One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter
Page 9
After our final wedding meal—another lunch, another tub of dum aloo and collard greens pressure-cooked to death—we had to go. Sweetu was to leave the country in a few days too, to move to Appalachia with her husband. That’s where she will start to lose and forget things. That’s where the pieces of the family get fragmented again. That’s where her children will lose this language eventually, where their children will not even be sure where their grandmother was from. That’s where India becomes a place she was from and not a place she lives. That’s where her roots get pulled out. I didn’t tell her this, because this would be a stupid thing to hear from someone who never lived here in the first place. Instead, I hugged her, and she smelled good, like every woman in India seemed to smell: sandalwood, fragrant hair, Nivea.
“So, when will I see you next?” she asked, her wedding bangles jangling ceaselessly. “The next marriage?”
“Sweetu, you’ll be eight hours from me. If it takes us a decade to see each other, something is wrong.”
She hugged me again, pinching my cheeks because I am forever younger than her. I walked away as Raisin ran in front of me, trying to rip off the last Indian outfit she was required to wear on this trip.
So much of immigration is about loss. First you lose bodies: people who die, people whose deaths you missed. Then you lose history: no one speaks the language anymore, and successive generations grow more and more westernized. Then you lose memory: throughout this trip, I tried to place people, where I had met them, how I knew them. I can’t remember anything anymore. Raisin doesn’t even try. I never miss any of these losses until I’m reminded they exist, until weddings or funerals or births or other milestones of a life cycle. I don’t like the obligation of a wedding, but I did like the look on my mom’s face when she watched Sweetu float to the car to be carted off to her father-in-law’s home. I liked how she rested her chin on her hands and blinked thick tears, good ones, the kind you want your mother to one day cry for you. I liked that she got some closure, that she got to send someone off the way she was sent off. Mom complains about having to clean rooms in my childhood home that have long been empty, but when anyone suggests downsizing, she demurs. “I don’t want to sell this house until you get married. This is your house. I have to send you off from this house.” I don’t want to wear the old hair that my mother has stored in her deep-freezer, but I like that she considered it.
One day, Hamhock and I will have to do this, less for us than for my parents, and my Bua, and Chacha, and Chachi, and Masi, and Fufaji, and all the fragmented parts of our family who may not attend but will somehow have a hand in threading a chain through my ear or force-feeding me little fried chilies. Hamhock will do it because he loves me and I will do it because I love him, but above all, I will do it to give my family an ending, a promise that I remember parts of our history that I can’t possibly know. I will do it because it tells them that I’m okay, that the circle my parents drew is closed, and now I can start a new one. There’s so much of it that I don’t want—there will not be gender-specific sobriety, thank you—but when else will I get all these people into a room, wearing chiffon and eating with their hands, to wish me off into a good life? When else might I see them again?
Raisin often tells me I’m not an adult because I’m not married, suggesting that it might be time for me and Hamhock to get on with it. I laugh at her, but I want the same for her, too, eventually. I don’t care who she marries—frankly, I don’t even care if it’s a legal union. I just want to rub coconut oil in her hair and tell her that she is in my bones, no matter where she ends up. I, too, will cheer and laugh when they press safety pins into her head, or cover her in milk infused with purple flowers, or when she complains about the impressive weight of an intrusive outfit. A little torture, a few tears, some gold around her wrist and neck, the gentle application of bindis along her eyebrows—after all these years we’ve spent away from each other, it is the very least she can give me.
Scaachi
Not a single vaguely racist email from you today.
Does that mean you’re sick or something?
Papa
Better minds and intellects have always been wrongly interpreted by the great unwashed.
