An Invitation

I was raised, like most children, grazing on the wet-scaled, lily-draped underbelly of classroom politics. I was sent to a K-12 school with 600 children. We all knew each other — recognized each others’ mothers' fashion on our little claymade knees and necks — and would know each other for at least 13 years after the first day of school. In our first years, we sat in assigned groups around brightly painted wooden tables and learned when you write a letter, the recipient's address goes smack in the middle of the envelope and yours goes in a small corner on the left. (I still expect letters in the mail, lovingly stamped, but no one writes me.) We learned fractions and were introduced to the nematodes and mollusks — on which my father quizzed me with an iron voice in the mornings before school — and memorized each other's birthdays; and that was when the polity was introduced to politics.

Oh, the birthdays — such bloodthirsty, gift-hungry, worrisome affairs. Until we were 13, everyone was welcome. No conscientious mother would rob her child's classmate of an invitation for fear of retribution. Our parties were a youthful bacchanalia, no sobriety in the room — save the rueful tired-gray smoke that draped the chaperones' faces. There were streamers and magicians and bouncy houses and return gifts — little bags with chocolates and maybe, if the birthday boy or girl was rich, a Spiderman action figure or a monster truck or — god forbid — a pencil case. Some parents dared to take us to swimming pools, where we all urinated freely, as if bathrooms could never quite be enough. We forced each other under until one of us cried or swam away, lurking in the deep end until the anger had passed. We raced and cannonballed, and the children on the margins — the children that could not swim as well or did not play with us at recess — still made it in, crossed the city walls before nightfall.

And then, suddenly, at 13, the parents left us to our own devices, and the invitations grew scarce, shriveled like raisins. I was invited to some things — not all, never all — at first. I smuggled abandoned friends, hidden in pockets and backpacks, across gates with me; they smuggled me. “We carpooled. I couldn’t get here without his car,” and other feeble pleas. At these parties, groups would form naturally; a clique here, a clique there. Each made their own pathetic celebrations of gossip and rumors — the stuff of teenage heartbreak; we were dusty corners in banquet halls and floating ants in swimming pools, and sometimes, disco balls hung precariously from a peeling ceiling.

For a playwriting class this semester, I was asked to consider invitations. Who, or what, do I want to invite to the theatre? Who is invited to occupy space on the stage? Who is welcome and whom will I turn away? In answering these questions, I keep returning to my K-12 school and the politics around invitations — to that clawing, youthful discomfort which has since matured into something more ominous. That discomfort now rears its ugly head at the alienness of being here, away from my homeland. Here, in the melting pot, the uninvited — the uninitiated, the immigrants — stick to the sides of this cauldron like cheap copper. Some of us are luckier than others — we live easier lives studying at top-tier universities and find security through other means; but what of those hundreds of thousands who are welcomed to minimum wage jobs with open arms, but little else? What of the people at home, who have been painted in one, assuming Western shade, in hues of third-worldness and nothing more?

Who do I invite to occupy space in the theater?

Today, I invite to exclude as much as to welcome. We have all been othered, marginalized somehow, but that is not to say that all that othering is the same, or equal. Definitively, I can say: It is not. My youthful politics is a mild form of the childhood violence that twisted my ears and pinched my arms, but is incomparable to the violence, physical and emotional, inflicted upon others like me. I write for, and about, India, people of color, and the immigrant community, many of whom are not so lucky to have access to a theatrical platform. I want them to feel like I have painstakingly built a nest, twig by twig by twig, for their little winged bodies. For the rest, I want them to know that pain and discomfort exist in shades bloodier than they may have known. That is my invitation to you: Swallow the pain of being unwelcome so that you may never say, "I did not know," so that you may lend a hand of support to the uninvited and welcome them to a history that has left them on the margins.

— Contributing writer Yash Kumbhat’s column, “Portrait of a Time” is a personal essay column that discusses representation of home and identity in art through narratives from a Kolkatan perspective.