Poornima Manco

Author

identity

All of Her

by

Somewhere within her there is a little girl of eight. She waits for her mother to return from work, scared of the scolding her report card will beget, yet secure in the love and forgiveness that will inevitably follow. She listens to her father at the dinner table as he talks of his clients and their problems, the gentle wisdom he imparts daily underlined by the kindness flowing through his veins. At night, she weaves dreams around amorphous futures before falling deeply and heavily into slumber’s arms.

Somewhere within her, there is a rebellious teenager of sixteen. She curses her parents under her breath, planning elaborate schemes to hoodwink them and following through with none. Her friends are her life and she spends hours on the phone with them, talking about everything and nothing, all at once. She nurses a crush on the neighbourhood boy, watching him covertly as he walks his dog in the evening. She ignores him on the street when he smiles at her, because “good girls” don’t return male attention. But she is quietly devastated when he finds himself a pretty girlfriend, someone far prettier than her.

Somewhere within her is a young woman of twenty-one. She stands on the threshold of her adult life, ready to embark upon an adventure. Excited, nervous, unprepared, she is sad to leave home but wondrous at the possibilities ahead of her. “This,“ she whispers to herself, “is when I can truly begin to live on my own terms.” It’s not until much later that she realises that with freedom comes responsibility. And bills. Lots and lots of bills.

Somewhere within her is a thirty-year-old new mother, cradling her month-old baby, who doesn’t stop crying. Exhausted, she cries alongside. Surrounded by men – husband, father, father-in-law – who are no good to her at a time like this, she yearns for a woman’s touch, someone who will reassure her that this too shall pass, that childbearing and rearing isn’t an impossible task. There is no one who can replace her mother, who is long gone. She misses her desperately, the hollowness inside threatening to engulf her. Friends step in, clumsily, but they comfort her far more than the men can.

Somewhere within her is a forty-year-old who still looks young and alluring. No longer in love with her husband, she enjoys the attention that other men give her. She flirts – coy and cooing, revelling in the excitement and danger of uncharted terrain. In the dying embers of her youth, she feels alive again. No longer strait-jacketed by society’s mores and values, she wants to soar above the labels of wife and mother. She wants to forge ahead in her career, eager to shed the ties that hold her back – friends and family who caution and counsel her. She wants to define herself as someone important, someone worth knowing, someone others aspire to emulate.

Somewhere within her is a fifty-year-old divorcee who doesn’t know who she is anymore. Her husband has left, the children have moved away; the once dazzling career has fizzled; the paramours have melted away, and no, she isn’t someone important or worth knowing. She is just another anonymous woman living an anonymous life, searching for love on the internet. Her single status has left her friendless, a scarlet letter invisibly tattooed on her person declaring that she might poach on other women’s territories. She is afraid of loneliness, of old age, of dying.

Somewhere within her is a sixty-five-year-old grey-haired granny who is slightly hard of hearing. She, who had made peace with her singlehood before finding love with her husband again. They have both wandered and returned, this time to a quieter, more sedate love, one that will last the distance. Suddenly, her life is full to the brim with children, her children’s children and the school runs and coffee mornings that she missed out on the first time round chasing a career. She marvels at life’s bounty, crossing her fingers daily, praying that her luck doesn’t run out again.

Somewhere within her is a seventy-two-year-old widow, crying over wasted years, bloated egos and stupid, ridiculous, futile arguments. She misses everything about him, even his habit of leaving the cap off the toothpaste tube. Her children rally around her, reminding her of the good times, of what she still has, of what they created together. She wonders how her own father managed for two decades without her mother, how he carried on being a parent while putting a full-stop to being a spouse? She knows that the world still turns and she must turn with it, as others before her have done.

Somewhere within her is an eighty-five-year-old woman with arthritis, a heart condition and two hip replacements. She no longer cares she isn’t someone important, because she knows that in her own small way, she is. There aren’t many of her peers left, but those that are still meet monthly for a long and leisurely lunch. They discuss their families, the state of the planet, their misspent youths and laugh as only the young or the very old can – uninhibited and unashamed. They don’t understand the world anymore, feeling out of touch with everything, but they don’t care what anyone thinks of them, either. They sit comfortably in their wrinkled skins, free from the shackles of youth and vanity.

