The complete “India Sutra” appears in The Butterfly Effect by Susan Hawthorne (Spinifex Press, 2005)

Hawthorne, Susan

Virtual Commons - Bridgewater State University

Journal of International Women's StudiesVolume 8Issue 3 Women’s Bodies, Gender Analysis, and FeministPolitics at the Fórum Social MundialArticle 9Apr-2007India SutraSusan HawthorneThis item is available as part of Virtual Commons, the open-access institutional repository of Bridgewater State University, Bridgewater, Massachusetts.Recommended CitationHawthorne, Susan (2007). India Sutra. Journal of International Women's Studies, 8(3), 113-124.Available at: http://vc.bridgew.edu/jiws/vol8/iss3/9 Journal of International Women’s Studies Vol. 8 #3 April 2007                                    113  India Sutra1  By Susan Hawthorne  For Hugh David Hawthorne 31 Jan 1913 to 28 Jan 2004 and for travelling companions, Lariane and Renate  Prologue They say that in ancient times  women didn’t travel,   but I, Avis, say they did.  Women travelled in pairs   across the Australian desert,  Isis sailed the Nile,   the seven girls became birds,  took flight heading skywards, Amazons   rode horses, protecting their lands,  Medea, Helen, Sita and others   not yet known to us travelled for love.  So why not ancient lesbians?  In this time lesbians travel for love. Our relationships  span continents, cross oceans and gather frequent flyer points,  modern day swan-maidens.  Here are three voices:  Sakhi from India, displaced at fourteen to a land where  the secular rites of cricket and football take the place  of gods, mandalas                                                  1 Sutra. Literally, a string or thread. Also a literary form. What appears here is an extract from a longer poem of the same name. The complete “India Sutra” appears in The Butterfly Effect by Susan Hawthorne (Spinifex Press, 2005).  This journal and its contents may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or  systematic reproduction, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. ©2007 Journal of International Women’s Studies. Journal of International Women’s Studies Vol. 8 #3 April 2007                                    114  and yonis carved in stone.  Sakhi is on a quest for an identity both elusive  and forbidden. She is searching for a lost recipe and hoping  to catch it in a photograph. Leda is of European descent.  One day I called her Scintl and it stuck. She says,   I am no Leda, I refuse to represent  dead Europa. She longs for India  as for something lost, some quality of life, some release.  Will this trip ring out the end? Will her knees hold up?  Her wings rustle with uncertainty,  but Scintl’s humour keeps her walking.  Then there is Avis who longs only to fly, who in attending  one meeting in India, is missing another in Melbourne where  she is the black sheep, the crow who cannot cease speaking   the awful truth. Avis is a poet born  in the town named for its crows.  For each, a longing, for each, a release.  The plans are made, the tickets  booked. Three women  caught in a mix of cultures rehearsing imagined futures.  Journal of International Women’s Studies Vol. 8 #3 April 2007                                    115    28 Dec 2003, Bingil Bay Avis: I dream of mortality. My father not yet dead,  the coffin missing but still they try to bury him.  Seven ages of men buried beneath the flag, he’s not ready yet,  not dead yet, and the coffin is not built.  Bingil Bay Scintl: A troubling dream, an operating theatre filled  with masked women and men. They open my knee  only to find the plastic and steel has dissolved.  I wake to a ragdoll knee unable to walk.  Geelong Sakhi: I dream of Chowpatty Beach, the recipe for bhel puri has been stolen.  I go in search of it all over India. I interview thousands and no one  can remember it. In the end they tell me it has never existed.     First Sutra 16 Jan 2004, Mumbai India raises its nuclear hand and so does Pakistan   Journal of International Women’s Studies Vol. 8 #3 April 2007                                    116  but on this stage in Mumbai a single stage  the band Jinoon blasts out peace Pakistani rock rocks Mumbai.  *  From the parade ground a lakh of souls watch and listen  Debating imperialism is like debating the pros and cons of rape, says Arundhati   Roy. Her absolution, she says, is to be allowed into Frying Pan Park2  unlike the others, she talks turkey  with the condemned turkeys.  *  Manjula, thirteen years old, and Vice-President of Bhima Sangha,  laughs with her eight- and ten-year-old  friends, ragpickers all of them,  she smiles into the camera. Small fry, condemned to be  a turkey, forever scratching  through the rags of others.   17 Jan We – Sakhi, Scintl and I,  (Avis of the crows)  begin the day with masala                                                  2  In her opening speech at the World Social Forum, Mumbai on 16 January 2004 Arundhati Roy spoke of the annual Thanksgiving Day pardon of a single turkey by the US President. One turkey is pardoned but fifty million turkeys are slaughtered. “That’s how New Racism in the corporate era works. A few carefully bred turkeys – the local elites of various countries, a community of wealthy immigrants, investments bankers, the occasional Colin Powell, or Condoleeza Rice, some singers, some writers (like myself) – are given absolution, and a pass to Frying Pan Park.”  Journal of International Women’s Studies Vol. 8 #3 April 2007                                    117  dosa, crunching it into being.  *  We’re at the gates of another world, Cerberus is here, so too  the old guard and the avant garde The grounds are abuzz with banners, leaflets,   drummers beat out a rhythm for the  protestors, some sing, some dance  GLOBALISE HUMAN RIGHTS. MUSLIM WOMEN & SEXUALITY.  ORISSA ADIVASI ADHIKA NO COMPANIES, NO CORPORATES  ONLY COMMUNITIES CONTROL OVER LAND FORESTS AND OCEANS.  GLOBALISATION IS A QUESTION, DALITS ARE THE QUESTION MARK.  WOMEN IN BLACK AGAINST WAR. NATIONAL DISABILITY NETWORK.  IF ANOTHER WORLD IS POSSIBLE MAKE TIBET A ZONE OF PEACE.  WHO WOULDN’T DIE TO WEAR A SHAHTOOSH SAY NO TO SHAHTOOSH.  Each brings to the event her own hopes, her stories of hardship and action.  For me, it’s a dream turned reality. My theories tested in the dry dust  of  Mumbai. Here, if anywhere, perhaps another world is possible.  *  A buzz of black and yellow  Journal of International Women’s Studies Vol. 8 #3 April 2007                                    118  padmini cabs swarm toward me   in the late afternoon sun dancing into the lucrative hive  so many customers from so many places  the negotiations spiral toward the vein of honey.  A thousand rupees … Four hundred rupees …  Eight hundred … Four hundred and fifty …  Six hundred rupees … Five hundred.  And the queen makes the deal.  *  The flute-seller carries  his wooden pipes  an echidna’s spines humped on his back  his tune calling  each passer-by   each child dancing behind the pied piper.   My lens is fractured, what I see, like the colonisers before me,  comes through the eyes of a different geography a world of other fauna.  But India and Australia share a substratum, Gondwanaland.    Journal of International Women’s Studies Vol. 8 #3 April 2007                                    119  18 Jan We ride in the ladies-only carriage to Goregaon. Crushed body to body.  Above the fans whirr hot air, below  our feet the rails zing with electricity.  Women board selling from trays earings, hair clasps, ribbons.  Disgorged at the other end, Scintl, friend of Cerberus,  stops to photograph dogs  lazing on railway roofs.  Mementos for Sindhu, she says,  since she can’t be with us.  We need a world that’s  friendly for dogs too.  *  A sarong covers my head I throw up behind its wrap.  A group of men in white jalabas look at me,  I care nothing for their stares.  My head pounds, like the pounding  of old Sisyphus tumbling headlong down the rocky slope.  My body removes itself from the pain, taking flight,  I stand, wobble into the crowd of Dalits proclaiming on the backs  of their jackets that it is they, Dalits, who will make another world possible.  Right now, all I want is a world  Journal of International Women’s Studies Vol. 8 #3 April 2007                                    120  in which migraines are impossible.   19 Jan I walk to the workshop B42, says the program.  It’s at the edge of the grounds a marginal place to talk about   a marginal group, lesbians  beaten, killed, jailed, ostracised  tortured because of love I find B45, B44, B43 … B41?   