The Anthropologists

Life and Death All this time, we were waiting. For the news of some momentous change; that we were being summoned to serve in real life; that the time for playing games was over. We lived with the abstract shape of the news, informing us that it had arrived. We lived with the imaginary shock. Maybe, I thought, it would also be a relief: Here it was

All the months that I had been filming, I’d thought that there were so many ways of living, of inhabiting the park. I wanted to know as many configurations as possible, all the strange and unique ways. But lately, as I went over the scenes again and again, smoothing their edges, positioning them into a fluid conversation, I’d begun to understand th

I retained only bits of information from his retellings, not because I wasn’t interested, but because I felt assured that he was learning these things for both of us and that I could consult him whenever I wanted, like certain books I wished to have in our library, even if I didn’t intend to read them, because they provided comfort in their silent

This was one reason for Manu’s calm optimism, because he was constantly immersed in narratives of creation and collapse, centuries condensed to the span of forty-five minutes, from which he emerged, taking off his headphones, a little transformed, back in the present world, which was no more or less strange than the one he’d just traveled to.

My mother and grandmother were always telling me to focus on my own life. I agreed with them, but I didn’t quite know where my life began and how far it extended. I didn’t want to risk cutting off any vital parts.

On my way out of the apartment, I put on a pair of impractical yellow shoes to match my top. Impracticality was its own type of festivity.

It was a shock to be reminded of my youth, which I had recently abandoned. It seemed to belong to another time, when the future happened on its own rather than being shaped by our efforts.

There were tragedies of the highest order that upended ordinary life, the ones that ushered in deviations of kindness. Then there was life itself, at every turn a devastation, which nevertheless did nothing to stall its flow.

In Tereza’s presence, the world seemed less urgent. The poems cleared out spaces in us and filled us with their shapes. Sitting around the table, I felt that we should try and live like this, reassembling the world in poetry, where things were a little lopsided.