’s endangered wild coffee forests. How to make ice cream cocktails like a true Wisconsinite. An oral history of Simpsons & steamed hams. A lesson in acceptance. Stone fruit season: a comic. The dawa: Kenya’s beloved boozy cocktail. What kefir has to do with marxism. My mother’s catfish stew.
the wistful life
The reclusive food celebrity Li Ziqi is my quarantine queen. A Garo woman’s YouTube channel is exploring North Eastern [Indian] cuisine, one tribal kitchen at a time. Once upon a time, there was cottagecore. In a wistful age, farmers find a new angle: chore TV. My grandfather and the fukien tree: a botanical history. Dr. Southern California. The Chinese farmer who livestreamed her life and made a fortune. Portrait of a Cambodian lady: a narrative of Khmer women’s labour and performativity. Pastoral romance. Cottagecore is the pastoral fantasy aesthetic taking over tiktok. The pleasure of sitting out a trend. Periwinkle, the colour of poison, modernism and dusk. Archive of queer brown feelings. Underneath the sweet gum tree.
watermark
Hong Kong’s vast $3.8 billion rain tunnel network. Logistics, labor, and state power. A whale’s afterlife. Taino names of the Caribbean islands. A chain of seahorse hotels is coming soon to Sydney harbour. Inside the fight to give Florida rivers legal rights. Open waters. The surfing sculptor. Underwater (un)sound. My year on a shrinking island. Covid-19 lull increases theft of turtle eggs in Oman. Hagia Sophia has been converted back into a mosque but the veiling of its figural icons is not a Muslim tradition. Why one expert predicts a major hurricane hitting Houston would be “America’s Chernobyl”. Quick thoughts: Diana Buttu on the UAE-Israel agreement. The mountains where manna flows from the trees. The phoenix mosque and the Persians of medieval Hangzhou. The end of nature. Lost at sea. 🔊Muslim Rumspringa: the karma of Vijay Prashad. This limpet may be evolving to avoid humans. How a Buddhist community in Nepal reclaimed its holy water. 🔊Of forests and floods: a speculative podcast.
☞\( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)☞ yeehaw
How two British orthodontists became celebrities to incels. Inside the boogaloo: America’s extremely online extremists. A suspense novelist’s trail of deceptions. The wild, wild west of space law. Why did these YouTubers give away their son? Cops raided and shut down the only magic mushroom ‘church’ in the US. You spy, we chat. One Twitter account’s quest to proofread the New York Times. China issues guidelines on developing a sci-fi film sector. Boss of the beach. How four brothers allegedly fleeced $19 million from Amazon. What do virtual worlds tell us about our own? How to learn everything: the Master Class diaries. The iconic Ibiza wall lizard once ruled its domain. then came the snakes. The wildest insurance fraud scheme Texas has ever seen. What French feminism can teach us about Karens.
culture diary: skye arundhati thomas
monday
At the end of this week I will mark four entire months in lockdown. This whole time I thought I had been cheating the pandemic, tricking time, stealing it away: working out; working a lot; buying too many new clothes for imaginary nights and days that were yet to come but that were probably, definitely, on their way. I had been avoiding most video calls—too afraid to make the time/space distance real—except for an obligatory birthday Zoom party in June.
I wore an 80s Marks & Spencer silver lace nightgown, filled my room up with balloons and hosted a talent show. T made a small rubik’s cube of her face and bobbed it up and down across the screen (we unanimously decided that she had won, even though she was first to go, and even though it wasn’t a competition); B did a spectacular drag act in an egg-yolk yellow power blazer with giant shoulder pads; D drank soup from a bowl and fed her dog a carrot; A showed us all the strange, special objects in their room; R sang a song with a surprise ending, a red flower in her hair, so charming; M danced, of course, wearing tiny disco balls as earrings, looking so soft, a little darling; and A performed a small set of my favourite songs, after which I think each of us cried a little. It was so beautiful. At the very end we decided to dance a bit and as I heard my own footsteps falling in my empty room I thought, fuck, this is really sad.
