It’s a sweet-sad feeling to sit here in a cool dawn writing the last Paronormal Activity for this newspaper.
Goodbyes are hard. But goodbyes are truthful. When we take the time to say goodbye, we say there was love between us. We are not ghosting each other, because whatever the intimacies we shared, whatever their shape and valence, whether gossamer and shimmering with the unspoken, whether stated, routine and taken-for-granted (or both, as our column relationship has been), their meaning will go with us as we go our way. There is no such thing as a situationship; only relationships whose capacity to manifest multiple forms, defies all norms, timidities, labels and laws.
For me, this form of the short, weekly, tabloid column, was a marvelous thing. It was a space that refused the pompous certitudes of venerable, respectable, self-serious spaces. It was a place to be playful and serious at the same time, week after week, bole toh, a complete person. I tended it as a windowsill garden without hierarchies of what ought or ought not to be written about, and therefore what or who, is and isn’t worth valuing. A place where I could talk about literature, lauki, Kangana, KJo, ASHA workers, politics, poetry, elusive darzis, libraries, love letters, Bigg Boss, trees, telephones, roza-pop, mutton curry in Madurai, lilies in Kathmandu, being scolded by older feminists, being a useless character, inequality, equality, drinking alone, eating together, Bombay experiencing winter, the fragility of waiting and of course, over and over, Shahrukh Khan, with the same attention. The attention to life. The attention to a poetic politics. The allegiance to only one motto — #BoreMatKarYaar.
Writing is often presented as a fraught and tortured enterprise. If writing is seen as an event (THE book of the year vaghera) maybe. But in this act of writing week after week and the response of your reading, was the particular gleam and freedom of a committed relationship. The artistic humility of practice. And so, even on days it was hard, even on days when I felt bored, writing was ultimately joyful, pleasurable and most of all — possible.
Ah possibility. What else is politics but the belief that things are possible? Especially those things the world gloomily says, ki boss, impossible hai. Yeh sab nahin chalta. Nowadays people tell you it is not possible or advisable to be many things. People won’t be able to slot you (what a paltry dream to have, no matter how well paid), so write about only one topic for maximum success. Why is your Instagram grid so random? But all your weekly comments, and letters, the way some of you who saw me someplace, sometimes yelled out “Yaniki!” proved that those lectures are just bekar authoritarian BS. There are many kinds of writers and many kinds of readers. Everybody’s somebody’s baby. And for a good while, I was yours.
In this new normal, I know you will miss the paronormal. What a beautiful confidence you gave me to believe that. But frenz, the roads are winding, the magic is in finding each other. Yaniki, phir milenge, kahin aur. Ok? Ok.
Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com