Where is B42? Is this a metaphor for our invisibility?  *  We begin to talk. The students of psychology speak about delinquent girls  whom they hope to rehabilitate so they might marry, be normal girls.  When I speak, what do they hear? Am I the Dalit? Am I untouchable  in another way? I say, What of the trauma?  What of the suicides? The silences? They hear my words  but not the silence between us. In spite of this, we build small trust  through conversation. We speak of the insults and assaults   encountered in the countries represented by these twenty women.  It’s a women-only session, I say  Journal of International Women’s Studies Vol. 8 #3 April 2007                                    121  to the man at the door.  It’s Ganesh in drag, neither here nor there.  I repeat my sentence, and as I do some women inside the door  rise to leave. Small trust is shattered, openness ruptured into fragility.  We begin again,  shuffling into speech.  They burned the house of a couple in Kerala, says one.  They flog the women in my country, says another from Iran.  In Cuba, I cannot speak, there I cannot exist, says the Canadian activist.  Each knows the precarious existence of the world  she inhabits, of the world which claims another world is possible.  But even in this tent at the margins of possibility, that possible world remains elusive.  *  A rainbow of protestors gather each pinned with a multicoloured badge.  HIJRAS3 ARE WOMEN, says the banner. But, I ask, Are lesbians people?  No hijras attend the session on  Muslim Women & Sexuality.   Is that because                                                  3  Hijras have played a social role in Indian society for many years. Traditionally hijras are eunuch men. These days the definition of hijra is broader and includes men who are gay, transsexual or cross-dressers.  Journal of International Women’s Studies Vol. 8 #3 April 2007                                    122  hijras are also men?  * The tongue is silent, still we  cannot speak, cannot name ourselves.  Is this what freedom amounts to?   *  Later, at the hotel, I mull over my invisibility,  my untouchability. The migraine recedes,  into its shadowlife. Temporary relief.  I am back in my body again. What a surprising experience!  20 Jan Who is at the door? Is it Ganesh, doorkeeper  to the women’s quarters, the world of women  who from their own fluids give birth to the elephant-headed one  neither male nor female. Perhaps it was Ganesh who wrote the  T-shirt slogan, Heterosexuality isn’t normal – just common.  *  Scintl is in the midst of debates on IVF,  infanticide of girls, stem-cell selection   and cloning, I can almost hear her feathers ruffling the canvas-walled room.   Journal of International Women’s Studies Vol. 8 #3 April 2007                                    123  Between words she passes the old fruit bar from the airline,  suddenly hunger takes me.  I chew through the remainder  until with a nudge of wings she insists I share.  *  The women’s toilet has a queue outside the door, where a sign reads,  Hurry up! 2.4 million people want to use the toilet.  *  Here we sit, activists from four continents, five corners  one chair empty, a reminder of  our visa-less friend. Allowed out,   they say, but not back. The risk  is that she’ll speak out of line  in this global line dance. I talk through the jarring  jackhammer; through the migraine still hammering my skull.   21 Jan Chowpatty Beach is home to Sakhi’s childhood memories  We’ve been filling up on bhel puri daily,  tasting the past on your tongue.  In the night’s warm air we watch as chefs  in high hats and red gingham aprons  cook up scents of coriander,   Journal of International Women’s Studies Vol. 8 #3 April 2007                                    124  mint and lemon mixed with ginger,   tamarind, onion and chilli.  * Scintl dreams of returning to this world as a cockatoo,  she dreams of a life without pain, without papers and files,  knees that can take sudden landings. Is any other world possible?   

India Sutra

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India Sutra

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