Mute
My first computer was a forty-seven-pound Dell desktop, the monitor the size of a filing cabinet and a tower tall enough to—theoretically—prop your leg up on when masturbating. My parents got it for me when I was twelve, the year my brother moved out of the house for law school and the year I started seventh grade. It wasn’t the first computer we had—my dad had his work laptop, the one with the little red nipple in the middle of the keyboard that you had to tweak to get the mouse to move. Then there was the desktop computer years before the laptop and the Dell, a clunky white beast with a fan that whirred so loudly my mother could hear it from the floor below me. All I did on it was fuss with Microsoft Paint, or try to play “King’s Quest VI,” despite barely being able to read, or type out letters in Wingdings to send to aliens—you know, the specific breed of alien who speaks exclusively in MS Wingdings.
But this computer, this one had internet. Real internet, the internet that didn’t fuck up the phone. Internet that my parents didn’t completely understand and, therefore, internet that led to true freedom. It was 2003, and this was the quiet rebellion I could hold. My parents told me I wasn’t allowed to use any instant messengers or join social networks, but name one preteen who obeys their parents, even if they’re just trying to keep their child from being abducted. (“FUCK YOU, MOM, THIS GUY SAYS HE’S EIGHTEEN AND HE WANTS TO MEET UP WITH ME IN HIS VAN AND YOU CAN’T STOP ME FROM FALLING IN LOVE!!!”) My twenty-five-year-old cousin, Neeta, set up my webcam and Hotmail account and MSN Messenger. She assured my parents I could never contact a stranger, winking at me behind their backs.
I spent every free moment I had online, ignoring the homework the computer was intended for and instead watching clips of Jon Stewart on The Daily Show or heading over to MiniClip.com to play a video of Hillary Clinton’s head on an animated stripper’s body. I chatted online with my friends from school and made new ones, getting into heated arguments on message boards about things that didn’t really matter but felt like they were the only things that mattered. Boys paid attention to me and girls were threatened by me. The internet rewarded all the parts of my personality that the tangible world didn’t: sarcasm, cynicism, and a refusal to enjoy almost anything. At that time, our corner of the internet gave you full control of your image, so I edited my profile photos to make my skin look its best and snapped pictures from flattering angles only. (Imagine if a bird snatched the camera from your hand and took a photo just as it flew directly over your cleavage.) I got to be smart, too, discussing newspaper articles I had read (if you say things incredulously like “The real estate market alone,” just about anyone will take you seriously) and chatted about sports I pretended to like—when a guy sent me a message asking me about my favourite football team, all I needed were quick fingers and reliable Google sources to pretend I knew what a down was. My MSN name, meanwhile, was GoOd GiRlS aRe BaD gIrLs ThAt HaVeN’t BeEn CaUgHt.
Does anyone remember Nexopia? I suspect not, but it was popular in western Canada from the early to mid aughts. It was like a Canadian knock-off of MySpace, but, like all Canadian knock-offs, it was much worse. You could customize your account with thumbnail-sized GIFs, and if you paid around ten bucks a month, you could further personalize your profile with colours and fonts of your choosing. It was, predictably, hell. If you were popular at school, you were popular on Nexopia. If you weren’t, the site largely just recreated the same social structures you had in the physical world: you, quietly lurking around Melanie and her tattoo (oh my god, I can’t believe she has a tattoo at fourteen, she is cool and I am a skunk ape) while convening with your friends in private channels far away from everyone else.
For plenty of girls using the site, it
was our first foray into what we would later call online harassment. It would be years, maybe a decade, before any of us would know what to call it. When we were thirteen, it was simple: if you were stupid enough to take a photo of yourself and post it online showing an inch too much clavicle, or if you dared develop early and your tits naturally hovered right below your chin, you would get weird messages from men. They’d ask you for something, or threaten you if you were too bold and they didn’t like it. That was your fault. It was your fault if they asked to meet up, then became vaguely threatening when you said no. Sometimes this wasn’t so vague, like when they threatened to find your address if you refused to send n00dz. You owed them something, whatever they decided it was that afternoon. We all assumed this was normal. We were barely teenagers, and when older men sent us messages that were creepy at best and threatening at worst, it was expected. What was valued above all, despite how some of us used the site to be smart and clever, was our femaleness. We were girls, so it dragged attention towards us and then tried to make us feel bad for it.
