Blue Hour
I learned to swim underwater first. I was ten, it was the sixth grade summer holidays. I was scrawny and terrified of drowning — a fear my mum passing-the-parcel-ed to me.
Eyes screwed shut but still sensing the chlorine blue of the swimming pool around me. The bluer tiles at the dark bottom of the deep end where I feared I’d be sucked by a vent into drowning. Why does summer make me think of it’s opposite? Maybe it's the body longing for homeostasis. A reaching towards rightness.
It was my father who taught me how to swim. A stubborn and frankly, weird kid, I was rarely in his good books and we disagreed on everything. He used to be an athlete. His budding Ranji-cricket career had been forbidden by his father, and he respected him enough to abandon his dream, and demand this fearsome concept of paternal respect from us in turn. I don’t know if tenderness came easily to him even if he yearned for it in the way that all humans must. Swimming and track-practice were the few interactions we had in my childhood where he didn’t hit me and neither of us yelled at each other. I’m gay now. Obviously. Not because I spent years being afraid of men and the space they took up with their heavy palms and voices like thunder. But also not not because of that.
I was not the type to run from a confrontation. But I would hide forever if that meant I could avoid being around men.
Here’s how to do it
Perch on one leg like a flamingo
Here’s how to do it: Perch on one leg like a flamingo. Tuck the other leg behind you and lean its sole on the wall of the pool. With that foot push off the wall, and the reactive force ricochets you straight forward into the water. Shut your eyes and hold your breath and keep your form straight, arms outstretched like superman flying. With your legs straight behind you, paddle ceaselessly with your feet till your hand bumps against the wall at the other end of the pool. You’ve made it.
Open your eyes. Now breathe.
What I liked best was floating. I taught myself many years later how to do the breast-stroke, and how to swivel on my back and stay still so the water could carry me. It still feels like magic.
I think about sensory deprivation chambers -- in the salty darkness, floating with no sense of where your body ends. Dissolution. I don’t think it’s a death-drive; it’s that feeling you get deep into a make-out, listening hard anticipating the best part of a favourite song, in an auto stoned watching the city race by you hurtling towards some place you want to be. I think we’re all always reaching outside the body. Some of us just notice it more than others.
What I hated about swimming was coming out of the water. Clambering up, missing my footing on the unsteady steps, holding on to the railing, feeling suddenly unmeasurably heavy. Padding across to stand under the shower, it felt like my skin didn’t sit right on me -- the vague smart of being stretched too tight across my face. My swimsuit dug into me, foolish and soaked, too tight, all of it wrong-- almost like you should be able to unzip your body along with it. After a shower though there was cleanness waiting, the sour tang of a chilled glass of orange juice and Cartoon Network.
At some point over the summer holidays, I began to hear the insides of my ears too much. Maybe I just started noticing it. In any case I was terrified. I immediately decided that it meant I was losing my hearing.
Make it stand out
Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Swiftly this fear consumed all of my waking hours. I became hypervigilant monitoring the soft crinkles I heard, sort of like the folding of paper or turning a page, when I varied the air pressure in my ears by flexing some part of my jaw.
I couldn’t describe any of this then, so instead I burst into tears as Sharjah transitioned from sunlight to velvety dark.
The apartment we lived in then, paid for by my father’s employer, had a long white-tiled kitchen with gallery windows that overlooked a sandy lagoon. I did my homework at the kitchen table, and we ate lunch and dinner there unless there was a party that called for the fancier dining room. I watched the dark eat the sun every evening out of these windows, my small face going whiter, my voice drying up until I washed my face over and over at the kitchen sink, to chase these thoughts away. At bedtime I prayed for hours to every god in the pantheon I remembered. I was raised in a dominant caste Hindu family but inexplicably it was the figure of Jesus who seemed the most comforting. Frequently I wished to be a nun. I imagined it would preclude the need to think about my body ever again.
