Be we dragons flying on mighty wings or pangolins curled up in a ball, our fantasies are our personal ‘playgrounds in the head’. Our space to play with ideas safely. In fantasy, we can explore breaking social convention (and even our mostly dearly held values), imagine other ways of being and feeling, and become, even if only for a few moments, someone quite other than ourselves. Still, we sometimes feel confused about our fantasies, especially our sexual fantasies. Vithika Yadav walks us away from shame and emphasises that we owe ourselves the space to consider, without judgement, what our fantasies evoke. In so doing we can find within ourselves the agency to understand our desires, set boundaries, and treat others and ourselves with care.
Fantasies are intensely and uniquely personal. They may be sparked off by what we read, see, or hear, or quite simply be conjured up by mysterious processes in our mind. They take us into other worlds. As a young girl, Chitrangi Kakoti was often lost in the world of books and stories. Her fascination with the strange and enchanting (its adult version being feminist and queer fantasy) persists, leading Chitrangi to “refusing to accept that the world, as it is, exhausts what is possible”, and to search instead for other ways of living and loving.
For Rituparna Borah, in an impatient, messy, transactional, capitalist world it is K-dramas that offer a portal to “a universe where longing and fantasy have direction.” K-dramas are characterised by slow burn – lingering looks, anticipation. Against the seeming impossibility of love, it is waiting that is rewarded. Writing about the vagaries of her personal fantasy-scapes, Taarina Therese Chandiramani reveals that her fantasies are not so much about people as they are about arrangements, about creating the conditions in which wanting them feels inevitable. Another kind of waiting, in a way.
In our fantasies we create and participate in other worlds. Nonx, a Twilight movies fan in her early teens, used to write her own form of fanfic, her fantasy notes or smutty diaries, as she calls them. Revisiting her fantasy notes “as memoirs of becoming”, Nonx finds in them an articulation towards healing, and “a map of my sexuality” as the person she is now. Mourning a time and a world lost, Shirish Khare (originally writing in Hindi, and then on our request, in English too) takes us to the traditional wedding songs, “gaari”, sung by women on the banks of the river Sindoori. Songs of ribaldry and playful teasing, they allowed women a sliver of space to laugh, dream and speak of things they could not otherwise. Today, the river has receded and so have the songs. Sometimes there’s not even that sliver of space for some people. Prarthana Pai talks about how people with disabilities, being viewed either as objects of pity or as inspiration porn in our society, popular culture, social media and dating sites, seem to have been “written out of the collective fantasy of desire itself.”
What are stories if not fantasies transcribed? In Tejal K’s story, two friends write letters to each other, over the years. Layer by layer they discover where the mind leads. Fantasy reveals itself to be the source of their truest selves – the place where the ravine opens up into the wilderness. In Garima’s story we are a fly on the wall. X asks B, “So, tell me, what are some of your fantasies?” B claims to not fantasise all that much, but has “sexual curiosities”. Read on to see how this turns out, and maybe by the end of it you will be as breathless as B.
In Hindi, we bring you Shirish Khare’s original article also published in this issue in English, on the lost, naughty and playfully teasing, “gaari” wedding songs sung by women along the banks of the Sindoori river. That now gone tiny corner of freedom that breathed within a larger field of confinement. Imran Khan writes about the power of imagination and of ideas. Because we inhabit a realm of possibilities, Imran encourages us to ask “what if?” and move into action from the response to that question to create better services, conditions and even entire worlds that do not yet exist.
Go frolic.
Cover image by Kym MacKinnon on Unsplash