Schoolyard squabbles became hyperaggressive feats of manipulation on Nexopia. Girls would catfish each other, pretending to be a cute boy from a nearby school. (No need to use your real name on Nexopia.) Boys would receive a PG-13 text from a girl and share it with each other, creating little vortexes of mini-scandals. Worse, perhaps, was Nexopia’s rating system, in which your profile pictures were automatically fed into a slideshow where anyone on the site could rate your hotness on a scale of 1 to 10. Just a few thousand thirteen- to eighteen-year-olds leaving each other messages about how fat and/or fuckable you were.
This is glorious when you’re a teenager and the world is only as big as you allow it to be. Even the internet didn’t feel like the all-encompassing thing it actually is; at the time, going viral wasn’t a possibility, so the shared videos of backyard fights were only for us. When I wrote a mean blog post about a girl in my grade eight math class, she found it, and her friends found it, and they sent me a few irritated Nexopia messages, but it blew over in an hour. Any criticism you got felt self-contained. Any compliments filled you with only a temporary glow. You still had to leave the house and go back to school; your mom would make you.
Then many of us made the internet our job. We got tiny computers that fit in our pockets so we could check them at bars, at restaurants, while we were languishing pants-down on unkempt toilets in order to avoid small talk at an ill-conceived party. And we found each other on it, again, and took all the lessons we had learned from our small, intense, intimate online communities and tried to apply them to this bigger, bolder, unwieldy global internet.
—
I use Twitter—a lot. Possibly more than I should. I use it for work, I use it to play, I turn it on and say, “Mmm, sorry, this is important,” and act like it’s an urgent email when I run into a girl who three years ago called me “pretty for my size.” Twitter is how I first met Hamhock—he followed me a year before we would meet in person. I liked his profile picture, and when I asked others about him, I was told he was married with twin daughters. This proved untrue, but will make for interesting hindsight should I ever hear about his second family located somewhere in the Pacific Northwest.
Most people use Twitter to drain their brains of the things you can’t say in public, the minor irritations of existence, passive aggression so sharp that if you acted it out at your office you would immediately be fired. But me, I am a loudmouth, all the time, anytime, virtually and in person. (For the last six years, I’ve been in a heated argument with my former editor and current nemesis, Jordan, over whether it’s spelled woah or whoa, with me championing the former. He might be right, but frankly, I’m in too deep and I would sooner die than let him think that whoa doesn’t look fucking ludicrous.) So Twitter is a place for me to go and yell into the ether, and for the ether to come into focus as other people, and for those other people to scream back in my face. It is nothing if not even-handed.
It’s hard to predict what will attract the internet’s ire. Men—and in my experience they are almost always men, white men, straight white men, middle-class straight white men, with “anti-Marxist” and “anti-feminist” in their Twitter bios—cannot be relied upon for consistent outrage. Say what you will about online feminist activism: we are very predictable. You know we’re here to yell about equal wages, abortion access, the ability to go outside without being catcalled. But when you’re contacted by a guy whose Twitter bio says “Sacred cows make the tastiest steak tartare,” well, that’s impossible to track.
I was yelled at for making jokes about the very stupid white woman I once saw wearing a row of five (FIVE) bindis on her forehead in public at seven in the morning. That one yielded a week of people accusing me of reverse racism. I was yelled at by Men’s Rights Activists for going on television and arguing that a 50/50 gender-split in the Senate would be a good thing. There’s one guy—and I honestly wish I were making up this name because it is too perfect to be true and he’s likely deleted his account by now so who will ever believe me—whose Twitter name is Brian Jerkey. Jerkey likes to send me tweets in which he tells me I’m dumb, or, in one eloquent rush, repeated missives of “BOOOOOOOOO.” We are married now.
