Dearest Curious Reader,
Fighting a tug of war with the self can be exhausting. What can I be, what can I not? What can I show, what do I even know? Queer selves have often found refuge within the subtext of straightness. It’s within this subtext that many a teen, twink and the ‘other’ have found their comforting expression.
Little Bhargav is going through this tussle himself, bearing the weight to be an ‘ideal child’ imagined by the adults around him while wanting to be himself. He doesn’t care much for subtext or the weight of expectations laid on him, what with him being all of seven years old! All he wants is to wear colourful bangles, like his friend, and dance during Navratri. Yet, all his father wants is to censor him and his grandmother wants nothing more than to protect him from this ‘self’ in the world.
“Certain things are meant only for girls, Bhargav,” said Ba.
Certainly, Ba underestimated the stubborn clarity with which young Bhargav could ask questions, throw arguments (and tantrums) and clutch onto his desire.
“Like what?” asked Bhargav.
“Let me see… like long hair, earrings, bangles, long dresses, wearing a bindi…”
Bhargav continues to wonder why something so beautiful to him must be hidden away. He unassumingly keeps asking the simplest questions about the world and the expression of his self within this world.
“But why?” interrupted Bhargav.
“Because… because… that’s just how it is,” stammered Ba, not able to find an answer.
The book, The Boy Who Wore Bangles by Riddhi Maniar Doda, illustrated by Shruti Hemani and published by Karadi Tales in 2023, gently breaks the subtext, allowing a little child’s desire for self-expression to exist in the open, much to his grandmother’s worry and his father’s dismay. What makes Bhargav’s story endearing is that the book does not treat his desire as a childish phase to outgrow or a problem to correct. The book refuses the idea that a normative childhood is only preparation for a “normal” future, a decidedly straight heteronormative future. Instead, it lets Bhargav inhabit desire and curiosity in the present.
If queer adults once searched for themselves within subtext, this book offers children (and adults!) something gentler and more direct: recognition without hiding. The story, for you dear reader, may offer a window into the kind of selfhood that is expansive and growing, without the subtleties we are often taught to embody. However, if you would still like to hold onto the comfort of subtext sometimes (I certainly do), there is space for that too.
While little Bhargav continues to dance in Navratri with his rainbow bangles, there is also comfort to be found in the queer-coded and wonderfully camp universe of Falguni Pathak songs that blares through the speakers in pols, chowks, mohallas and societies during Navratri.
Here are two songs, Meri Chunar Udd Udd Jaye and Chudi Jo Khanki Haathon Mein, for everyone who has ever understood that Navratri, and “very close female friendships”, have always carried a little more queerness than people like to admit. After all, Navratri was never meant to belong only to straight people.
Credits: Photo by Riya
