Of Alternate, Unintended Meanings

WARNING: Adult content

My short story Kaleidoscope begins like this:

Expanse of green. Sheer silk…white…flowing. A pearl necklace. Pearl earrings.

I gave it to Mat, our instructor at the British Council for some feedback. Apart from some pretty useless comments (e.g. it's a horror poem!?), he marked on the phrase "pearl necklace" (adult content - think before you click) and asked me to look it up on Urban Dictionary, if I dared. Of course, I had to check it out once he'd said as much, though I wished I hadn't. "Pearl earrings" carried a similar meaning. Even though I found it pretty disgusting that instead of telling me something useful, that was what Mat was doing with my piece, but it is also strangely fascinating with respect to the people's imagination!

The Key to Friendship

From the story Artists and Models in the collection 'Delta of Venus' by Anais Nin:

'... Someone told me the delightful story of a crusader who had put a chastity belt on his wife and left the key in care of his best friend in case of his death. He had barely ridden away a few miles when he saw his friend riding furiously after him, calling out, "You gave me the wrong key!"...'

Bound by Boundaries

Over the past couple of years, I've come across the phrase 'blurring of boundaries' a hundred times, with respect to literature (merging of genres, less high brow attitude to high vs low lit, acceptance of literature from various countries and cultures into the literary canon, etc.), films (lesser distinction between art and commercial cinema with the advent of multiplex culture, intertwined genres again, diaspora movies attempting to 'bridge' the gap between the East and the West), nations (globalization, the European Union, internet) etc.

The same is now being said about the sexual preferences of Indians - the LGBT pride parade being heralded as an example of how India, or at least Delhi, Bangalore and Calcutta are 'ready' for a change and are more understanding and accommodating of people with different orientations. The boundaries between the two extremes - male and female - being blurred by transgenders, hijras, et al. Such an open outlook may exist, or may not exist at the moment.

Yet, the boundaries still exist. And some are very difficult to erase. Relationships for example, and their nomenclature. We are so used to fitting every relation neatly into a category under a specific name. When a name does not exist, or multiple options present themselves, it creates problems. To quote from innumerable Hindi movies, what was the relationship between Lord Krishna and Radha. If we keep aside moral issues for a while, for the sake of hypothesis, if a father begets a daughter from his daughter, what relation gets primacy? Is father or grandfather more acceptable. Is mother or sister more prominent a link? How about the man's wife? What relation does she have with the newborn. This is a relatively simple and straightforward example. There exist a million such cases all around us (including the famous Khushwant Singh joke). As long we stick to the boundaries of definitions etched out long, long ago, we will run into problems - increasingly so as the society propels forward at breakneck speed.

Masti

I was going through a collection of essays, "Because I Have a Voice - Queer Politics in India" edited by Arvind Narrain and Gautam Bhan, and published by Yoda Press, and in the introduction to the book, the editors were discussing the scope of the word 'queer' - of relationships and sexualities that extend beyond those encompassed by the words gay, lesbian, bisexuals, transgenders, hijras, kothis etc. and at one point they said "Where do we draw the line between intimate friendships and queer relationships? How do we understand a concept such as masti - a term that refers to the sanctioned space for sexual activity between men - in our framework of sexual desire?"

I always knew that the word masti had sexual connotations but I had always presumed it to be a heterosexual one. I always find it interesting to see how words change meaning or grow to an umbrella term that comes to tolerate a lot more in meaning than just male homosexual activity, or simply sexual activity for that matter. I tried to google the word in a million combinations to find some references or the original meaning but the internet is cluttered with Bollywood and masti phrases clubbed together. Very annoying. Couldn't find a single relevant site.