Blahaj Around My Neck
I don’t particularly recall when a blahaj started to appear around my neck.
I didn’t even realize it was a blahaj in the first place, seeing as it was neither soft nor fluffy. It always was a misshaped blob, a mish-mash of cruft, dust, ticklish feelings and heavy. Very heavy, to be honest. So heavy that you’d think I wouldn’t have been able to carry it with my already large school bag decades ago, or later my laptop bag, or much much later, the little coffin with my little son that I carried to that secret necropolis that him and I colonized for ourselves.
But I did. I always did. If any, the blahaj grows. Each time my heart is heavy with something, it grows and becomes heavier. Heck, it totally is fucking growing right now as I type.
I’m getting ahead of myself. If my dear departed grandfather, my tāta, was alive, and I told him about the blahaj, he would have quoted Coleridge:
“Ah! well a-day! What evil looks
Had I from old and young!
Instead of the cross, the Blahaj
About my neck was hung.”
But tāta, I would ask, is it evil?
He would then blink at me, for a moment, and talk about nothing being evil in this world, that in our mother tongue, the word for devil, dayyam, was just a corruption of the word for divinity, daivam, and in any case, it was just a poetic allusion, that he didn’t really believe in ghosts or devil or any of that nonsense, after all, despite being religious, he was very good friends with the head of the Rationalists Association back in the motherlode, why back in 1967 back in Krishnalanka, him and that gentleman went off on… he would be lost in his memories for another hour.
I can say all of that because 1) he’s my tāta, 2) nobody knew him as well as I did, 3) he may have sadly passed away 9 years back, but him and I just had a very nice conversation today morning while I was sleeping. That’s the wonderful thing about him. He’ll always come back for a chat, particularly for long and meandering ones, like it always was.
I digress again. Point is, tāta would throw a lot of literary allusions, probably be even sympathetic, but he wouldn’t know the first thing about a blahaj, much less know how to pronounce the word. Not many people do, as a matter of fact. Know about it, I mean; don’t really care about the pronunciation.
The blahaj is real. You want to pretend it doesn’t exist. You want to hide it within your shirt, perhaps stuff it down your pants. You want to kill it; you want to stab it, you want to annihilate it. But it’s nothing like the albatross that Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner killed. Because you can’t kill it, there is no guilt. Because there is no evil in this world – no deyyam, no black magic, no dushťa śaktulu, no evil powers – it can’t be evil.
But it is powerful. It can make you do things you never imagined. It can make you feel things you’ve never experienced. It can make you be something you’ve never been before.
And it will never ever leave you. Never.
You think it’ll go away if you ignore it for a bit. Or may you think it’s just a matter of being distracted, of not letting your mind wander, and use all the mystic powers of intense concentration that the ancients were well known for. The more you try to stuff it down, though, the more it will pop up. It’s like a balloon; squeeze it hard, and it’ll grow in shapes you would never have imagined. May be you think you’re John Nash, like in that movie; may be you think it’s a bit of an imagination that you can ignore whilst you chase your real destiny to be regarded as the greatest genius of your generation or something equally grandiose and self-serving.
It really isn’t; there’s no schizophrenia. It’s not like a TV screen that you avert your eyes from, or a person that you shouldn’t stare at. It is within you. It moves while you move your hands, it stretches while you cross your legs, it shakes your head as you wiggle your head like every Indian ought to. And because it is within you, it affects you. Your hand’s gestures become more dainty, you cross legs with a certain gait, and your head’s wiggles with less of manly sternness, but with more of a flutter of your long, lovely eyelashes…
I’m getting ahead of myself again.
This blahaj, it can make you do things. Things you’ll never imagine you would do. It’ll make you seek things. It’ll make you remember every Looney Tunes episode where Bugs Bunny had to pretend to be someone else. It will make you haunt your school’s ancient library, make you seek encyclopaediae from decades ago, trying to find out more about itself. It’ll grant you the gift of patience, of collecting all those hefty tomes, and turn their pages in anticipation for… something, anything. It’ll give you the boon that is an encyclopaedic memory, for when you read so many encyclopedias particularly for their section starting with T, you will remember most of the content.
It’ll make your school teachers wonder on how you retained so many facts in your head, without them understanding that you knew so much, so much more, about Shakespearean theatre, about Japanese kabuki, about Deccani Kuchipudi, without them once realizing what was the one thing common to all of them. They will be amazed that you already knew about obscure stories in the Mahābhārata, not just about Śaśirèkhā parińayam, Ghatōtgachā’s ruse, or Sikhandi or Brihannalla, but also about Aravan, his temple in Koovagam and who celebrate him on Cittirai amāvasya, that piece in India Today from March 1992 on the Chamayavilakku festival is still seared into your mind like you’ve just read it yesterday, that you know exactly what was the sage Narada’s involvement in the naming of the 63 years of the Indian calendar.
But you don’t tell them any of that. You learn very quickly to offer just enough information to answer the question, hide the rest under a bushel. That’s how they do it in Mastermind, see, and some would say even in University Challenge. You don’t say why you read up on all of this; you don’t want them to be scared, do you.