So, yes, I’ve been thinking about my footsteps in an empty room today. I guess I could say that my heart feels a little broken right now. It’s only just struck me that, well, maybe, I haven’t successfully tricked the pandemic, and actually things are quite messy and in distress. I woke up feeling foggy, sneezing a lot, and sat at my desk drinking coffee very slowly and watching the powdery rain. I had tried, rather unsuccessfully, to start at online affair over the weekend. It made me think a lot about self preservation: how acts of self-preservation seem to rule our days. We don’t leave our homes even as the lockdown lifts a little because numbers are still rising; I’ve seen R wear a mask even when nobody’s around. We’re trying so much to take care of ourselves, but it’s leaking into our imaginations, obscuring things too hard. I wrote a text message in response to what felt like a negation of where I was coming from, ‘I guess we are approaching time/space differently? I hate to close doors on things, I feel so curious and open to what’s possible — it’s also this moment, so outside of our control, that perhaps requires new versions of old things.’
It’s so windy outside and I’m daydreaming a little. Can’t love, or near-love, or desire, or even more-than-just-a-friendship be about the small moments – or does it always have to imagine a future in order to exist? I want to write another text just to say, ‘Can’t we just admire each other for a while’ but I don’t, the moment has passed. I guess I’m a little heartbroken today because in a time of no future I would like to be able to remind myself that I exist outside of this room, this routine.
tuesday
I wake up late, again. It’s no longer late, it’s just “morning” to me now. I text R and ask if she wants me to go with her to the hospital, and she says yes. I feel sluggish but chase down some coffee and scramble some eggs. I wear long trousers, a long-sleeved shirt, tie my hair, put on gloves, a mask, socks, and a scarf. My own kind of hazmat suit, I guess: just trying to cover myself up as best I can. I have to drive my mom’s giant car, I can’t get the seat to move forward so only my toes reach the pedals, but I lurch forward—my first outing since R’s birthday actually, so that is, in weeks. The streets are an eerie quiet. The people that I do see don’t seem to be wearing their masks properly. There’s a group milling about in front of the Punjab Dairy, drinking tall foamy glasses of lassi, another outside Kapila, waiting to pick up kathi rolls. I struggle to find parking, walk halfway around the hospital and in through the wrong gate, fill out a fake name at the entrance.
I see R in the lobby: her hair flops around her shoulders, her mask is bright green, her eyes dart around the large atrium, and I can tell she is nervous. We sit down, one seat between us like the stickers direct. I give her a spare pair of gloves and we joke about death. A person sitting close to us is wearing a blue checkered handkerchief around their forehead, long rectangular slits cut out for their eyes, the fabric falling down their face. No mask. The hospital is an eerie quiet, too. I expected chaos but all the tiles are gleaming, as if they were polished just seconds ago. The doctor tries to ask me to leave the room when we enter but I persist, and I ask a lot of questions. He is patronising, a little curt. I make bad jokes to try and make him laugh, loosen up, to be a person. It’s a bad time to feel alienated by the medical industry, I think to myself, a really bad time for a doctor to say, instead of any proper explanation, ‘I can’t really tell you why this happened because you are not versed in medical facts.’ Incredible.
We drive along M. G. road to get some more tests done, and then just hang out in the car, drinking from separate bottles of water, our masks off, the windows open. I smile at a woman walking her dog. R seems chill, she’s such a bro, a real beefy dude, I think she might be in a lot of pain but she won’t ever say. We get takeaway from Kapila, too, R standing in line with after a group of teenagers that look jumpy and stoned. We have a roll each, paper folded out over the car seats. I spill green chutney all over myself, and a cute bone-white stray dog jumps against the door, smelling the meat. As I drive home I keep taking my eyes away from the road to chose a song, and think, this is a really bad idea but do it anyway.
wednesday
I wake up with an idea for a project. Not really a “project” project. I will call a friend, say hi, and immediately they will have to start talking about an ex—any kind of ex, could be a friend or relative, too—and I will listen, make notes, and then later, write a letter to that person, on behalf of my friend. I will send the letter back to my friend, as a translation of their pain, as something that I now share, so they don’t have to suffer through those unresolved feelings alone. I guess this is also to say, I wake up feeling like my capacity for heartbreak is immense. So: I guess the logic is, can I share the heartbreak of those I love?
