Of Cabbages and Kings: La La Lump

Last year my father died of cancer. And the laugh went out of me. It was a mad howling silence and as always in moments like this, when your world is in tattered, fleshy pieces, like you've been bombed; someone makes a cruel joke. "Oh ha ha, now we can all go out for a picnic," and just like that, you also laugh. Ha ha ha. A desperate, dystopic laugh because you feel so throttled, your voice has nowhere else to go but to copy. Ha ha ha ha ha!

In some small or big way, we've all had these macabre moments. And now, as Trump waves his stodgy hand at the world, we, in India are doing just that. Smiling our way off our faces as we live with our own in-house Trump. Ha ha ha we say, as one more democratic space is shrunk or broken. The last to snap was our Reserve Bank. But what do you do, when you're staring into a void, your parent going down, one organ after another? The cancer is everywhere. My mother and I sometimes joke about how my father smoked his life away. Arteries filling with smoke as he puffed incessantly - a hundred cigarettes a day. Me and my mum - his hideous audience watched his heart start to shudder. Then the kidneys and liver. And then cancer of the lungs made him sink entirely. Poof. All gone up in smoke. It's like how the world has been voting lately. Lining up our collective cigarettes until we incinerate ourselves into oblivion. Well, we've done it. In Modi-India and Brexit-England and Trumpistan. So now, let's just do the cosmic, collective, yogic thing and exhale, shall we?

It helps, I've discovered. It makes you say, okay, this is personal. We've broken it all. And it's a desolate, lonely, nightmare; even when it's a collective. You've seen it in some shape or form, I'm certain. Like the day you may have taken yourself to a cafe and stared enviously at the couple across the table. Or sat in a park as a dad pushes his daughter higher and higher on the swing; knowing that you're single and too old and over the hill now to have a child. Our democracies are perhaps like that, more and more. Single, searching, on Tinder, on WhatsApp, in parks and cafes and every possible place for that elusive La La Land. And then even in THE movie of 2016, La La Land; Ryan Gosling doesn't get the girl. So it must be true. Not post truth but simply, THE TRUTH. We want to live in the 1940s, tap dancing ourselves around lamp posts and singing in the rain. And the world comes and hits us in the face and says - stop.

So we have to find a way to change the backdrop. Or the foreground. Like we have to learn to walk again, speak again, live again after a parent dies. Maybe we won't find a way. But until we sputter to our own end, we have no choice. So we stand up and look around and grab every stranger in the street and say - hey, I'm bleeding, I'm broken, I need fixing! And many will run a million miles. What is wrong with that woman? Why is she so needy? Doesn't she have friends?

And you sit in front of your laptop after the enth day goes by and some friends stay and others drop you a line, and you feel the need to run from the familiar. Because in the world turned turtle, the familiar is strange. And you look to strangers for the new, yet familiar. Are our rules enough to keep us as a nation? Were we standing on nothing? Was our democracy in La La Land and is Trump the awakening we all really needed?

Well, we've got no choice now. We have to ask ourselves - what does equality mean when we're all so different? Was the West really handing out a receipt for deceit - from Voltaire to Marx? Did they say we should all band together as one but really only mean all the white people with no headscarves? And if we're falling off the map now, what end of that dream can we still hold? And how? And who are `we'?

Just as well that the ugly white President who wants to homogenize the world into one big Mac Burger is right there in front of us. So we do not have the comfort of our childhood, our parent, our home, our lover, our children. We have to start over. Like the lonely single girl in a cafe. Even if we have parents. And kids. And partners. With Modi and Putin and Trump, we really don't. We can no longer say - okay, we've voted. The man or woman in charge will do the rest. Let's go home to our biryani and raita and the rest will take care of itself. It will most certainly not. And that may just turn out to be a good thing. Or at any rate, we're at the point where we have got to see it as such. And re-draw the universe. And take part. Not just agitate and hold up banners and change our Facebook profiles to black. We have to look at each gaping hole - education, inclusiveness, tolerance and find ways of making each of these things up all over again. Trump and Modi and whatever "rough beasts, their hour come round at last" (Yeats - The Second Coming) have been born; they've been stitched together carefully, with hate, over time. And will have to be un-tethered ever so carefully and painfully over time.

And it does help, when someone looking at your father's ashes in a pot makes a joke. That's when it all comes to pieces and you remember, as you stumble over yourself, to look for a new railing, to teach yourself to walk all over again. But before the fact of walking, you've got to go force your mind back to imagining new ground. What's real is gone. The abyss brought on by Modi and Trump is a dead parent. It may as well be fiction. We've got to make new facts now. In my world, the somewhat scared media world, this our chance. To not be mouse. To really do what the American Press Corps just did in an open letter to Trump. "We will set the rules, not you," they said. "We credit you with highlighting serious and widespread distrust in the media across the political spectrum. Your campaign tapped into that and it was a bracing wake-up call for us. We have to regain that trust." They pledged to do what the press seldom does. To stand together. To be fearless once again. Not La La Land. Heels off. Cuffs on. Bring it on Trump. Modi. Whoever's waiting in the wings. This, right here, this column is one such fearless space you've inadvertently brought to life. And it will fly.

Also read - How this Gujarati watched Obama farewell and sneered at Trumpistas