Object Permanence 3: Wall

Preeta Samarasan with FED's Fall installment of Object Permanence

As FED is a grand experiment—just like all my art and life efforts—I am thrilled that Preeta took me up on the offer to experiment, that the Object Permanence series emerged for FED as a deviation from her normal writing practice, while still being solidly fueled by it and by the course of her life with its passions and preoccupations, incidents and coincidences.

I love that when I read this piece, I can experience it with a knowing of Preeta and her work, accrued over a couple decades now. Given my own pleasure in this, I can’t help but encourage you to check out all the many other ways she shows up in the world—novels, Instagram, Facebook, Millicent’s Substack, and, if you’re lucky to be her friend, then also in-person at points spanning several continents—so that you, too, can begin to access and fully appreciate all the nuanced layers here. But, as with the entire FED table, you don’t need all that nuance to dig in. We put it on the table for you to enjoy however you like.

For me, I got charmed by “itchified,” and then stuck on it… how cruel and lonely the world can be when we are assigned intentions not our own, when we are demonized and scapegoated for insufficiencies in the eye of the beholder, when something as delightful as being itchified, which I’ll define for the purposes of argument as tingled to passion and possibility, can be corrupted by smallness, turned dirty and shameful, used as a weapon to wall (usually) women into some spot of controllable darkness. This taste lingers.

This way I taste the dish need not be yours. It’s wholly a reflection of my own sense and sensibilities, generally and in this moment. I encourage you to notice your own. And, to share them with us in the comments if you dare. The problem with influencers and tastemakers, is that they somehow achieve constriction rather than bounty by walling us into their perspective, when our own is right there for the noticing. The dish is all the more exquisite for what you bring to your tasting of it.

Before I place it before you for your first tantalizing bite, a word about the structure. We live in a time when writing is no longer achieved with words alone. Enter format, device, and platform and the need to wrangle them all to intended effect. Hence all the irregularities of format, punctuation, and yes, the screaming ALL CAPS laid out for you to approximate texts. This voice is texting.

Preeta had first to “write” the piece, and then, we had to figure out how to achieve it for publication, with this fact in mind. I truly wish that I’d had the wherewithal to design the piece as texts for you. This would have been the perfect environment for that. So, imagine that I did…

…and then consider that the prior installments of the Object Permanence series name and claim the author of the voice. A curious omission here, where the object not the author is foregrounded, somehow compelling me into the voice as I search for her identity in a series of texts sent ostensibly to me as the reader receiving them, and about whom I’m far less interested. I want to leap outside myself to know this voice, and in so doing, maybe shine a little light on my own knowing. May it shine a little light on yours.

Big love, Ashley

P.S. With our Fall issue, we open wide the doors for everyone to contribute to a FED Friendsgiving, and I genuinely hope that you will share your taste of home with us. The table awaits…

Send a recipe, an anecdote, and/or a favorite food plus an image.

We’ll pull everything that arrives together and serve it up as FED dishes throughout the season. Yum!

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Wall

I don’t think so i should. tell you. the whole dreadful story...but my great. husband put up the side wall after a fight with the backside NEIGHBOUR. Now you will ask what does a wall on the RIGHT side of the house do for a fight with the backside. I also asked the same question don’t worry. The short answer is that after the backside house built their wall he. had to go and show that he also could build a wall...that’s about all. in the first place their wall was hardly high enough to block their view. Anyone at their window could see right over it. Simply making a statement, that’s why they built it. I told him, In that case why don’t you show them that anything. they can build you can build higher? I sang it for him with the tune and everything. He said NOT FUNNY. Then

sure enough he took. the easy way out. To build a higher wall he would have had to be less of a lazy bugger...or pay some less lazy bugger. Both also cannot. So, simply stack up a few bricks until he got bored, like playing Lego like that. Actually even Lego can be better than this.

You see I used to

hang up the washing just in front of the wall. BEFORE there was a wall itself I was hanging up the washing there...One fine day there came a peeping tom. Not that I was hanging. Up the washing. Naked. I would be in my usual home clothes. Blouse and sarong or something of that sort. But SOMEHOW the story got around that I was taking my sweet time hanging up the clothes so. that I could stand there making eyes at other people’s hubands. The backside house lady who was one fat old Ceylonese maami went around telling people I was itchified because I had nothing better to do it seems. Wah the whole thing turned into one big bloody drama I tell you. but I promised I won’t subject you to the whole sordid story. You know what she used to say to the other neighbours? You know these housewives. Because SHE had a well-paying job what. Graduate teacher and all that. I felt like telling her You think anybody wants your lumpy husband ah.

it is NOT nice to make fun of people’s looks. Actually I’ll never do that…but in my anger I looked at him and thought Chi! Bald and oily and lumpy and the nostril hairs so long that they one-shot merged with the moustache. Honestly I don’t

know from where she got the idea. Her husband had no interest in me and I had no interest in him. Only once in a while if the newspaper boy came while. I was hanging up the washing then I used to stand at the fence and talk to him. But she would not even have. been at home while we were chit-chatting. She would have been at her school. If I’m not mistaken she should even. have been promoted to headmistress but last minute got cheated out of her promotion because you know lah this country. Ceylonese also sometimes they’ll end up standing there watching like fools while everything is handed out to the Malays...and when that happens then in their anger they will step even harder on the rest of us ordinary Tamils. Must be in her KADUPPU after not getting the promotion she cooked up this story about me eyeing other people’s husbands while hanging up the washing. it seems

