A Real Durwan
This story definitely hit a bit too close to home. I was homeless for a year when I was 20 and I had to rely on friends and sometimes strangers to provide me with a place to sleep, when I wasn't sleeping in the UCSC forest. That feeling of helplessness and of being totally without orientation in a world gone mad was evoked for me by this short story.
The things that keep us tied to our stories and to our version of reality are so frail. The ties that keep us connected with the world around us are even more fragile. I think it is much easier than most people realize to slip away and become if not insane, then so out of touch with the world that it makes no sense to you and you make no sense to it.
There are many elements that go into that situation, as there are many layers to this story. Sexism is obviously a part, as any older woman is likely to be severely disrespected within a society with even moderate echoes of patriarchy. That this woman was not "a real durwan" seemed to me to echo the Western unwillingness to accept witches as real healers, even though they performed all the same functions. Wanting a "real" durwan struck me as being similar to that--wanting someone properly trained [to be a doorkeeper, which requires not training but social skills] and dismissing what you've got as not good enough.
Meanwhile of course women who wind up in terrible and precarious positions in society rarely "deserve" it, rarely do anything to engender that result. The woman in the story, the "false" durwan, simply had the misfortune of having her keys stolen. Literally, this could happen to anyone. Yet I remember that too, that feeling from being homeless where everything I did was simultaneously under greater scrutiny and dismissed out of hand because I was the one who did it. People would get terribly angry with me for practically no reason at all, or without bothering to hear the actual details of a situation; the instant I would start talking, particularly about abuse or my past, people would shut off. Class is a major component of this society in ways that most people I know rarely pay attention to, ways I am trying to learn to turn off my brain to so that I can live in the world. But in reality, once you lose access to the basic necessities of life--food, shelter, transportation, clean water, safe sleep--you can no longer function competently as part of a society that insists that having at least the bare minimum of these things indicates a person's moral goodness, and losing these things or never having access to them indicates a person was born monstrous.
My prompt for this week was about sanity and how it is prescribed by men and inscribed into some bodies and not others, how it is like a key that we, like the non-durwan, can lose or that can be stolen from us. That in some ways sanity is the key to our own bodies, but there are many voices of those who claim concern who offer to take on the burden of that key for us and then condemn us if we trust them. Sanity is always relative, always about how much cultural capital you have. In a society like ours which values wealth above most else, cultural capital relies extensively on wealth, at least moderate wealth. Wealth that can be taken away so much more easily than you think.
The things that keep us tied to our stories and to our version of reality are so frail. The ties that keep us connected with the world around us are even more fragile. I think it is much easier than most people realize to slip away and become if not insane, then so out of touch with the world that it makes no sense to you and you make no sense to it.
There are many elements that go into that situation, as there are many layers to this story. Sexism is obviously a part, as any older woman is likely to be severely disrespected within a society with even moderate echoes of patriarchy. That this woman was not "a real durwan" seemed to me to echo the Western unwillingness to accept witches as real healers, even though they performed all the same functions. Wanting a "real" durwan struck me as being similar to that--wanting someone properly trained [to be a doorkeeper, which requires not training but social skills] and dismissing what you've got as not good enough.
Meanwhile of course women who wind up in terrible and precarious positions in society rarely "deserve" it, rarely do anything to engender that result. The woman in the story, the "false" durwan, simply had the misfortune of having her keys stolen. Literally, this could happen to anyone. Yet I remember that too, that feeling from being homeless where everything I did was simultaneously under greater scrutiny and dismissed out of hand because I was the one who did it. People would get terribly angry with me for practically no reason at all, or without bothering to hear the actual details of a situation; the instant I would start talking, particularly about abuse or my past, people would shut off. Class is a major component of this society in ways that most people I know rarely pay attention to, ways I am trying to learn to turn off my brain to so that I can live in the world. But in reality, once you lose access to the basic necessities of life--food, shelter, transportation, clean water, safe sleep--you can no longer function competently as part of a society that insists that having at least the bare minimum of these things indicates a person's moral goodness, and losing these things or never having access to them indicates a person was born monstrous.
My prompt for this week was about sanity and how it is prescribed by men and inscribed into some bodies and not others, how it is like a key that we, like the non-durwan, can lose or that can be stolen from us. That in some ways sanity is the key to our own bodies, but there are many voices of those who claim concern who offer to take on the burden of that key for us and then condemn us if we trust them. Sanity is always relative, always about how much cultural capital you have. In a society like ours which values wealth above most else, cultural capital relies extensively on wealth, at least moderate wealth. Wealth that can be taken away so much more easily than you think.
Thanks for sharing this, Ari. I found your last point particularly poignant especially with relation to Boori Ma. Wealth and the privilege associated with it are so transient. I thought a lot while reading this story about how reliable of a narrator Boori Ma was or wasn't. It was quite possible that she was a woman of extreme wealth before the Partition. In the end, it doesn't matter because her current position means the people in the apartment community find her dispensable. When they make her their scape goat, they lose sight of themselves and their humanity. They are much less sane in their fury than Boori Ma is with her stories, even if they are both exaggerated.
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