I would like to type this with my eyes closed or at least change Substack’s interface to have a black background, but I can’t figure it out, because my eyes are dry. My eyes are dry and I’m not exactly sure why. My eyes have been dry for some time, weeks/ a month / more? It’s one of those slowly creeping up on you body ailments. I’m prepared for any ailment to signify my end, is this because I’m a death doula? Because I’m dramatic? Because I’m prepared for death or afraid of death? All to say, I’ve taken a deep dive into what my eyes are telling me, both in the, will I die the way my father died, the eye disorder being some signifier of a brain disorder? And also spiritually what messages is this ailment here to teach me? Certainly scrolling on any electronic device is less desirable for my tired eyes. And that alone is a lesson. But also I must close my eyes for reprieve, I must lay down, take special care of what I eat and put on my body and face. I am dissecting my habits. I’m not sure if this is allergies because I don’t really have allergies, but I’m open to the notion that I’m changing. I have a doctor’s appointment tomorrow to start the process of understanding what Western medicine has to say about this. While in Mumbai, I went to an ayurvedic doctor and bathed my eyes in ghee, netra tarpana. I told people I met, no I’m not tired, I’m just having an eye thing. But perhaps I am tired. Very very tired.
Tired of scrolling. Tired of hot takes. Tired of compelling attractive people telling me over 3 minute video the exact perfect thing I need to hear at that exact moment1 to combat fears my deepest self can barely articulate. These videos tell me to dispel those desires I hold, they were programmed into me by way of all the -isms (and -archies) and that enlightenment and liberation is just around the corner. I oblige and follow the endless algorithm. It’s research, it’s one way to get a pHd in social theory on your own, it’s human nature, it’s not fluff, but rather a window into some version of ourselves.
I go to India and Tiktok is banned. I go to India and all the Tiktoks I have saved in my profile make no sense. I go to Mumbai and whatever I think and feel about the world is turned inside out, challenged. Mumbai and Jaipur and so many places in India remain unbothered. How else do I explain it but that way? It’s not to say change is not occurring at a speed that astonishes in cities like Mumbai, driven also by global capitalism, but with a billion Indian people, government just can’t control society like it does here. So something about our very nature becomes clear in India, the nature of who we would be if we were unencumbered by all systems we rail against. What is that nature? It’s of course not one thing, it’s not easy even, it’s grotesque, stunning, joy-filled, heartbreaking beyond all explanation. We are a hot beautiful fucking mess of a species.
Mumbai often feels like a time travel machine, things are still very old. Some of the ways of doing things in India have remained. Many things have changed. But some things feel like they never will. In Jaipur, a vedic astrologer spirit guide (she does and her ex-army husband found me gazing at the moon, monkeys and birds on the roof of our haveli hotel and she told me things. Things nobody that I know in my New York life would dare say to me because culturally it makes no sense here. She told me things that do not make for good Tiktoks. When she finishes, I am undone, because this is not my usual way. I usually suppress the things she talks about. My way is often forging ahead, making myself anew, building upon each new realization which often comes by way of heartbreak of societal or personal nature. My way is also paved with celebration, awe and joys, no doubt. Her way was instant connection to the parts of me that I often do not find space culturally to express so those parts remain unsaid out loud. There is time to say those things out loud in time, I don’t feel rushed here. It’s simply enough to have someone appear telling you that all that you are is enough, all that you desire will come to fruition. Whatever it means to determine whether “it comes true” or not, it was enough for someone to identify and deem my exact nature and desires worthy and possible.
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I need to remember to parent this way. There is no thing other than allowing your kids to desire and strive for all that moves them personally. Their desires will never be mine, not exactly. Just like my mother and I traversing worlds to understand the distance between ours.
I don’t know if I’m still jetlagged, it’s been a 6 days that I came back from India, but my sleep is irregular. My eyes bother me, I awake and start a new cycle in the middle of the night of hydration, gentle dim scrolling until it feels like self-harm, and meditating my way to sleep again next to child and dog. Tonite I wanted to write I guess about this time. But it’s always been middle of the night for me. For my dreams, and for dedicating myself to them. The night is the place for that. My eyes have always adjust best to the night.
I want to chat about adab, it’s a concept I was largely introduced to through Mana Kia’s book, Persianate Selves. This is a book I needed to read, that speaks about the culture of lands including pre-modern colonial borders Iran, India and regions to the West of India in a way that links us instead of separating us. It is so hard to speak in India about our Persian ancestors, history, and culture. Islamophobia has been in vogue for a long time now in the U.S., India and globally, we see the ultimate ugly truth of it in Gaza. Palestinians have made clear to all of us who the West deems to be discardable. Perhaps also who the West feels most threatened by.
To be from Mumbai, where my family is from, to be from the Western most coastal port city that was always a trade and communication hub across lands West of India and beyond, is to know our history as a people is filled with the influence of Persian culture from West, Central and South Asia, as well as African influences.