Somewhere within her is a ninety-year-old woman ready to give up her mortal coil. Life is a drag, and the only thing she looks forward to now are the rare visits from her great-grandchildren. Adults bore her while children delight her. In their innocence, she sees the only remaining purity in an increasingly depraved and insane world. Every morning, she wakes up and sighs that she is still alive. She prays for death; she invites it into her dreams, hoping it will step out of them and into her life someday soon. She waits and waits and waits, her hands crossed in her lap, her coffee cooling on the table beside her.

Scar Tissue

by

 

Back in February, I had an accident. I tripped over a metal grate abandoned on the pavement and went flying, landed heavily on my front and while my coat, my sunglasses and my gloves protected most of my body and face, my knees, which were only covered by a pair of workout leggings took the brunt. The right knee was grazed superficially, but the left knee had an enormous gash which required seven stitches.

Why am I telling you this?

Well, just the other day I was looking at the massive scar tissue that’s built up over that wound. It’s ugly, large and raised; puckered in places and dark enough to stand out in sharp contrast to the skin of my knee. It has also taken nearly four months to heal properly because of how deep the wound was. It still twinges occasionally, and bending at my knees is quite uncomfortable.

My body is a repository of scars. With a tendency for keloids (those ugly raised overgrowths of scar tissue), I can trace my history of accidents, injuries and surgeries through all the lumpy, knotty cicatrix on my skin. There is a thin spindly one on the middle finger of my left hand. A dog bite that involved a tussle over a pencil with my angry pet. The horizontal lump on my chest that was a collision with the handbrake of an old-fashioned bicycle. The one behind my right knee that I can’t for the life of me remember how I obtained. And the one just below my tummy, when my distressed infant was cut out of my womb in an emergency C-Section. Each scar has a memory attached to it; each scar is a little bit of me.

But what of the scar tissue that isn’t visible? What of the wounds that run so deep that no amount of time can overlay the pain?

There is the loss of my mother – the deepest cut of all. A reality that no one can escape from, but given time, can come to terms with. Losing her at twenty-seven meant that I never had the years that would have made her loss a bit more bearable. Those years when we could have grown together, when she could have guided me in my marriage, been there for me when I became a mother; when I could have understood her more fully as a woman and when I could have taken care of her as an old lady. That was denied to me through a combination of ill-health (hers) and circumstances (mine).

That loss feels all the more poignant today as I remember her in the week of her birthday. Had she lived, she would have been eighty-one. Maybe losing her in her eighties wouldn’t have hurt as much. Or maybe it would have. Maybe loss is loss, no matter when it happens. And those scars, the ones that stay hidden from sight, are the keloids on my soul.

The month of June has seen bad news come in from so many quarters, it’s been overwhelming. From losing a school friend through Covid, to a colleague through pancreatitis, a family acquaintance through a heart attack and the twenty-year-old son of my husband’s former boss unexpectedly, it has been a tsunami of devastation. These are gaping wounds that refuse to fill. There is grief, anger and shock. There is also an acute realisation of how fragile life really is, and how nothing and nobody can be taken for granted.

My pain is once removed, but what of those who are in its immediate vicinity? What of the wife who has lost her husband, the mother who has lost her son, the son who has lost the only parent he knew, the company that has lost their visionary leader? How long will it take for the scar tissue to build there? And will it stay – ugly, raised and twisted – revealing the depth of those wounds?

Life is pain because pain comes from attachment and love. No one is immune to it, and nor should we be. How arid it would be to live in a world devoid of any feeling. Each wound, each scar, is a testament to our time spent in this world, loving and living.

And those keloids on our souls? That’s where our loved ones reside.

 

Rage

by

Aren’t we living in the 21st century? Haven’t we made several strides in the last hundred years towards women’s empowerment and emancipation? Why then does a movie like ‘Promising Young Woman’ hit a nerve? I’ll tell you why. Because it reveals an unpalatable truth.

For those of you who haven’t seen this powerful, shocking, brilliant film scroll away now because I am going to be talking a LOT about it. About what it means, how relevant it is to our times and also, why the rage that permeates the film is a good thing.

Let’s look around ourselves for a moment. How do you think we’re doing, as women? Are we free to go where we want, do what we want, be who we want? You think yes? Scratch a little beneath the surface and you will discover no. I’m going to take the example of three countries, the three that I have the most to do with.