One of the longest online spats I got dragged into lasted four days, winding down only when I started to reply to angry tweets with passages from Good Will Hunting. I dug up the script online and read through the worst, hackiest quotes possible, mostly because I was tired of fighting nonsense with logic rather than, well, unrelated nonsense.
“The slightest hint of actual research would blow your entire house of cards down,” said a man whose online pseudonym was A Jackass In Rags. He was, of course, upset with nearly my entire gender, using me as an easy representative of 51 per cent of the population.
“It’s not your fault,” I answered, hoping he would eventually break down crying in my arms, me the sage teacher, him the damaged student.
“I know it’s hard through the ‘poor me’ victim haze,” Jackass continued, “but we’re trying to get you [to] a coherent stream of thought.”
“I bet you can’t even tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel.”
“What can one really expect from a gender bigot?”
“STOP JERKING OFF IN MY MOTHER’S ROOM!!!”
This went on well into the night, and it was hours before any of my critics realized that these were movie quotes and that I did not actually want to know what they thought about “them apples.” I went to bed at two in the morning, feeling moderately victorious. The next morning, Hamhock shook me awake, his iPhone in his hand, my tweets flickering on his screen. “What,” he asked, “were you doing last night?”
I sometimes try to understand how people formed their identities in eras before the internet existed. What did teenagers do to carve out a sense of self in the world? So often, the people screaming at me online seem to derive their selfhood from being internet aggressors, and the more time I spend on any given online platform, the more my identity is marked by defending myself. I know Good Will Hunting quotes by heart now. Obscure ones. Ones like, “I swallowed a bug!” You can’t come back from that.
For those of us who are not in a position of power—us women, us non-white people, those who are trans or queer or whatever it is that identifies us as inherently different—the internet means the world has a place to scream at us. The arguments range from the casually rude—people who want me to lose my job, or who accuse my father of leaving me and my mother, which would explain all my issues with authority—to comments deeply disturbing, ones that even my greatest enemies wouldn’t verbalize to my face. Not just offensive comments on my body or my skin colour but rape threats, death threats. Accusations that I’m a terrorist. Encouragements for suicide. I answered a lot of them, because your brain fills with toxins so fast when someone threatens you with forced fellatio that you need to exercise that energy, somehow, even if the way to do it means making another dick joke.
&
nbsp; People ask me how I handle this. “Doesn’t it wear you down?” one friend asked after I showed her my Twitter mentions, filling with men calling me a cunt or a whore or threatening to detach my limbs and toss me into a dumpster. It doesn’t—or, rather, it didn’t—for the same reason that you’re not supposed to be afraid of non-poisonous spiders. They’re more afraid of you, and they’re only displaying a panic response when their legs freak out and they start running around your walls in circles. Why waste my finite fear and rage on what is, ultimately, something my cat can trap and eat out of her little pink paws?
When I’ve interacted with these men—and again, they are, by and large, all men, very angry men—they all betray some information about their trauma. After a year or so of mocking them, I started asking, directly, what happened to them. Sometimes I’d just apologize preemptively for what was so obviously a personal destruction they were trying to soothe. Their wives had left them for another man, maybe a friend, sometimes a relative. Their children were taken too, suddenly, and they blamed the women in their lives for not taking better care of their offspring or for refusing to let them have shared custody. They lost their job to a woman or a non-white person, someone they deemed unqualified, someone who didn’t need the money like they did. They went to war and returned with PTSD and mental health issues, and neither the government nor their personal support networks took care of them the way we all hope and like to think the country takes care of its veterans. Their moms died. Their moms abandoned them. Their uncles molested them. They were raped in jail. They were raped by women. Their fathers beat them and beat their mothers and told them, “This is how the world works.” One man sent me thousands and thousands of words in an email, explaining how his mother killed herself recently, and how it was my fault. I told him I was sorry for what happened. He immediately replied, apologizing for his letter.