Adab is very broadly defined as the proper way of being, relating to others, and aesthetic style. But it’s a whole way of life. I won’t be able to do it justice here, I will only try my best to give you a taste.
This cultural idiom was adab, which Kia defines as the “proper forms of aesthetic style and ethical conduct” (p. 9). Persians acquired adab through education in a basic set of ethical, literary, and “commemorative” texts that included poetry, history, travel accounts, autobiographies, biographical compendia, and others. Through adab, Persians grasped and expressed their connections to place and origin, self and community, in ways that were multiple and “aporetic,” which is to say, based on distinctions and oppositions whose terms were negotiable and their boundaries permeable.2
One way of thinking about adab is a way of being and learning that prioritizes our actions over simply words.
For certain things to come into being, they had to be enacted in the world. Here, for learning to truly exist, you needed to act according to it, to show it in the appropriate way. Otherwise, as Sa‘di explains, you were in fact ignorant, and your learning in vain. Learning didn’t exist separately from its expression. This was a matter of ontological being, before its moral and aesthetic status.3
But truly Kia’s book is necessary in this current moment we find ourselves, chained to nation states, being held complicit in the evils of an empire, struggling to understand how we got here, who our actual kin are. Truly the pain of Palestinian people feels so personal to so many of us, this pain insists that our connections to each other go far beyond a series of circumstances that says I am American because I was born on a plot of land that was cut and drawn up with blood by a group of mostly white men a few hundred years ago. This is not how true connection is formed. Adab is one way of understanding that we were once connected to each other beyond anything remotely close to nation state, kingdom, or race even. It was our actions, our language and our way of being.
Over the course of seven chapters, Kia argues that Persian ethnicity was not only based on blood and lineage, nor were “native” Persian speakers the only people considered to be Persian. A Persian could be anyone in the vast cultural cosmopolis stretching from the Balkans to Bengal who was associated with a set of embedded forms, acquired and circulated transregionally, in which Persian operated as a shared language. She tells us that premodern authors did not use a single term in reference to writers and speakers of Persian (e.g., Tājīk, ʿAjam, Qizilbāsh) and that these terms were not free-standing, but were bound to specific contexts.
One day in Jaipur my friend and I drove out of the busy hustle of the city to the quiet outskirts to visit a family-run hotel that my mother had randomly found on google and sent to me. We were staying elsewhere but this spot had a pool and it was terribly hot so we reached out to see if we could hang by the pool one hot afternoon. We drove about 40 minutes and found a family’s ancestral home lovingly turned into cozy hotel. There were no guests staying at the hotel this week, because the home was returned to hosting its own family members for the Holi week holiday. It was quiet, and we were the only ones at the pool-side, barely seeing any other humans. Even though we most certainly were not family, we were welcomed as if we were. We were told we needed no payment for our swim or use of the room for changing and washroom, only to tip the staff well if we could. We were fed a delicious lunch and enjoyed a conversation with the husband and one of the owners of the establishment. He had been napping when we arrived, with his grandchild at his feet, but when we arrived he welcomed us, sat and chatted for at least 20 minutes and apologized for not being able to host us longer, while we apologized for waking him from his family holiday nap.
I asked him about his understanding of the term adab. He lit up and commenced describing a way of greeting people, a way of welcoming people, a hand gesture, but you could tell he was just getting started, that this conversation could have spanned days, because it was not just one thing. It’s a way of life. He was happy to engage in this discussion with us. Looking back now, I wonder if it is because he embodies the concept. The real way to describe what adab is, is perhaps not really through language at all, but only through the doing, which is what we experienced at Savista Retreat.
Adab feels like a way of meeting and interacting with people despite on the surface perhaps having very little in common with them. We sit, eat and drink together and take our time in our knowing of each other. We become more than strangers, perhaps more than friends even in the time that we take together. When we leave each other we are embedded forever onto each others memories. Our actions become beautiful because we know how much they matter in this dance of connection. We could never harm one another because we are bound somehow in the rules of ethics and aesthetics that we find beyond pleasing. It is how we treat each other, our children, our friends. The importance of a meal shared of the time taken when a visitor arrives.
When we left, we did not see any of the owners, and did not want to bother them on their family holiday. We quietly changed and retrieved our things from the room that had been generously opened to us, took in the quiet nature of the surroundings and made our way down the steps to the car. As we were almost to the car, the owner walked out towards us with his small 5-year old grandson not wanting to miss the opportunity to say goodbye. He told the child my name was Resham Auntie and I smiled to a shy child comforted by the worldly loving confidence of a kind grandfather. We said goodbye and thank you.
The mind-blowing thing about India is that this kind of hospitality, this kind of adab is everywhere. It is not rare. It is a way of life. Another way of making family.
If you enjoy reading this newsletter and want to support my work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. In gratitude, Resham.
fucking algorithms
https://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/alireza_doostdar_reviews_persianate_selves/
https://psyche.co/ideas/persianate-adab-involves-far-more-than-elegant-manners