Let’s begin with India, my birthplace. If the many instances of patriarchy and misogyny aren’t bad enough, how’s this for some additional disgust: A 43-year-old woman, a coronavirus patient, was raped in the hospital by a male nurse while awaiting treatment. She died within 24 hours.

Read the article here.

How about the UK, where I reside: Sarah Everard, a 33-year-old, vanished as she walked home in Clapham, south London. Her body was found a week later near Ashford, Kent. PC Couzens pleaded guilty to kidnapping and rape and accepted responsibility for killing her.

Read the article here.

 

And finally, the US, where I work: In 2016 the Stanford Rape Case made headlines when two male Stanford graduate students riding their bikes spotted a man on top of a woman near a dumpster. The woman did not appear to be moving. When they approached the man, he fled. He was later identified as Brock Turner, an “All-American swimmer,” while the victim was relegated to a ten-syllable description of an “unconscious intoxicated woman”. The judge in the case, Aaron Persky, gave Turner a six-month sentence despite the prosecutors pushing for a six-year sentence.

Read the article here.

Notice any similarities? These people (aside from Turner) were meant to protect, care for and safeguard women. Instead, they failed them, and how!

‘Promising Young Woman’ begins with the premise that a lone, intoxicated woman is fair-game to predators, even the wolves who parade around in sheep’s clothing. Because, after all, she put herself in that position, didn’t she? Shouldn’t she have gotten home at a decent hour, dressed less provocatively and been tucked up safely in bed? If then, she is taken advantage of, it’s her own fault, isn’t it?

To dismiss this film as a revenge drama would seriously undermine the hugely important message it is trying to convey. When Cassie, a medical-school dropout, entices “nice” men to take an apparently blind-drunk woman back to their homes to ensure her safety, she has an interesting little surprise in store for them – her sobriety. Cassie confronts that part of the male ego that has long shouted #NotAllMen in response to the #MeToo movement. Not all men will attack a vulnerable woman, but given the right circumstances, can you be sure?

More importantly though, it’s what happens after an attack such as this which is spine-tingling. As in the Brock Turner case, a man can get away with a slap on the wrist, because, after all, there was alcohol and opportunity, plus the bonus of a woman’s ‘stupidity’.

Angry yet?

Emerald Fennell’s astonishing indictment of what it means to be a woman today is meant to provoke rage. It’s a feminist manifesto that urges us to stand up to the status quo, to defend our freedoms and to question what consent means. The title itself is a play on the long touted expression that many of these graduates (Brock Turner included) are promising young men whose future lives and careers can be ruined because of “twenty minutes of action” or some such expression reducing sexual assault to a banality. As for the woman, well, she was “asking for it”, wasn’t she? Her promise, her future, her health and her identity don’t matter a jot. It’s a man’s world, after all!

Which begs the question that when a woman is unimpeachably behaved and still gets raped or assaulted thanks to being in the wrong place at the wrong time (Sarah Everard) then who is to blame? What about date rape? Or the rape of minors?

Fact of the matter is that rape is less to do with sexual fulfilment and everything to do with power dynamics. In the western world, which considers itself far ahead of the more ‘backward’ countries, where men feel emasculated by their female peers, this power struggle takes on an even more insidious nature. On the face of it there is outrage, but behind the scenes, there is the locker-room talk, the upholding of male entitlement and an unspoken understanding that women’s rights can be trampled all over by men placed in a position to do so.

Which is why watching Cassie deliver vigilante justice is so damn fulfilling! Yes, it’s just a movie, and yes, there’s a lot that’s far-fetched in it, but my goodness, do we need to identify with the rage that underpins it? Yes, by golly gosh we do!

None of us go out looking for trouble. None of us want to be assaulted. But if it does happen, what we want is that the perpetrators are given a punishment commensurate with the crime. What we want is that it’s their character, their motives and their actions that are questioned, not ours! As women – wives, girlfriends, sisters, daughters, mothers, grandmothers – we deserve the same rights to the same freedoms that our male counterparts enjoy.

Ultimately, Cassie’s sociopathic behaviour ends in a fitting denouement. She is unable to move on from the incident that led her life to devolve into a vendetta. There is no ‘out’ for her as there is for the people who committed the crime. This story is symptomatic of a larger malaise that plagues society – patriarchy and internalised misogyny – which allows men to get away with words, deeds and actions that betray the fact that ultimately, it still considers women to be the inferior sex.

