Their Earnestness of Being Not Important, or my In-chooch-ience

One word could sum her up, unreconstructed (there is a specific giggly pleasure to driving someone to google in the first line of describing them). Much as she espoused a politics of mid-range radicalness, she imposed a relation of work and reciprocity that felt like I had turned the corner and met my neighbourhood Aunty. Except my neighbourhood Aunty would not perhaps pointlessly and repeatedly nitpick about the politics of an ex-comrade of hers, but maybe she would have done the same about the pressed creases made by the woman who irons her clothes. So meet Doctor Aunty Politico, she offers beef and beer and saving the world by bitching.

Strangely, in spite of my relatively strong interest in the people that she was often talking about, my well of interest in what she had to say would run dry quite soon. How can so-and-so do this-and-this? Really, yawn. But let me pretend an interest, because ‘we’ must ‘work’ ‘together’. Like hell. There were meetings where my eyes glazed over at moments when I fondly remembered how much easier it had been to come to this government health clinic and to meet people on my own.

It still amazes me that for a bunch of people allegedly volunteering at a medical clinic, how often everyone referred to it as work. It wasn’t the appointments with district officers, the meetings with babus and all these accouterments of work that were bothersome, as the pointless glaze of work over everything giving it an importance that this didn’t deserve. Can you work tomorrow? I am working on this. We could work on a report. I had a huge desire to laugh in everyone’s face at that point, why don’t they work on their pointless lives instead. Its not like our work had actually changed a single thing, we should call it muck or cook or peel and spare ourselves.

But lets see who is around here, there is the student (a dingbat of a pre-man whose only upstanding quality seemed to be his ability to do this work) and he was her ‘boyfriend’ (shudder – the last time he showed signs of an inner life was while accidentally humming an 80s Hindi song). There was the unemployable cheeky bastard who truly should only stick to lovemaking, and then there was her who seemingly got and flung jobs but never seemed to actually have any. Then there were others who occasionally appeared - the savarna couple that she had bitched out and might never come back. And then the few people who turned up for the meetings who actually lived in the area surrounding the clinic. Their thoughts and views were opaque to us, as we were probably to them. Occasionally something flashed across, but mostly we stayed politely unknowable to each other while doing this work together.

Oddly, even with my own bare minimum relation to having a job, I was the only one here that probably understood the strangeness of what work actually is, it is not politics, it is not desire, it’s a bit like fill-in-the-blanks. And maybe to a large extent I resented the lack of imagination of everyone around me to make everything work, but did I mention my insouciance. Which is my new favourite word, maybe because it also buries within itself chooch, a word for vagina in Hindi. Drearily I wonder how I drifted from a repressed office where a Brahmin was getting too much talk-time and control, to these meetings in which I was surrounded by joyless note-taking non-Brahmins. The common factor being the feeling of can-I-kill-myself.

Partially this has to be my fault, tired and infuriated by being repeatedly asked to dump what I want to say in academic foundue, it had seemed easier to retreat to a corner here and be more silent than talkative, let the waves of others’ pettiness wash over you. The only price I had to pay for my insouciant lounging was to listen to her sometimes, so why should I object to being giving a ringside view to the engrossing charms of unimportance?