On Valentine’s day in 2020, my dadi sat on her plastic chair in the verandah of our home in Lalton Khurd, Punjab. Some time early that afternoon, while rocking back and forth and enjoying the feeling of the sunshine on her skin, she closed her eyes for the last time.
19 years prior, she’d journeyed to America for the first time, to assist in the upbringing of her first granddaughter. While my father woke up at 3 AM to drive taxi in San Francisco, and my mother headed off to what was often her 10th consecutive shift at the hospital, my grandmother braided my hair, changed my diapers, cooked Maggi noodles, and hummed me to sleep with Punjabi folk songs. By the time I became a teenager, our roles had reversed. After her second stroke, I braided her hair with a ਪਰਾਂਦੀ, walked her to the bathroom, and snuck her the dates she wasn’t allowed to eat because of her diabetes. For most of my life, we shared a bedroom. Each night that we slept next to one another, I attentively listened for the clicking of her walker against our tile floor, meaning she was safely returning to bed after using the restroom. On several mornings since, I’ve woken up from dreams where I’ve imagined that I’ve heard this sound once more.
My dadi was a notoriously difficult woman. She was known to throw steel cups, yell at neighbors, and use Punjabi curse words that my mother requested I never use. And yet, spending my life with her until her death shaped me in ways that I’ll continue to understand until my own death. Beyond sweetness, joy, and comfort, my dadi taught me that love is found in responsibility, ferocity, and loyalty. The pain I felt after her passing was immeasurable, and yet, it was this pain that demonstrated the enormity of the care and the love she imbued me with.
As such, I dedicate this February newsletter to love and its innumerable forms. Friendship, romance, family, community, the land. A blessing to love and to be loved.
Motif Mix: Love
Loving fuels action above despair. Love forges courage, not cowardice. Love is unfailing conviction in something beyond oneself.
Letter from Gaza | Short story by Ghassan Kanafani, 1956
Kanafani was a Palestinian resistance writer and revolutionary politician who produced some of the Arab world’s most celebrated works of fiction before he was assassinated, alongside his beloved niece Lamees, by Mossad in 1972. “Letter from Gaza,” perhaps Kanafani’s most famous short story (though I would also highly recommend “The Crucified Sheep” and “The Land of Sad Oranges“), was written when the author was barely 20 years old. Tragically prophetic, it is told in the voice of a young Palestinian man who has returned to his destroyed neighborhood in Gaza. In a letter to a friend who is eagerly awaiting his arrival in Sacramento, the man recounts a trip to see his badly wounded niece, and explains his decision to “remain among the ugly debris” of his brutalized home place (Sheehan for LitHub, 2024).
“I went out into the streets of Gaza, streets filled with blinding sunlight. They told me that Nadia had lost her leg when she threw herself on top of her little brothers and sisters to protect them from the bombs and flames that had fastened their claws into the house. Nadia could have saved herself, she could have run away, rescued her leg. But she didn't.
Why?
No, my friend, I won't come to Sacramento, and I've no regrets. No, and nor will I finish what we began together in childhood. This obscure feeling that you had as you left Gaza, this small feeling must grow into a giant deep within you. It must expand, you must seek it in order to find yourself, here among the ugly debris of defeat.”
That obscure feeling, that deep well, too, is love. In my perspective, love for your people means witnessing the ugly, the terrible, and the horrifying with eyes wide open and choosing against escape.
No Name in the Street | Novel by James Baldwin, 1972
In 1957, when walking to lunch one afternoon in Paris, Baldwin encountered a photo that covered every newspaper kiosk. 15 year old Dorothy Counts “being reviled and spat upon by the mob as she was making her way to school in Charlotte, North Carolina . . . with history, jeering, at her back.”
“The photo made me furious, it filled me with both hatred and pity, and it made me ashamed. Some one of us should have been there with her! I dawdled in Europe for nearly yet another year, held by my private life and my attempt to finish a novel, but it was on that bright afternoon that I knew I was leaving France. I could, simply, no longer sit around in Paris discussing the Algerian and the black American problem. Everybody else was paying their dues, and it was time I went home and paid mine.”