To tell

you the truth by that point I had given up on men. the person who was happily making eyes left right and centre was, not me it was my great husband. So what I said to myself. As long as he leaves me alone at home because I had had it with babies, four was more than enough for me. If he was satisfying. himself elsewhere then so much the better. How grandly he

talked during our courting days. In fact you see that high window next to the water pipe? It was supposed to be for the servants’ toilet it seems. What-what plans he made. Servants’ toilet lah study room lah vegetable plot lah. We’ll extend the inner kitchen...and put a roof over the outer kitchen he said. In the end all he did was build two useless bloody walls. The servants’ toilet became nothing but a breeding ground for cicaks.

For some funny reason I once mentioned it to the newspaper boy while we were yakking away. My great husband had great plans, I said. When I said servants’ toilet he latched onto it and at once said, now why is it that servants need a separate toilet. Can you believe I had never thought about it before. I said hmm cleanliness reasons isn’t it...Then he said Oh is that right, do rich people have cleaner backsides than poor people. When I said it wasn’t about rich or poor he said without batting an eyelid, Oh, high-caste backsides are cleaner than low-caste backsides lah in that case. We laughed and laughed. just standing there at the fence like that. Laughed so hard until I had to hold on to the fence for support. It was funny but in a way it wasn’t funny. That’s what I always enjoyed about our conversations. You could laugh like mad but there would always be something to make you think also. I mean except for those times when he would come out with some pure comedy lah. Such as when he posed like a cowboy like that full of. swagger. Is that the right word.

Anyway like a cowboy he said If you were younger or I were older I myself would have married you, hahaha I tell you. we. really laughed like two coots until some neighbours even peeped through their curtains to see what on earth was happening...Nothing philosophical there...just a grand joke...But when he said that about

the high-caste and low-caste backsides, that did make me think. And after that I didn’t care so much about the servants’ toilet being signed over to the cicaks.

you must be thinking Tsk ok lah he was just a newspaper boy what, why is she talking like as though he was some professor. Just a newspaper boy but he had read quite a lot of books you know. On his own like that. He was the type who was interested in everything. Something or other he’ll see in the newspaper...and then he’ll go and look it up and find out all about it. And always thinking thinking thinking. In my time I could be like that too. Not like my great husband, feed him water him burp him, finish, he’ll sit. there in front of the TV happy as a toad. Not one original thought ever bubbled up out of that man. I suppose that’s why I was often so bored even while my hands and feet never had a moment’s rest with all the housework. Downstairs was busy, upstairs was gathering dust, you know? Always had that feeling like I was searching for something more but I could never find it.

One doesn’t want to be melodramatic. I can’t say I was TRAPPED by these walls or anything of the sort (even though there was another wall on the left that you can’t see in the photo), haha it would be a joke, look again at the height of them, I could even have climbed over. Not that I needed to. As long as. the housework was done. and there was food on the table

my husband didn’t care where I went. I could walk out of the front GATE straight to the bus stop, take bus, taxi, those days taxi to town was two ringgit. I used to go and do a bit of shopping...buy some material to give the tailor for a new dress then have a bowl of noodles in some simple eating place and come back home. No cage for me. The cage was just inside the head. Looking at the angle of the photo it does make that window look so high though and if

you didn’t know that it was...destined to be a servants’ toilet but did not even make it that far then you might think wah like Rapunzel like that. But you’d be wrong. The wall was a feeling. Seeing my husband laying brick by brick with his pudgy back like an overstuffed leather sofa so shiny from the sweat. well somehow. I couldn’t help feeling he was bricking up my freedom. Now it

makes me laugh and I tell myself it was all nonsense. The man died like he lived, shaking legs under the ceiling fan. The Ceylonese maami and her lumpy husband also died. The daughter comes once a week to air out the house but otherwise it is sitting empty just like. my husband sat. Even the newspaper boy died believe it or not. Got married off like a good boy and...worked himself to the bone trying to provide for his wife and children in a country that hates Indians. Same old story. Dropped dead of a heart attack before he even turned sixty, poor fler. So now

it’s just me and the walls. Recently my son said let’s demolish that side wall. At least you’ll get a better view of the road. I said what for. As though a wall that high even blocks the sun. I put my small plastic chair in the middle of the back yard in the mornings and I sit there and enjoy the sun on my face. Thanks to the half-baked wall nobody needs to see me and I no need to see anybody.

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For more goodies…

For more from Preeta, be sure to check out Object Permanence 1 from FED’s Spring issue and Object Permanence 2 from our Summer issue. And, to learn more about FED’s entire global crew of musicians, artists, writers, growers, gleaners, cooks, and craftspeople check out our Special Guests and the wonderful contributions they have added to the FED table.