Act I – Plagiarism (literally, “kidnapper“)
“I had an uncle who had diabetes and lost a leg. He used to ask me to scratch the toes of his lost leg.” The idea of a ghost leg, an entire working limb with its own life and quirks and knee-jerk reactions as a running joke felt melancholic but also a necessary interruption to that melancholia.
I live my life in parallel. A story I hear runs into my own story, rewritten by the more abstract absurdity of someone else’s life – real or fictitious. Sometimes the eventfulness of my own life is ironed out by the mundanity of someone else’s, sometimes they fill in details of time and place. Sometimes I steal it in its entirety, to chew it up but spit out whole because I couldn’t do any better than them at telling it. There are characters that I borrow whose ghost selves never added much to my own story, but in someone else’s they had the luxury of perspective, agency and arc. I borrow them as real persons, substitutes for my own real people and then use a masking tape for their fictitious identities.
Act II – Collage
Someone said something about riding on their father’s bike, spreading their arms wide on the back seat in the assuredness of their parent’s momentary good grace. I think of little Bobby running a fork through his mashed potato, looking up at Henry to say, “I wish it was yesterday.” It’s a nod to the Beatles, I know. The little child pillion bird, a nod to the dreamy expanse of cinema halls. Both become networked images from the Internet, generating something new and something old, which will now become mine. I think of standing up straight on my father’s Chetak for the longest time, till my height interrupted his sight. I remember feeling proud and dismayed when he said I had gotten too tall to stand in front and now I should sit behind him. I feel like I have been sitting since, forming round-bottomed indentations on hard seats. My father’s hidden face, behind me, in front of me, morphed into the kind-looking old man pulling his sickly horse, then into me as a grown man going into a spell of dance and song breaking my own film like coughs and sneezes.
Act III- Décollage
At a birthday party recently, history and memory ran like criss-crossing rail tracks. From high high above, it looked like a patchwork of words, events were truncated into headlines and titles from an old magazine, photocopied by the dozens to make a zine. Every page is arranged to deliberately break the curation of history; turning words into design elements, names in cursive like a fashionably upturned moustache, words in languages as if someone drew them but couldn’t write them. History as evidence is like scratching the toes of a ghost leg. Memory as storytelling fragments brings literary joys to it, histories become tragedies, comedies, an ironic device. Because my father looked more like the horse and not the kind old man pulling the cart, because I will never grew up to be the man he was, because I never grew my tail as long as he did, and I will never birth a child to leave leather-belt welts on their bare bottom.
Act V – Freeze frame
To hang dirty laundry out on the balcony, disrupting the deep blue of the sky and god’s people in neatly arranged square Eden gardens below it. everything runs in parallel, a photographic frame.
brown-study 