Our second guest post is from Pooja Pande. Pooja Pande is a writer and media practitioner living in Delhi, India. Her latest book, Momspeak (Penguin Randomhouse, 2020) is a feminist interrogation of the idea of motherhood and mothers in desi culture. Pooja and Mehrunnisa are virtual friends. They got to know each other when Pooja edited Mehrunnisa’s essays on ‘Bread, Butter, Books’ (Volume 17) and 'Modern Nomads and Static Postcodes’ (Volume 20) of Papercuts Magazine.
It was as the rain was beating down on her, splashing about in the pool, that my daughter, on the verge of turning 10, discovered the difference between a “girl friend” and a “girlfriend”.
“It’s all about the space”, she educated me later on, “between girl and friend”. I tried not to chuckle, snigger, as her cousin, with a whole wise decade on her, who’d been swimming in the pool with her, taking short breaks to answer his chatterbox cousin’s unceasing barrage of questions, tried not to snigger either, unsuccessfully. My daughter went on, the girl uninterrupted that she is, “Just the space changes all meaning, Mamma!”, she said, “Just the space between those two words!”.
She was genuinely struck by this discovery, but like all precious hindsight moments, I didn’t get it then.
Those lovely pool days were the last trip overseas that we took – a family holiday to Singapore in Jan 2020 – but I’d never have thought that those words from the mouth o’ my babe, would come back to mean so much, in just about 3 months into the year she was turning 10.
Because S P A C E has come to mean a lot to me, to the world, since.
In 2020, with the onset of the pandemic and the lockdowns, we all struggled with the space we suddenly had to share 24-7, with those we loved. Or thought we loved? Were meant to love? Does the sharing of space change how we perceive even, love? Unarguably, those who cannot practice social distancing living in tiny shanties, would agree. Or would they?
Did I even deserve to think about space in this way, living as I was in a home that wasn’t exactly cramped? Privileged, entitled S P A C E in a country that was watching its most vulnerable unravel and die, on crowded train platforms, bus depots, railway tracks.
On our best days, we went about creating our own little bubbles of space, didn’t we? We also tried to respect them. I do my yoga here. You play your imaginary games over there. I work and Zoom here. You craft your daydreams elsewhere. Please. Give me S P A C E. I heard what my daughter never articulated either, because as a parent, as a mother, you’re also tuned into that 24-7. Out of sight, out of mind seldom works at least for me – I have thought about her, like a constant bittersweet ache, even when we’ve had the S P A C E of hundreds of kilometres between us, in separate time zones. And now of course, she’s never out of sight. I never have my space. And she longed for it too I know, S P A C E.
Notions of S P A C E began to change for me though as 2020 spiralled on, as I learnt so much, without always realizing it. That sometimes you never intended for the space to become the norm – in a relationship with someone else, in a relationship with your self too, because you can also grow distant from your own self after all – and maybe that can change. As we went about distinguishing between needs and wants, I also stumbled upon the nuances of differences between needing S P A C E and wanting it. The greys that exist therein.
The sky spoke to me suddenly. That ultimate embodiment of S P A C E, you could say. In suburban Delhi, we had a spate of beautiful, clear skies as we went about trapped in our minds, just assuming we don’t have space, and I remember my mind opening up, each time I bothered to look up at them. This was pure MINDSPACE, and hell, it was free. You didn’t need an app, you didn’t need nothing, but the eyes you were blessed enough to be born with.
2021 began on a false sense of hope, even that is a thought I know from hindsight alone. As the worst of the crisis engulfs us all here in India, as I now find myself more tuned into the meta awareness of life, my feelings, my relationships, my work, my writing, I’m also finding the space that my now 11-year-old had inadvertently mentioned then, post her exciting heart-to-heart with her older, cooler brother, who apparently, has many girl friends, but only one girlfriend.
I’m finding that there is S P A C E for more love and joy, that I can make S P A C E for more.
If I close my eyes and imagine the skies, I’m almost home.
The same one where I’ve been since 2020.
But somehow, it feels more spacious.
I love this.