One by one, trickle it down
Put on your lipstick, spritz the perfume, plaster a smile
Light.
How do you share your light when you do not know who you are?
So you borrow parts for yourself
The way she stands
The way she walks
The way he talks
You borrow these impressions
Stand in front of the mirror and practice till you perfect them
Until you become them and they become you
A borrowed you
A carefully structured, perfected you
One by one, trickle it down
Another person
Another era.
The borrowed expression persists, passed on like a baton
The poise used as a legacy of social upbringing
So you move along without ever questioning
And you perfect that walk or the way you talk
Performances were essential to who she’d become. Waltzing around the room with a smile plastered on her face while she hugged and kissed. The many relatives, family members, friends whose names she’d forgotten, only remembering every time to not truly kiss anyone on the cheek or hug them tight enough or sniff their hair – who knew what nasty shampoos or perfumes these strange-faced people used. She was taught that a lady’s job was to appear sweet, friendly, smart enough to hold a position in society but not too smart so as as to threaten men. Was it her third cousin or her fourth cousin who said yesterday that boys don’t like girls who read? Such a shame but then again the third cousin who had a brain that resembled the mushed peas she was forced to eat as a kid, would feel threatened by anyone who ever contradicted his thoughts, no matter how primitive they were.
The Champagne glasses clinked in the barely lit room while people tried to make conversation over the blasting music. Another half an hour and people would be drunk enough to let their barriers down. Manners forgotten, the pretentious ones would leave the garb of their disguises and transform into their true selves. Only the truly kind ones would be helping each other out.
To think about it, she liked people when they were drunk; even the loud, unkind, opinionated cousins whose egos were bigger than their blithering heads. When people around her let their guard down and threw away what they thought were beautiful masks hiding their supposedly ugly faces, they became tolerable, almost fun. She wished the world could be drunk forever, people living their truths and not hiding behind masks; masks made after careful and deliberate observation of society- theirs and whatever gibberish they liked watching on the flat-screen televisions that adorned the walls of their rooms like the Kohinoor in the Queen’s crown. So many families she’d visited who boasted about their expensive sound systems and televisions bigger than the beer bellies hanging on their sons, tried to coax her into thinking they were smart enough, as if quoting Aristotle was all it took. Any four-year old with a gadget could google and quote some dead man. She didn’t want to hear ideas already presented in books or movies, she wanted to know what the individual thought of the world. But it was as if everyone was more aware of the opinions of famous people rather than their own beliefs, constantly seeing the world from the eyes of their friends or what in the latest Ranbir Kapoor movie, his wayward but cute character perceived. Anyway, how could one expect originality when their prized possessions were fancy cars they drove on streets marked with endless potholes (because the administrators were too busy buying their own fancy cars instead of maintaining the roads). Their love for flat-screen televisions trumped the need for a library, a bookshelf, a space to sit and think.
How one could live in a house without books, was beyond her. She wasn’t against watching movies. On the contrary, she enjoyed a good piece of storytelling. But to watch a piece and to critique it like you owned the artwork, suffocated her. To watch was only the first step to understanding the depth, the wisdom, the need for creation. One had to go back and sit down or go about her chores and let the experience sink in, even if it was for the kind of movie that fried one’s brain cells.
Humans have fallen into the terrible habit of reacting without fully immersing themselves in the experience. As if the experience doesn’t matter until we post a reaction satisfactory enough for our peers on our Instagram stories. Social media is the boon and the bane of our tiny existence. The constant tapping, nosing into each other’s private lives or whatever pretty parts people decide to show us, has pushed our already competitive toxic sides to the ultimate level of suffocation.
Anxiety is as common as dieting was in the 2000s. If one truly thought about it, we’d see that much of our troubles stem from self-doubt. The rising number of suicides indicates this. It was as if this world of suffocation got too much and the only way to liberation was to take their own lives, no matter what damage or broken pieces were left behind. Sometimes people were made of such contradictions, it made her want to laugh.
All these thoughts whirled around her head when all she wanted to do was peel off masks. And yet she put on her own mask, walked around the mirage of people, posing for selfies, pouting the foolish duck face, sending reactions to her friends’ stories, for the penultimate need of approval and the craving of human contact even though it was through the screen of her lifeless device whose robotic voice sometimes soothed her loneliness.