Rosalyn D'Mello: Life in an absurdist world

Protesters on top of a signpost outside Trump Tower. Thousands of Americans took to the streets in protest a day after Trump was elected president. Pic/AFP

The shower head in my bathroom refuses to stop dripping, each drop rippling the surface of the previous collection of drops, resulting in a relentless plonk. The plumber hasn't been able to wrap his head around this anomaly. It's deeply ironic, the fact that since April my flat has been suffering from the worst water crisis in the four years since I've been its inhabitant. My primary source of water has been tankers sent by the Jal board. And now this unceasing slipping, this drip-drop-drip-drop. It's beginning to assume slightly metaphorical proportions. Having witnessed second-hand the strange mockery of democracy, the election of an orange goblin as head of the proudest first-world nation, the bizarre witch hunt against activist Nandini Sundar, the continuing violation of human rights in our immediate neighbourhood - it feels like an onrush. And I'm slightly envious of the woman my friend spotted on Tuesday evening at a Fortis Hospital in Green Park, who decided to get rid of her black money by purchasing R1.5 lakh worth of air purifiers and baby diapers. The shit has really hit the ceiling, and the rotating fan sends it flying off in a thousand different directions. Those of you who have managed some degree of optimism, do realize what they say about the butterfly effect is not untrue.

More than anything else, what stings is knowing that misogyny has just gotten enshrined in the establishment. Had Trump been a chauvinistic woman, he'd have been eliminated long ago. But the revelation of his "locker-room" talk, his pussy-grabbing mentality clearly changed nothing. That America, the last bastion of freedom should choose someone whose agenda is so divisive, whose ideology is so full of hatred, whose speech is so obviously racist and anti-women, who has said, on the record, that he would unabashedly consider dating his daughter if she weren't his daughter, has driven home the bottomline - we have officially entered an absurdist world. Forget God, I'm unsure if the concept of humanity exists anymore in any pure, unsullied way.

This is, as David Remnick has decreed, an American tragedy. For many of us in India who've been dealing with a repressive government, unprecedented student unrest, and a student, Najeeb Ahmed's disappearance for now almost a month, with increasing atrocities against women, and air that is not breathable, it all feels irreparably bleak and depressing.

And given that one has limited legal tender, there's little possibility of whiskey-fuelled respite from the sense of apocalyptic doom that hangs in the stratosphere, dangerously close to sea levels.

I remember exactly where I was when the present Indian Prime Minister was elected. Bharti Kher, an extraordinary Indian artist, had dec­i­ded to host what she called a hen party at her house. It was mainly just us women, and we were all struggling emotionally trying to come to terms with the new reality we found ourselves having to brave. We wanted to be hopeful. We wanted to believe that even if there would no longer be room for subversion, we would reinvent what it meant to be subversive. There was something healing about all of us being together, eating pork chops made by Kher and toasting to the future, however dark it seemed from our vantage points.

It's difficult today to muster even a shred of that enthusiasm. But I have been taking heart in knowing that the fight against fascist forces must continue, that we have miles to go before we can call ourselves a gender-equal society, or a tolerant people, or to imagine a world where the leader of what calls itself "the free world" can be a woman. Remnick puts it poetically, with the fervor of an evangelist in his op-ed in The New Yorker. "But despair is no answer," he says. "To combat authoritarianism, to call out lies, to struggle honourably and fiercely in the name of American ideals - that is what is left to do. That is all there is to do."

Maybe it is time for us, the so-called millennials, to start actively provoking the next revolution. Everyday we must ask ourselves, what did I do today to make the world a better place, to leave it better than I found it? We can no longer afford to renege on the huge burden we must shoulder. The truth is that the world we were born into has failed us. We never asked for such a damaged ecological and political system, with tree-less landscapes, over-mined terrain, human rights violations, and a refugee crisis whose extent is still unfathomable. These are not our wars, and yet, we have been its victims. As the world witnesses a resurgence of conservatism, fascism, racism and misogyny, we must make it our mission to do what we can to repel their lure. A better, more humane and just world has to still be possible, if only we can bring ourselves to imagine it.

Deliberating on the life and times of Everywoman, Rosalyn D'Mello is a reputed art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx. Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com