I ask T what she thinks and whether she will try it with me. We can’t do any small talk, I tell her. Are you asking me to confront my own mortality? she asks, and I can’t tell if she’s making a joke. I want us to make each other feel better, I text back, herd immunity but for heart break. She replies, I thought you didn’t understand what herd immunity was? I put my phone down and realise, I really need to restart therapy.
I make coffee, choose a baby-blue painted porcelain cup, place it on a tray, get back in bed, arrange the pillows into a little lap for me to rest in, watch the rain. I pull my laptop towards me and try to finish writing a pitch to a mainstream international publication: ‘How Intersectional Feminism Threatens the Hindu-Right’. I’ve been trying to write about an unfairly, outrageously, incarcerated group of intersectional feminist activists from the collective Pinjra Tod, now around seventy days in a maximum-security prison in New Delhi. They are friends of my friends, and I click through photos of them on Facebook admiring their strength and resilience. As I write the pitch, I try to talk about the precedent of intersectional solidarity movements in India, how Hindu and Muslim womxn have historically stood together to directly confront Hindu-masculine-nationalism. I rewrite and revise every sentence and realise, again, how fundamentally exhausting the pitching process always is: having to make real, tangible things seem relevant to a white editor. Having to make lives into anecdotes, justify their relevance, their currency, their capital. I send out the pitch. Watch The Sopranos, begin editing a piece, sleep.
thursday
I wake up, check my email and come straight to my desk; slowly restart editing the piece. R comes over and we drink coffee in the balcony with the rain misting around us, eating chunky pieces of coconut flesh. I bring up how in a conversation with A last week, they said to me that how they have been trying to realise their future in the present moment, instead of deferring it. I want to do that too. In a time of impossible-to-imagine futures I want to start my future now. We talk about what that means for each of us, what that could look like, what are the smallest steps we could take. The afternoon feels supernaturally charged: the breeze, the overcast sky, the sound and smell of rain. We are dreaming a dream together, I thought, this is what it looks like to build a future for oneself, but together. We talk for hours, the sun sets, and we open up all the windows to do a workout in the living room. We squat and lunge and jump and laugh and the cats run along our bodies, really excited, digging their nails in the yoga mats. I put on some sad girl music, which makes R laugh, and we stretch for ages, using foam rollers.
friday
I’m up all night, bleary eyed into the morning. At 2.34 am V posts a Facebook status that makes me cry, ‘Jail is the only place you’re happy when a loved one leaves—Devangana, on the phone.’ It’s the day before annual Independence Day celebrations and I’m feeling claustrophobic. After sunrise I work on an edit for a piece about journalists who were beaten in the street in a religiously charged attack. I skim-read the news and its looks like they are going to hold Prashant Bhushan (an ex-Supreme Court judge) in contempt of court for critical tweets. It’s really so hard to make sense of such a violent time. At 11 am I try to do some yoga but hurt my wrist, too clumsy after no sleep. I spend the day in what feels like a dream state. Pacing around the house, around my room. I arrange to have therapy the next day. Work late into the night editing a piece to publish in time for—a phrase I see someone tweet and decide to adopt—Independence is not Freedom Day.
saturday
Feeling really off-centre. Two recurring thoughts after therapy:
Can my preoccupations be nourishing instead of destructive?
Why am I obsessing/feeling so PROVOKED by the future? The future has collapsed, and every day is a new navigation.
sunday
I spend all day thinking about what it means to have a fantasy. Fantasies are so fragile, so prone to rupture, and perhaps they have to be left as they are. Sometimes fantasies are tied to desire but also to intellectual fascinations. A way to experiment with the elasticity of the imagination—test out how far one can imagine a different world, and it’s not always about the future, especially now in this moment where the future has died in some fundamental way. Maybe it’s about shifting the present moment—a fantasy as a way to subvert reality, which is perhaps its most basic definition. Especially if one is less available to oneself than they are to others: a way of realising something apart of the self in the fantasy: of building texture and depth without having to face up to what’s actually missing from the scene.
featured creature: gloster fancy canary
It’s true I’m moving to Berlin but that’s a ways off yet. In the meanwhile, please enjoy these apple-headed baby banged roundboys.