“Hello. My Name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.”
The murder of a parent or parents is a often catalyst event for a protagonist to seek revenge. The death of Mr. and Mrs. Wayne turned Bruce into Batman. The death of Uncle Ben turned Peter Parker into Spiderman. In the Iron Man movies, the death of Yinsen provided that sort of thrust – and later on we also see how the murder of Mr & Mrs Stark had a part to play in his character development. I distinctly remember there were times when I was an edgy teenager that I thought maybe it would be kinda cool to have something like that – something dramatic and dark to serve as a sort of narrative propulsion.
I never imagined that I would actually find out anything about myself that would make me feel anything of the sort. After all, I was a middle-class guy living in a pretty prosperous city. The world didn’t particularly “need” me. I remember watching Eve Ensler’s TED talk about her journey with The Vagina Monologues – about how she was abused by her father, and fantasized about being rescued – and how 40+ years later, when she was in Kenya, learning about the efforts to stop female genital mutilation in Africa, she felt that she had finally been healed, rescued, saved. “When we give in the world what we want the most,” she said, “we heal the broken part inside each of us.”
I referenced Eve’s quote in an essay I wrote about passion, about how passion is really about suffering, and it’s about what you choose to suffer for. At the time that I wrote it (2015), I felt that the way in which I was broken was that I was a misfit. And it’s interesting to sit here now in 2018 and to re-examine that state of mind, that experience, that feeling, which was very real, and see how incomplete that picture was. (And to know that surely, even now as my picture is clearer and more “full”, it must be incomplete relative to what my future self’s understanding might be).
In April this year, 2018, I read about a murder in Udumalaipettai, Tiripur, India. This murder had taken place in March of 2016 – 5 men with knives attacked a young couple in broad daylight – Shankar and Kaushalya – and they hacked Shankar to death. Why? Caste. Kaushalya is from the Kallar caste, and Shankar was from the Pallar caste.
My parents have the exact same caste makeup as Shankar and Kaushalya did. When Kaushalya’s father said “bearing the child of a Pallar in a Kallar womb is blasphemous, don’t you know that?” – he was talking about kids like me. As the men hacked Shankar to death, they were shouting, “How dare you love, you Pallar son-of-a-bitch?” Kaushalya was subsequently abused and beaten by her own family.
This isn’t an isolated incident. Last month, 24-year-old Pranay Perumalla was murdered for marrying Amrutha, a higher-caste woman. His aunt believes that her family was driven to murder him after seeing their wedding video on Facebook.
It’s an interesting feeling. To realize that there are people living on this Earth who think that you are an abomination just for existing. That your father should be hacked to death, that your mother should be beaten, that she should drink poison and kill herself.
A little searching around, a little reading, and I discover that of course caste violence and discrimination is deep-rooted in India, the way sexism and racism is pretty much everybody else. And yet… hardly anybody talks about it in Singapore, where I live. A search for “dalit” on my Facebook and I find that a vanishingly small number of my friends have ever mentioned it, mostly the activists.
I have a lot of reading to do about this. A lot of learning to do. There is something very wrong about the world of caste discrimination, of internalized racism, of bigotry and conflict.
I hit the gym before I started this word vomit. I’ve not really been feeling much motivation to work out in a few months. But earlier today, something clicked for me with everything I’ve been reading, and the conversations that I’ve been having. I have a great struggle ahead of me. And for the first time, I think, it’s not somebody else’s struggle. I’m not an ally fighting on behalf of somebody else. I’m fighting for me, and the people who came before me, and the kids who are coming after me. I’m not saying “I imagine it must be rough…” – I know what this is like, to be me. I’ve felt it. I know what it’s like to know that people would murder your parents if they could.
And so… I have a reason now, in a way. I always had some semblance of a reason, I think. This vague general sense of being a misfit. But now there’s something more concrete here. There’s something with real stakes, real blood and guts – and now when I say “blood and guts” I’m not being metaphorical anymore. This is real.
I feel like I had some stronger feelings when I started this vomit and now that I’m here I just feel a little tired. I should wrap it up and go to bed. This is not a dramatic keynote or some bold statement… it’s just me experimenting with this idea that this is something I think I should be using as rocket fuel. It’s something I want to understand, it’s something I want to make a difference to. In my present state I know I might not be using all the right words, it might not be clever PR or a smart move or whatever – but I don’t care I’m just doing this anyway and I’ll figure the rest out later. The point is – there are real problems in the world, and I’ve found one that cuts through my own heart. That gives me a frame of reference unlike any other, and I really want to do something about this.