the social science of gossip

long after i’m dead & buried, if my girl shows up at my grave & says the words, “i’ve got tea.” i’ve got a hunch i’ll lift from the mud & say, “tell me everything. now.”

“you know what happened today?” it seems. girl i’ve been WAITING to know. & don't spare a single detail. every tangent is a detour for us to hold hands & skip along. & along the way, every theory we make to explain why they did that or how they could say that or what that even means will become a hypothesis in our heads for us to keep testing over the next few weeks in every social interaction & report back to each other about. meet the social science of gossip. it's literally world building.

what makes it better than traditional science is that every theory remains enmeshed in the context that birthed it. how so? good old intention. as she tells me the story, i can usually begin to guess why she's telling me the story. i know the kind of things she tends to notice about people, what she finds cute, what gives her an ick. similarly, i can also guess why she wants to tell me about it. because she knows what i would find interesting, what i would find outrageous, etc. & so, every theory remains grounded in the theorist. not simply what they want to prove, but why they want to prove it.

& so, gossip becomes a very special kind of intimacy. what is an exchange of stories on the surface has a powerful undercurrent of desire to get to know the other. soon, we meet recurring characters, & *gasp* the plot twists, & wait, was that a foreshadow? until the space where our conversation lives becomes a whole world that we have built. the scaffolding of our words becomes a home for us to inhabit & an interpretation of our own lives that we can trust.

personally, i don't call gossip that is just a stating of facts gossip. it's not really gossip until you deconstruct the whole thing together, until you wonder what you would do in each actor’s place, until it becomes a science, basically. without that, it's just a value judgement. it ends up a tool for exclusion & surveillance. it is also usually a sign that the gossiper is just using the gossip to distract themselves from the boredom of their own lives instead of truly examining their own feelings about the story they're telling. but sometimes, that's also because they don't have the space to honestly discuss their feelings.

i spent last weekend in an airbnb with my grandmother & her sisters. they were five until a few years ago, when the youngest passed. fuck cancer. but the daughter of the youngest, my coolest aunt, makes sure the four take a break from their lives to come together whenever she's in kerala. this time, they took me along as the designated photographer, for a staycation a few hours drive away from my nani’s house. as soon as my nani’s sisters started arriving, the stories started bursting out of them, everything they had been happened since they all last met. my aunt was thrilled. this was the real reason she had called the assembly. she needed all the tea. the taxi that was going to take us hadn't arrived yet but they all decided to save the stories for when we got to the airbnb, everyone rushing to shut the other up if they accidentally started telling a story unable to contain the excitement.

when we reached the airbnb, they started from the beginning. five girls living on the shore of the arabian sea. their father who would stitch fishing nets in the summers when the water was too hot to fish. their mother who would grate coconuts for money & feed all the hungry kids on the shore. and many many stories came tumbling out, the story of my nani being married off to delhi at the age of 17 where she completed her studies & worked for years, which they considered the root cause of being able to afford the airbnb we were sitting in today. the oldest one was married off at 13. & so on & so on, until the scene was set. then one by one we went, from the oldest nani to the youngest, detailing everything noteworthy to happen with each daughter-in-law & son-in-law over the last few months.

when i say i learnt more about love, living, & life in those few hours than i have in years of reading books about sociology & anthropology & whatnot, i mean literally that. halfway through, we went out for a walk & they sat around the pool, continuing to talk, while i swam about & pretended to be a fish. when we got back, we talked & teared up & laughed late into the night, & eventually, all of them breaking out into old songs that floated up in their memory, until we crawled into the beds one by one & fell asleep.

so many stories they shared were about feelings of hurt they were carrying. small things, moments where someone did not consider them, where they felt unseen. telling those stories to people who wanted to listen & feeling something akin to solidarity in those moments was all they needed.

& there, lies the transformative power of gossip. the act of gossiping itself. the quiet way that sometimes stories become more real when you tell them. & how you feel a little less alone when your own interpretation of events is given the right to be the truth. & somehow it feels, for a moment, like life didn't just happen to you, but that it mattered that you were there.