I think we know places in going away. Through the people we have become by the time we have left. Through the fabric of stories we need to carry along, stories we never can tell sufficiently but without which our own stories wouldn’t be.

I remember meeting Ahmedabad, in 2004, through stories. The air was so full of grief that even before I reckoned with what had happened, I was haunted by dreams of running across barren fields, fires raging, looking for the earth to open and offer hiding space from the mobs of armed, raging men. In retrospect it does feel as if I was absorbing it out of the air, through fragments of conversations, meetings, listening to stories of neighbours rescuing each other.

My nightmares at that time were of a different nature. The landscapes continued to be of here and not here, an in-between that was eerie. They were all silent, full of silent screams. They came from feeling trapped within the house, within a suffocating relationship it took me years to identify as patriarchal, in which the shape love took was constant warnings: ‘You cannot go to the vegetable market. It is not safe’, ‘Cannot travel alone. It is not safe.’ Fear sneaks in along class and caste lines.

I was learning to do things right. The lesson was opening the door to all neighbours collecting money for Diwali and providing whatever little. Being hospitable, offering tea. The doorbell rings and I open the door to the nth woman. I have learned my lesson well, so I invite her in, do the tea. The neighbours from across the corridor are watching. More intently than they usually do. Which is intently indeed. It turns out, late in the evening, in a conversation they had with someone else not with me, that the neighbours think that I have no sense whatsoever. I invited someone from the Hijra community in and offered them tea. Fear is gendered. Fear is sexually coloured.

How does one even begin to articulate, from that space of a city one doesn’t yet know, of a self that has no space for becoming, the nightmares which are inside and not out? My language around my body slipped into the language around the city, divided into two, polarized, seeking reconciliation. I can now put it down to the city that I have learned to become my feminist, lesbianly, queer self in the specific ways in which I am now: ways which cannot distinguish between the logic that forecloses desire and the logic that uses ‘pollution’ as acceptable currency; ways which cannot distinguish between asking for queer livings to be recognized and asking for migrant labourers in the city to be able to live with dignity.

 

The city I know, shrunk to the threads of an incomplete narrative, is a city made of people who belong without belonging. It is the trace of people that the city bears for me, viscerally, across its body; and it is the trace of fragments that I want to pull together through my words.

 

2017. At a queer conference in Romania I learn to articulate the ‘second-world’ness of where I come from. That would have come in handy 14 years earlier, as I was going away. I had left instead, at 19, head full of books a bunch of men had written about India about a century before. Head full of love stories too. My point of departure a seemingly neutral canvas in my head.

Going back for this first queer conference, people from across European nations which share a socialist-nation past ask me where I am from. I say Ahmedabad. I learn in going away that here is where I know how to be me. I have learned it, might I add, the hard way, giving up comforting certainties in classroom conversations around A Room of One’s Own. Chloe liked Olivia. Enough to give anyone ideas.

 

2015. I am travelling back to Ahmedabad from South Gujarat, a bag full of stories waiting to spill. A friend spoke of her mother, one among a bunch of strong women who were taught ‘shame’ by ‘civilization’, but who continue to wear their saris the traditional way – among other things – except when under the scrutiny of outsiders. The eyes of outsiders are always easily offended, aren’t they. ‘You know,’ my friend says, ‘I have not met Adivasi people ashamed of our own culture while at home. It’s when we come to your Ahmedabad that we are made to feel shame.’ This is one of the many instances in which the city is handed over to me on a platter, the baby sent off to the mother when it doesn’t behave.

 

Another friend travels to the city from Mumbai for the first time after the riots and says, ‘I cannot imagine I will ever like this city.’ I defend it with the urgency of one who steps into the sun when the plane lands, draws in deeply the familiar air, and feels her body relax. With the urgency of one telling herself, things will get better yet.

It is a restless time in 2015. As we leave South Gujarat, we hear rumours about the Patidar protests, but something seems to have happened with the Internet and news, and we start our trip back not knowing what the situation is. We are all trying to make sense of what is happening, what triggered the sudden anger. As we come off the Expressway, traces of still simmering fire appear around the carcass of a bus. Talking about the protests is explosive for days. Suddenly the most unexpected of people believe, in their words, in ‘meritocracy’. They feel deprived of what is rightfully theirs. Accidentally, they are all the standard ‘uppers’ – women and men, and I use the binary deliberately.

Days later, at a queer meet. The city I know is changing. I am no longer the only lesbian in town (by now I should say lesbianly, having grown into my politics), though to be honest I can still count us on the fingers of one hand. I attend these meetings, in spite of social awkwardness, because it feels like being part of queer Ahmedabad matters. It is a comfortable space, comfortably middle class. I remember the keri no ras being passed around. An acquaintance in the group silences me when he says he saw the protests happening near his flat and went down to join in. He had no clue, it turns out, what they were about. He just wanted to throw a stone too. Exciting.

 

Violence is casual. As the years go by, other protests take place that I consider joining. LGBT and Queer pride marches happen. The memory of violence projects itself into the future. But one does not need ‘events’ for the starkness of violence. Just complicity. In the relocation of people displaced from slums in far off, ghettoized areas; in the specific communities in the Pirana area; in the huge banners covering off the view to the slums when international visitors travel to the city.

 

2006. I meet you and the work begins. Afternoons take me across the city, walking from St. Xavier’s College to which my life in Ahmedabad seems inextricably tied, to Usmanpura where we meet. And the work begins.

