untouchable

i’ve always thought untouchability sounds like a name an incel came up with. touch is hardly the most humanising experience there is. the most humanising experience is probably that of being considered.

but perhaps there could be a more poetic, generous, even philosophical definition of touch. to be touched is to be changed. the vibrations of your words touch my eardrums. light touches image. touch makes sense. but i’m still skeptical.

i think you can smell my caste on me. my seaweed roots. i am a girl on my mother's side, a boy on my father's side, and non-binary everywhere else. mukayar, mukkuvan and dheevara, when allied. i am the ‘new money’ nuclear family you speak of, dubai’s favourite slaves, not well versed in your grammars and tradition. so my neurodivergence, my queerness, are all very informed by my caste, my roots. even in your bedroom.

the first time i phone called uditi was with an urgent question- is sex public? unfazed, laughing, she affirmed- yes, sex is always public. we carry everything to the bed.

“you want me in a way that you have no plan for it” she said.

i never have. and it's not some arduous process of doubting and introspection that brought me to my self. i’m not de-conditioned, no one is. everyone is just differently conditioned. this is just how those with no Gods, no higher power on their side, have always navigated the world.

intercaste sex is fucking hot. i get Ambedkar’s assimilationist inter-marriage, inter-dining project now. again, little incely priorities, but the truth is, what he achieved, he achieved with so-called ‘identity politics’- the mobilisation of a will of the people that only happens at the moment of recognising a shared experience, a consciousness.

but intercaste sex is only hot if you understand consent. not as something you expect from another person, but as something you try to actively read for. actice consideration about the comfort. otherwise you're abusing your power, your command over language, your righteous, ancestral privilege and entitlement to space.

and your desire is loud. and it's never for me, it's for a dream. a dream i know too well. love meant very different things to my parents, to my grandparents, to anyone at the mercy of the sea, to a man in a wooden boat in the Arabian Sea, looking for fish to bring home, to his boy waiting at home.

so mukkuvar might be backward and not scheduled, but personally, i am untouchable, it's called consent. read me, it's a challenge.