Da Police

When I was 14 years old, I watched an Indian film called Rang De Basanti with a tribe of family friends. I didn't like it very much at the time (spoiler: everyone dies). I burst into tears during this scene of a peaceful candlelight vigil that the police thunder into, indiscriminately beating protestors to break it up. I remember congregating outside the theatre afterwards, the old people denouncing the scene as ridiculous, far-fetched in vilifying the police. They thought that this scene diminished the integrity of the rest of the film.

I never, ever thought that I would come so close to this brutality in real life, repeatedly. Certainly not on my own campus fighting for of all things, decent conditions for university staff. That's just nowhere near hard-core enough to justify today.

It was a harrowing day at the protests, at times shoved and manhandled by the police. I became more upset when I came home to my mother glued to a television screen featuring slightly biased reportage of the event. Leaving aside media bias, the violence was awful. To me, triply so because it featured people I know well and like very much. It seemed to affect my mum too, who turned on me and reproached me for over an hour about my involvement with activism, telling me to mind my own business and just study. She pointed out someone on TV with a piercing, who I've never even met. "OH MY GOD, THIS IS THE KIND OF PEOPLE YOU'RE HANGING AROUND?" I let her overreaction slide because after all, it must be quite frightening and foreign. Considering that in school if I ever got a detention (never did, for the record) that would be a matter of eternal shame to the family, or at least for the next three generations, it's a pretty huge deal to see me potentially caught up on the wrong side of the police. It doesn't help that I once told my parents ASIO might have a file on me.

Every time I try to speak to someone about this, I become completely incoherent and choked. In the interest of finishing my readings, I'm going to pour everything out here and let it land in a messy puddle of despair, anger and bitter disappointment. My faith in (most of) society is hacking its way below ground level.

So, as a collection of teenagers and twentysomethings with signs, chanting slogans about FUNDING EDUCATION (!?), apparently we are threatening enough to justify calling the riot cops ON HORSES. I used to get prickly when I heard the phrase ACAB. It has taken me a long time to understand that the police force is really an inherently unjust institution. I want to wring my hands in despair when I realise there is no mechanism to hold them to account. The state won't protect people against the violence of the state. The police nearly choked someone, they broke someone's leg. Last time they punched people in the face, dragged them down stairs, made five unwarranted arrests. Their response to the situation, in every case that I have been witness to, is hugely disproportionate. They have incited every instance of violence. Besides this, I know of a friend who they winked at and today I was actually catcalled. Being objectified at any time is bad but by policemen on ego trips actually makes me sick.

It doesn't even matter that we film them, nothing even happens. It hasn't happened for the thousands of Indigenous people who have died in lock-up and it won't now. It becomes truly horrific when this meets the sweeping social consensus that they are "the good guys", just "doing their job". Since when did a "job" redeem such barbarity? People's reaction against demonstrating dissent, even on an issue that most people agree on (outside the Labor government), is scary. Once, someone (who got a really, really high ATAR) even told me that it was out of my place to raise a squeak because it's Spence's university to do what he wants. I don't even know where to begin with a statement like that.

I thought I lived in a more sophisticated world than what has been revealed to me over the last few months. Much disappointment.

I came back from India yesterday.

I know I said to a lot of people that I'd be home today... but everyone knows that I'm not very good at things like numbers. Sorry.

At first, I was just LALALA HOME! BED! SLEEP! because these were very exciting things after a harrowing and uncomfortable plane trip. It was only after I woke up this morning that the familiar post- holiday depression started to creep in. I tried to push it away with a 67th viewing of Hum Aapke Hai Koun, which is essentially a 3 1/2 hour long wedding video with lots of beautiful smiling people who are just happy all the time. I thought it worked but after turning it off, the wave of depression hit again with redoubled force and a plaintive voice was now crying in my head: "whyyyy doesn't my life look like theirs???". I took to restlessly flipping though the books I bought in India because they have a bookish smell that makes me happy. I know I'm crazy. I just finished watching Roman Holiday (ahh, Audrey!) but now it's back to square one. Does it count as nostalgia if it only happened a few days ago?

A few people have asked me today, "how's India?" or "what's it like?". It's not a simple question. What do I say? Full of people? Big? It's particularly odd to answer because having spent over two years' worth of my life there in holidays, I'm not exactly a tourist. Most the salient differences have become normalised to me, so what I find to be noteworthy probably isn't what you want to hear. I'm not really interested in giving you the ridiculous exoticised version, though I am sometimes tempted to write something sarcastic about the natives in their colourful costumes that struggle to keep their chins up in the face of crippling poverty and the caste system... but this is the internet and lots of people won't get it.

This trip was only 2 weeks long and we spent all of it in Chennai, where my grandparents live. Chennai is a pretty sleepy city and Besant Nagar, the area they live in, weirdly resembles Cherrybrook in some ways.  I love it though- going back to slow, stable Besant Nagar is the most comforting thing in the world and for some reason, it makes my "real" life feel frivolous and plastic in comparison. It offers me everything I need: food,  freedom and very good bookstores.

This is what I do every day:

I wake up, eat breakfast and then grate coconuts. This activity is filled with much more adventure than it sounds like, because of the lethal apparatus involved. If I don't pay attention, I could slit my wrists. I do random bits of housework to impress my grandparents and then I go upstairs, here:

 and paint and read books. I return downstairs for lunch and then read for a while, till everyone's taking their afternoon nap when I slip out and roam the streets like the vagrant I am. I go to the beach, buy food, buy clothes/jewellery/books, explore uncharted territory. All my purchases (and including food, there was a LOT of them) came to less than $200 over three weeks.

On a daily basis, I buy a coconut and drink from it. This is partly because I'm addicted to the stuff and partly because I'm in love with the lady who sells it. She is one of the most beautiful women I've ever seen in my life, with a willowy frame, lush hair and deer-like eyes. She sits in the dirt but she is always poised and elegant. Somehow, she's even graceful when she raises a sickle over her head and roughly swings it down to hack a coconut open. I rarely approach her before 12:00 am because until then she's engrossed in the newspaper and the way she pores over it, I feel like it's on the brink of swallowing her up.  She is also extremely unself-conscious and transparent, which is something that's probably true of most people there. She has a gorgeous 4-5 year old daughter and a stupid-looking husband who sleeps a lot.

In the late evenings, sometimes I accompany my grandmother to the park next to her flat. I love this park so much, not only because it's pretty but also for the motley of people that fill it. It's usually being circled by kids from the neighbouring karate school in bright, white uniforms. They have to pause often to respectfully edge past the strolling old men who will hardly bother to keep to one side. Manual labourers sometimes chitchat around the pond but they usually move on quickly. There are little kids being hilarious on the swings and their parents (mothers, mostly) gossiping in the corner. My favourite part is the row of benches occupied exclusively by toothless old ladies in fine silk saris (including my own paati) who silently watch over the whole scene with enlightened smiles.

At night I read, eat, sleep. Repeat.