Just as in the previous short story, Kanafani ultimately decides against escaping to Sacramento, so too does Baldwin return to America. Paying dues, to me, evokes the duty of the diaspora. Even when one is divorced from their people by time or by geography, it is each generation’s responsibility to resist disengagement. Because belonging to a community means that one is a product of the love and action of the generations prior, each of us carries a responsibility to pay dues for the present and the future. Because Sikhi and Punjabiyat were protected fiercely from destruction by my ancestors, it's my duty to continue this struggle.
The Martyrdom of Guru Gobind Singh and his family | SikhNet
Sikh history is riddled with battles, martyrdoms, and genocide spanning centuries– often with the ultimate goal of erasing the Sikh identity and people. What touches me most about the above described battles of the early 1700s are that despite his status as the then leader of the Sikh quam, Guru Gobind Singh and his elder sons entered the front lines of the battle themselves, and were martyred as such. Battles are usually fought amongst the most vulnerable, while leaders watch from a safe distance. But Sikhi, and others demonstrate that love, and a true, deep conviction (whether in God, or freedom, or any other such cause) mean that one will fight until martyrdom. To do otherwise would be betrayal.
Love and attention | Ladybird, 2017
Greta Gerwig’s 2017 coming-of-age film, Lady Bird stars Lady Bird, a high schooler who is desperate to leave her hometown of Sacramento, in pursuit of a more “cultural” experience on the East Coast. After having written her college essays, Lady Bird meets with a high school advisor, who tells her that she’d written about Sacramento “so affectionately, and with such care”, to which Lady Bird retorts that she was “just describing it”. The advisor insists that her writing came across “as love”. Lady Bird responds, saying that she was just “paying attention”. Finally, the advisor asks– “Don’t you think maybe they are the same thing– love and attention?”
That’s what makes friendship so sacred. People that pay attention, with nothing to gain from the pursuit.
Chadar | Song by Kuldeep Manak, 1986
In this song, a mother embroiders a chadar (blanket) that may one day be used for dowry in her daughter’s wedding. As she embroiders, she reflects on all the love she poured into her daughter to enable her to grow into the young woman she has become. The second line of the song is below–
agg de bhambar de wargiya dheeyaan,
ni tu sambh bukkal vich rakhiya
Daughters are like explosives, and I kept her safely in my arms.
My translation does the beauty of the song no justice. I’ll try to work with my dad and on a complete translation of the song one day. You should still listen to the song even if you don’t understand Punjabi, because you will still hear the emotion that Kuldeep Manak sings with.
The God of Small Things | Novel by Arundhati Roy, 1997
In this novel, a character who belongs to a high caste falls in love with a man of a lower caste. The following is an excerpt from a dream she has of him.
“That afternoon, Ammu travelled upwards through a dream in which a cheerful man with one arm held her close by the light of an oil lamp. He had no other arm with which to fight the shadows that flickered around him on the floor.
Shadows that only he could see.
Ridges of muscle on his stomach rose under his skin like divisions on a slab of chocolate.
He held her close, by the light of an oil lamp, and he shone as though he had been polished with a high-wax body polish.
He could do only one thing at a time.
If he held her, he couldn’t kiss her. If he kissed her, he couldn’t see her. If he saw her, he couldn’t feel her.”
The tenderness of touch. No need to explain further.
Giovanni’s Room | Novel by James Baldwin, 1956
“I scarcely know how to describe that room. It became, in a way, every room I had ever been in and every room I find myself in hereafter will remind me of Giovanni’s room. I did not really stay there very long– we met before the spring began and I left there during the summer– but it still seems to me that I spent a lifetime there. Life in that room seemed to be occurring underwater, as I say, and it is certain that I underwent a sea change there… We sometimes heard children playing outside our window, sometimes strange shapes loomed against it. At such moments, Giovanni, working in the room, or lying in bed, would stiffen like a hunting dog and remain perfectly silent until whatever seemed to threaten our safety had moved away.”
The impact that people you love have on you lasts long after your correspondence with them ceases, whether this correspondence was for just a season or for decades. The places you share together become forever tinged with the spirit of the moments you shared. I believe the name of this novel is perfectly titled. Perhaps the most intimate moments of connection and understanding happen in one’s room. When laying together like David and Giovanni did, it no longer feels as if one hears the laughter of children individually. Love allows for the witnessing of shadows and children together.