My days are split down the middle. It’s the beginning of a state of affairs that is only going to complicate itself infinitely over the following years. I am studying literature at Xavier’s and they say Xavier’s is the best. Through tears of frustration and anger at what seems to me like a flimsy reading list, slow to move discussions, I keep on asking myself why and how and why again. My classmates are children at 17-18. The class is divided in ways I do not begin to understand. It is not that I have not done my homework before coming to India. I have read virtually all that the library had to offer: Sanskrit drama, analyses of caste in ancient times, Tagore, satyagraha. But college is supposed to be about other things: people passionately brilliant about our ideas, talking about postmodernism, devouring books like air.

I shake off some of the anger as I begin to attend other classes and meet Indian writing in English, meet feminism, and along with them, begin to read more closely the place where I live. When people ask, ‘What do you eat at home?’ the implications strike just a bit sooner.

 

I do not really truly see it until I start taking extra classes for younger students who find it difficult to cope, and slowly it becomes apparent that there’s more ways than one to be a stranger in the city. As I turn around in my classrooms after that, I can see where the people come from. The little clusters which speak different languages in between lectures; the different hopes. And that there is a logic to the Xavier’s way of trying to look after people, trying to make sure that those who come with hope that education can change the life of whole communities, find a space. It is a logic in which I continue to see flaws over the years, missing voices, silenced articulations; it is a logic I see sense in, nevertheless.

You left Xavier’s long ago, though you have left stories behind that I pluck out of the air pretending, like lovers in the Cavalier poetry we study, not to care overwhelmingly. My daring stretches so far as to articulate, in the home of a friend across the river, in the moonlight, my desire for you. My daring doesn’t stretch far enough to talk to you about it.

We do that years later, in 2009, after the reading down of IPC 377. It feels like Ahmedabad, like other cities, will begin to make space for queerness. When we finally talk, the city doesn’t seem friendly and hopeful to non-heteronormative couples. There is a stretch of road, between the street corner where the words were spoken, over coffee, and the place I call home, which smells in the evenings as it did that evening: mildly of rotten fruits, agarbatties and dust. The lovely whiff of pollution. The trees morph into your shape, shoulders squared, into my eyes not mourning the loss of what we did not have.

You leave. I hold on to shadows in the city.

 

2018. The world revolves on its axis again. Much has changed. I am saying goodbye, on familiar grounds, to a bunch of people with whom I have spent some years, talking about books, understanding life, trying to listen to voices from different margins: class, caste, race, religion, gender. Ahmedabad holds my entire life by now. It leaves me speechless with the dailiness of its cruelty, with the dailiness of its hope. St. Xavier’s College is nothing if not home. A campus where I know the bark of the trees, the creepy ghostlike stains on one of the walls, the electricity switches of each classroom. And the people.

 

One of the people to whom I was saying goodbye reads us a story. In the starkness of a third-person narrative that chokes when you listen, she tells us about a young Dalit woman who came to the city to study. So that she can provide better futures for siblings she has brought up. To study, so she can reach towards dreams that take her away from the life of a mother who has a temporary job as a sweeper, and a father who is a labourer. The young woman in the story leaves the city, goes back to find her little sister dead, having said her goodbyes and swallowed poison.

The woman we know ends her story. Stands before a dusty desk, almost holding on to it, but not quite. Trying to reckon with the enormity of it.

 

Our group must disperse. Most of us are going back to lives in different parts of the city. Some are going away, carrying along the many stories of the many others we have met because we have, for a while, been here. Carrying along a question, what is it that we are responsible for?

The city is splintered down the middle. During an awkward dinner I was told, ‘Ahmedabad is growing so much and still – everybody knows everybody.’ Yes, indeed. The elites continue to be incredibly small and familiar. You can even pretend to believe in those spaces that gender, class, caste of course don’t matter. Conveniently.

 

2017. For the third time I return to the city to mourn. This time, all the people connecting me to the place I come from are gone. With me, I bring the memory of all the questions: what is it like, that city of yours? What is it like? How many people does it have? Do people wear in college the kind of clothes we see in movies here? What is the language like? What do you eat? Is it true there are cows on the streets?

I return to the refuge of the academic-activist Ahmedabad, looking for ways to bring them together. The Ahmedabad I truly know is that of higher education and my thoughts turn more and more to the need to link our academic conversations to the realness of life outside, on the streets; to the realness of our own lives while outside. In small groups, we wrap our heads around how ‘women’ are many. We build safe spaces in which we can articulate thoughts however tentative; in which we begin to think of who is invisible in our lives. We worry about our students’ academic lives coming to an end, and with them, one of the sources of support and solidarity. We worry we haven’t learned to dialogue sufficiently.

Our syllabi are becoming more and more comprehensive. We hear different voices, different stories, from here, from elsewhere. In the safety of classrooms, we are horrified at injustices, we see them in our own lives. We allow it to turn our lives upside down, inside out. And as we leave, we begin to wonder, in which space will we find the emotional strength to continue to read others’ lives, not in books alone, but in the morning journeys to our work places through a city where the roadside wakes up and packs away bedding and cots; where we are reminded as I was when I came here that certain areas are ‘not safe’. Where do we find the ability to articulate where that fear comes from and carry it with us so that Ahmedabad may offer shelter to more than just a few?

I listen to the city in which I continue to become who I am. I carry through the metaphor I seem to have inherited. The city split down the middle, the many places on its body where one’s name means that one cannot be at home. I carry also the many places where for a few minutes at a time I felt I could settle down. What stretches the fabric of the city to breaking point is a fear, fuelled affectively, that someone else’s belonging takes away from mine, even when mine has been gained through systemic oppression. The Ahmedabad I draw strength from is where stories are listened to, a city of words. Divided across the body of the city, bunches of ‘others’ meet, elbow in a little space, a little voice. I imagine these spaces growing, listening to each other, no longer asking how others’ rights threaten our own, but what do we have a responsibility to do from our existing privileges, so that others are not others any more.