Watch ‘Promising Young Woman’ and be angry. Be very, very angry indeed.

What’s in a name?

by

Shakespeare once asked this question through the young heroine of his tragedy, ‘Romeo and Juliet’.

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose

By any other name would smell as sweet.”

Indeed, a person’s worth cannot be measured by a name alone. In his tale of star-crossed lovers, Shakespeare was highlighting the ridiculousness of a generations-old feud between the Montagues and the Capulets. Juliet loved Romeo for who he was, and if not for his name, they could have lived happily ever after.

While I completely endorse Shakespeare’s line of thought, I must add my own two pennies’ worth here. You see, a name might not be everything, but it certainly is something.

Take the example of the actress Thandiwe Newton. After thirty years of being credited as Thandie Newton in her films, thanks to an erroneous acting credit that dropped the ‘w’ from her name, anglicising it in the process, she has reclaimed her name. Yes, she wants to be known as Thandiwe henceforth, and more power to her!

You see, names are deeply personal things. They have the weight of history and identity, of familial love and cultural coherence behind them. And as such, it is nearly impossible to divorce the self from the name. Unless you really, really hate it. Then you can have it changed by deed poll.

Take my name: Poornima.

When my mother chose this name for me, there was a lot of love, but there was also a significance there. She was from the South of India, from Kerala, to be precise. Hence, my name has the South Indian spelling of the two ‘o’s. In the North of India, my name would have been spelt as Purnima. The meaning is also one that connects me to her in a beautifully intimate way. Her name was Chandra, which meant the moon. Mine means ‘a full-moon night’. I love my name. It’s a tough one to pronounce, and an even tougher one to abbreviate, but it’s my name!

For nearly half my life, I’ve heard my name mangled beyond belief. From Purneema, to Poormeena, from Pooh to Poo, I’ve heard it all. I refuse to let it upset me. In fact, I find it laughable, because in the West, no one really bothers to ask – “Am I pronouncing this correctly?” Laziness and a comfortable sense of superiority allow them to anglicise anything unfamiliar. But woe betide anyone who can’t pronounce a ‘Sarah’ or a ‘Genevieve’!

Indian names aren’t the easiest to pronounce, I’ll accept that happily. But did you know just how much a name can reveal about a person? For instance, a name can tell you which part of India the person belongs to, drilling it down to state, religion and sometimes, even caste. Not always a good thing, but there you have it.

I can’t claim to understand every type of name that exists, or the connotations that go along with it, but I always try. Just making the effort is enough for the other person to cut you some slack if you get it wrong.

Which is why I insisted upon the constant mispronunciation of my protagonist’s name in my latest book, ‘A Quiet Dissonance’. Anu is short for Anupama, but everyone except her Indian family and friends call her ‘Anoo’. There is no emphasis on the ‘u’, but the ‘oo’ elongation of her name is just a symptom of the many tiny little misunderstandings that make up her story.

My editor and beta readers asked me why I insisted on keeping this little, seemingly irrelevant, detail in the book. But how could I not? To me it was symptomatic of a larger issue. One in which a compromise of identity takes place at every juncture in the character’s life. She accepts that to belong; she needs to let them pronounce her name in whichever way they deem easy.

You could accuse me of the same.

 

The value of self-esteem

by

I’ve often talked about the ill effects of social media – the addiction, the need for outside validation, the mental health issues, the ‘all that glitters isn’t gold’ aspect etc. But recently I stumbled upon yet another disturbing trend. Young girls filming/photographing themselves in their underwear/bikinis purportedly to support a body-positive movement.

Now, I’m a strong advocate of women of all ages and sizes being comfortable in their own skin, and I will shout it from rooftops if need be. I believe that every woman should have the right to wear what she wants, as long as she is comfortable with the sort of attention it attracts. However, flaunting one’s body on a public platform to elicit the approval of strangers, is where I draw the line.

Firstly, there is the safety aspect of it. How can one monitor who is watching/downloading these pictures? Where are these pictures being circulated? How are they being perceived? Secondly, there is the sleaze factor. To a young woman, body acceptance by way of photographing herself may seem to be progressive and life-enhancing, to the two-bit scumbag salivating over them, it’s just another way to jerk off. Sorry about the imagery! But there is no other way to spell it out clearly.