It has a name. Sundown syndrome is the catchall phrase used to describe agitation, confusion and restlessness that is primarily exhibited by people with Alzheimer’s disease and associated dementias, in the late afternoon to early evening. Your loved one might be a little more weepy at twilight, the eldercare website ‘aplaceformom.com’ advises. To photographers (and Instagram) this time of day is better known as ‘golden hour’.
This summer, this hot and endless June/July I’ve been laid up in bed with a torn ligament. Fighting with my partner over text, curtains drawn, writing, smoking pot, and listening to the quintessential Frank Ocean summer album, Blonde. It’s a bad time to be outdoors anyway.
In Delhi summer creeps in earlier and earlier every year. I remember when it waited until April. Staying indoors means overusing the air conditioning, means overheating the outside which makes things worse for the lower income neighbourhood nearby -- Govindpuri. Air conditioners running in posher neighbourhoods create heat islands and exacerbate the punishments of summer for people who work outdoors. So summer mostly feels like an endless wait for rain.
How to describe the quality of Delhi heat now? Merciless, burning, irritably sticky on your face, swarming with the buzz of mosquitoes who overstay their welcome by a little more every year. The body in summer: listless, damp, wilting, defeated. Summer can make you very aware of the fleshiness, the limits, the undeniable presence and bodiness of your body.
There is the pooling of boob-sweat, the irritation of clothes as they cling damply to the lumpy parts of you like an overeager lover, the trickle of little rivulets of perspiration down your belly and sides. Any discomfort or itchiness you may have with the meatsack you live your life in, is inescapable, undeniable and brought to the surface by summer.
Years after that summer of my first major episode of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, I’d learn hypervigilance and surveilling your own body for ‘signs’ that meant something is a classic sign of OCD. Dissociation and defamiliarization come along with a host of anxiety disorders like OCD -- particularly when I’m doing very badly -- but sometimes, like with floating, or being stoned, I want to be in an altered state-- any state in which my normal noisy relationship to the body is altered. Once very stoned, I experienced an absurdly positive instance of defamiliarization. I clicked through my album of Facebook profile pictures for an hour and marvelled out loud at how pretty I was, nearly weeping at one point over the sweetness of my smile. I have never once felt this before or after that one time. My flatmate (also stoned, beside me) was alarmed.
Several of my friends realised how very non-binary they were over the pandemic. I’m non-binary too, obviously. I like to say that I identify as either a party femme or a small boy, there is no in-between. Both because it’s funny and because it’s true. But what I mean by it, like the @genderoftheday bot on Twitter, is that this bodiness makes some of us squirm, the way I used to do when I felt spotlighted by too much male attention -- back when I was a kid hiding somewhere with a book. It’s not always the threat of physical violence, but even being looked at, a gaze that perceives you in a way you don’t want to be seen feels… wrong. Instead, like the gender bot announces everyday, the meaning of my body and the way I feel is more mutable than that.
Here are some of my favourites from the bot:
Today’s gender is sensitivity and the sound of wind in the trees. Today’s gender is the sound of the static between radio stations. Today’s gender is happiness and the sound of whale calls. The gender today is the smell of sunblock and sunblock. The gender of the day is a formless onesie. Today’s gender is a foreboding wraith on a playground. Today’s gender is too close to the sun.
While we’re making gender trouble, I want to say: fuck androgyny. I love a hot person as much as the next slut but the point is it has nothing to do with your meaty bits or what you put on them y’know? Like the point is, I got a whole Master’s degree in Gender Studies and the sum total of my two years of scholarship was this: Gender: real??
What you wear is important though, because it’s a source of delight. For summer I love organza. The softest cotton of course. Mesh. Tulle. Stuff you can see through. If I can’t literally moult and shed this sweaty skin, I’ll get as close to it as I can.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that the trouble with the body in summer is that it’s a fixed body at all. Personally, as much as golden hour makes me anxious, it’s blue hour I love best. That time when you’re awake to see the cool clear blue of the sky just before sunrise. I love how fresh it is, how the day feels like it’s full of possibility at the beginning. Like you could be anything you wanted, limitless.