Miscellaneous Mix
Beyond religious “tolerance” is seeing the value in all
ਅਵਤਾਰਨਿ ਕੀ ਕਥਾ ਮਹਾਂਨੀ । ਰਾਮਕ੍ਰਿਸ਼ਨ ਆਦਿਕ ਗੁਨਖਾਨੀ ।
ਸਤਿਗੁਰ ਸ੍ਰੀ ਨਾਨਕ ਤੇ ਆਦਿ । ਬਰਨਨ ਕਰ੍ਯੋ ਪ੍ਰਸੰਗ ਸੰਬਾਦਿ ।42।
The stories of the great incarnations (avatāras),
The treasure troves of virtue like Ram and Krishna,
The True Gurus, the Exalted Guru Nanak to Guru Tegh Bahadur,
Their sayings, stories, and conversations.
ਤਿਸ ਪਰ ਤਰਕ ਕਰਹਿ ਮਨ ਮੂੜ੍ਹੇ । ਭੇਦ ਨ ਪਾਇ ਸਕਹਿਂ ਗੁਨ ਰੂੜੇ ।
ਸੋ ਨਰ ਖੈ ਹੈਂ ਜਮ ਕੀ ਮਾਰ । ਜਨਮ ਮਰਨ ਲਹਿਂ ਨਿਤ ਹ੍ਵੈ ਖ੍ਵਾਰ ।43।
The idiot minded who dispute/critique such material,
They aren't able to understand the secret, the beautiful virtues within,
Such idiots are destroyed, by the beatings from Death,
Continually being ruined, they end up in the cycle of birth and death
Mosaic Murals of the UNAM Central Library | Another Day in Paradise
Amazingly all of the stones (even the bright blues) are in their natural colors, O´Gorman travelled all across Mexico to find the perfect stones. He chose to use natural occurring colors because painting the stones would have required constant renovating and re-painting. In the state of Guerrero they found the yellow, red, black and green stones. Some of the green stones were also found in the state of Guanajuato, and in Hidalgo they found volcanic rock that was in the hues of purple and pink. The blue was the hardest to find, but they finally found the blue stones in a mine in Zacatecas.
Arundhati Roy on how writing is about design / her training as an architect
Another "core" of the book is the lyricism of your prose. The Indian-American writer (and Salon columnist) Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni has confessed to writing to the rhythms of Indian music; sometimes she reads her work out loud in public with the music playing in the background to enhance the musicality. Do you have a similar approach?
I don't listen to music when I write. It's about design to me. I'm trained as an architect; writing is like architecture. In buildings, there are design motifs that occur again and again, that repeat -- patterns, curves. These motifs help us feel comfortable in a physical space. And the same works in writing, I've found. For me, the way words, punctuation and paragraphs fall on the page is important as well -- the graphic design of the language. That was why the words and thoughts of Estha and Rahel, the twins, were so playful on the page ... I was being creative with their design. Words were broken apart, and then sometimes fused together. "Later" became "Lay. Ter." "An owl" became "A Nowl." "Sour metal smell" became "sourmetal smell."
Living Sculpture: Isamu Noguchi’s Spider Dress Springs to Life - ELEPHANT
The spider dress, which could seem like a cage, spends most of the performance on stage as a menacing inanimate object. However, as the final scene reaches its climax, Graham slides into the dress and dances, seemingly revelling in the horror of her actions, in a twisted explosion of metal and limbs. For Noguchi, the sculpture was a “dress of transformation”, while Graham dubbed it “a chariot of flames”.
Thank you to my dadi, Jasmail Kaur (dec. 2.14.2020), and my nani, Gurdip Kaur (dec. 5.10.2021), for being the first people to show me unconditional love and its many forms. Every day, I wear the gold ring my dadi took off her own finger and gave me in high school, and the gold earrings my nani gave me on our final India trip together. While you both won’t be here to adorn my neck with a ਹੀਰੇ ਦਾ ਸੈੱਟ at my wedding like you promised, your impact lives on. You are both missed terribly every day.
I read this last night falling asleep - it's so special
I'm in awe of you