What has happened to our social fabric where it has become perfectly acceptable to derive one’s self-worth from the most shallow of sources? Yes, it’s wonderful to be young and beautiful and to enjoy the spring of one’s lifetime. But if acceptance of one’s self hinges on what other people think, then what happens when that body changes through life, childbirth, disease, accident or ageing?

Isn’t it time that we taught our children that self-worth and self-esteem need stronger roots than just body acceptance? Values such as humility, charity, empathy and forgiveness, character traits such as determination, resilience, patience and fortitude, are purer sources of self-love than any amount of pouting and preening before a camera lens can be.

Healthy self-esteem needs a healthy wellspring, and that can only come from working upon what lies inside. Yes, outside packaging matters, but only up to a point. If you unwrap a beautiful parcel and find it filled with junk, what are you likely to do?

The pitfalls of social media are well documented, but the insidious nature of its erosion of our children’s values and self-worth will have far-reaching consequences unless we start to combat it now. But first, we need to turn that mirror towards ourselves and look at where we are investing our time and teachings. It isn’t too late to steer our children away from conversations about their bodies, to conversations about their minds and souls. Perhaps then, they will realise that the value of self-esteem is far greater than the cost of self-doubt.

The extroverted introvert

by

Does this sound like you?

I’ve just come back from the largest Indie book conference in the world, where I learned so much and made many new friends, but you know what my most surprising takeaway was? The fact that, at heart, most writers are introverts. As am I.

I’ve always pretended to be an extrovert, be happy in company and at parties, even enjoyed the spotlight to a large extent, but somewhere within me I’ve always known, that given half a chance, I would rather be curled up on my sofa reading a book.

A lot of it could be down to my background and upbringing. I am an only child, and in my childhood with both parents working, I had no choice but to embrace reading and escape into other worlds or do the same with my imagination. Which, I suppose, in turn, led me to become a writer.

The other aspect of my nature is the desire to melt into the background, to become an observer of people and life, to take mental notes and file them away for future reference. What are writers but people who carefully curate experiences to create experiences for their readers?

So, looking around a room of 1000 strangers, I had a mild panic attack. How would I possibly get by for the next three days? I knew no one, and although we were all there to learn something, to grow, to expand our minds and our readership, we were still unknown quantities to each other.

I really needn’t have worried. Just as a country has its own language, we had ours. ‘Reader magnets’, CPCs, Beta readers, Bookbub deals – words and terms that would be incomprehensible to a layperson, became the vocabulary we introduced ourselves with. ‘Reverse harem’, ‘LitRPG’, ‘Space Opera’ were genres I started to grasp. Most importantly though, I came to understand, that here was a humongous tribe of (mostly) introverts who had pushed themselves out of their comfort zones to mingle with and learn from other equally terrified introverts.

There was absolutely no pressure to socialise if you didn’t want to. If you did, however, you were welcomed into groups with a rare and genuine kinship. In an extremely intense and enjoyable few days, I found myself relaxing into being just me. This me could be an extrovert or an introvert, depending on my mood. And that was okay because these were people who understood because this was them too.

On any given day, we are a multitude of things. I know that I am, for the most part, an extroverted introvert. Which means that after I have spent a lot of time in the company of people, I need to retreat and recharge my batteries for quite a while before I venture into company again. Some people will read this and say, “You? Never!” Because the facade is a good one. But I am also the person who can get extremely shy, awkward and tongue-tied amongst people. Often I’ve had to give myself a very stern talking-to before meeting someone new, for fear of making a complete fool of myself. I am incredibly diffident about approaching people, and the tiniest rebuff can dent my confidence for days.

Why am I telling you all this? Because I want you to be aware that sometimes people aren’t who they appear to be.

For the world I may seem to be a confident go-getter, travelling around the world, ready to plunge into any new experience, up for a laugh or a party at the drop of a hat. In reality, I am shy, very critical of myself, lazy to a large extent and an over-thinker to a painful degree. I am no different from any other human being. We are all bundles of contradictions.

Maybe its time to discard all such labels and to embrace our faults and our foibles, to delight in the many positive qualities we have been endowed with, work hard to overcome our shortcomings, but also to never ever lose sight of the fact that regardless of who or what kind of people we are, there is a reason for and a value to our existence.