They will not ask. Trivia quizzes are timed performances; either you get it, or you don’t. Since you’ve read it all in your quest – World Book to Three Investigators to Famous Five to Chandamāma to science-fiction – you will get most of the questions. That would be enough. They will fete you, they will celebrate you, they will suggest you participate in televised quiz shows. It’ll get to your head; you will puff your chest in pride and think you’re unbeatable.
But blahaj is never further away; if you puff your chest, and so will it. And then on the morning of the biggest, most prestigious televised quiz show, just as they were applying makeup to your face, your team mate says make-up like a girl? Yuck! and then you pause. You freeze. Your smile, it goes away. You pout and refuse to put anything more, ignoring their protests that it is only stage makeup, not makeup makeup. The lights that shone on you till then, the limelight that you revelled in, they suddenly blind you. You are hesitant, confused, unsure anymore of anything. It all comes crashing down. You lose. And in your loss, your teachers suddenly remind you that you’ve been missing quite a lot of school because of this… quizzing, and may be you should focus attention on your O Levels now? Wins on television don’t matter for college now, do they. And what would you do without college?
You swear to yourself that you’ll never ever ever be affected by this blahaj thing anymore. From now on, you’ll be the boy they all want you to be; show that quizzing shine in O levels, and then A levels, and may be in university where you can work on computers again. And you ask for, and are granted one soon, not really because they wanted to, but because they couldn’t figure out how to work one. And so, you take charge; you dial in to BBS’s, to Usenet, to the new fangled World Wide Web. You were good at finding information in a library, you will be good at finding information on the Internet. And you do: when you’ve finished your programming assignments in record time, you end up looking things up again. You learn about Lynn Conway, Christine Jorgensen, Lili Elbe, Jennifer Finley Boylan. You see other people are also interested in Star Trek. Specifically that Star Trek episode, the reputedly the worst episode in all of The Original Series, Turnabout Intruder.
You read everything there is to read about it all: scientific papers, Geocities home pages, “fun” online quizzes, tgfa.org. You learn about Two-Spirit – you get to know the original Ojibwe term, niizh manidoowag. You learn about Fa’afafine in Samoa, kathooey in Thailand, travesti in Argentina, sworn virgins in Albania, calabai among Bugis. You learn about the Medallion of Zulo, you hear about the Great Shift, you read tropes and cliches. You continue to do so on and off for 24 years, not just in Wordsworth-ian vacant or pensive mood, but when blahaj hits: when you’re alone in a hotel room on a business trip. When you’ve just read about Laverne Cox, or that movie they made on Lile Elbe (which you don’t see, for you know it’ll be painful). When you feel excited. When you feel down. When they release that Snapchat filter. You don’t know when blahaj hits, but when it hits, it hits. And you brace yourself for it each time.
And while you take all these hits, you begin to realize the world is actually moving along: language has changed, new words get added, more people talk about it everywhere. Identity Disorders don’t get called as such any more, eggs get talked about, and their hatchings get celebrated. And so you begin to ask yourself, as you’ve done so many years ago:
What do I do knowing all of this?
Your memory isn’t as good as it used to be anymore. So as you tap your balding head and graying hair, and you want to scream out: Why do I know all of this?
Which is when you begin to tell yourself:
You may have been reading the wrong Coleridge poem, after all. Not Rime of the Ancient Mariner, but Kubla Khan.
A damsel with a dulcimer
Good place to start, you tell yourself. Not the vanity bits. Starting with the main section. Strong!
A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
Vision!, you say, You remember well.
It was an Abyssinian maid
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Yes , Abyssinian maid, you continue, Old name for Ethiopia. That's where the neighbours in the home country used to be from. Pan-south solidarity!
Could I revive within me
Yes!
His symphony and song,
Her symphony and song, you go on, her symphony. Her song. Almost there.
To such a deep delight ’twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
You're unstoppable! Say it!
I would build that dome in air,
Say it!
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
Getting warm! Almost there! Say it!
And all who heard should see them there,
Say it say it say it!
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
Out with it! “I am_…”
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
No, don't deflect! Forget the poem! Say it: “I am....”
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
“I am. Not.”
You're not what? Afraid?
“I am not... a ci..”
Deep sigh.
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread
“I am in... trance”.
NOOOOO!, you hear a voice scream inside you with that 30-year-old frustration. Why fight it?, you hear it say again. It is what it is. This is what it is. Just admit it to yourself.
And so, you take another deep breath, and you start again, thinking of everything so far: the furtive search, the pleas in the dark, the shame, the quest, the questioning, the knowledge, the trivia, the emotions, the schizophrenia, the gifts, the curse.
The persistent dysphoria. The eternal hope for euphoria. The poetry and the music.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight ’twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, their floating hair!
Weave a circle round her thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread
For she on Blahaj hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.
And just as the crescendo dies, you mumble, hoping nobody would notice: I am trans.