when is a door

when is a door into the past, when is a door into uncertainty, when is a door not a door...

- Neil Gaiman

And somehow I keep learning over and again that stories are not created in vacuum - that while they are not recognisable within my world, and thus are completely perfect escapism for me - both for better and for worse - they are built in someone else's world. 

and neil gaiman and george saunders could not write the stories that exist in my world because they know nothing about that world. that nora k jamisen and trevor noah come closer to my world than either of them, but more than anything they can show what a story that doesn't look out of the eyes straight white men looks like... eyes to which so much is invisible, eyes to which the most commonplace is exotic and other worldly, to which a weird and convoluted logic is natural. and not just in stories but in how we run governments and countries and business of human and natural interaction. 

eyes that constructs the world in a certain way - it is as if all stories have to construct the world using the grammar designed by straight white men, even if we can use our own words. nothing wrong with it except that it has reduced the world by so much. SO MUCH.

I want a Neil Gaiman who lives in my world, who tells the stories built out my myths and takes them to lovely unusual places. I want a New Yorker who speaks of Delhi and Canberra and Adelaide, in that curious well studied way. I have a print of a painting at my apartment. it is of a wedding scene from somewhere in India. I love it for the joyful occasion, and even more for the colours - red and white, but what really gives me comfort is that the bride has a 'weak' chin and a practically non-existent jaw line and she is beautiful. That a lot of other people in the painting have that very Indian head. Something even my textbooks in India didn't show well. the default head was white European. By which I mean those vaguely European idealised features with brown skin. I first came across the idea of a weak chin in Enid Blyton as a child and still struggle with it. Thankfully I liked my hair too much to be more confused and less hurt by the idea that it was never going to fine and straight, and that combing them a 100 times each night is the worst thing that I could do to it. I learnt far too late in life that the images I saw in movies and TV are women with nose-jobs and wigs because in America they wouldn't be accepted any other way.  Because in America, they still had laws that would allow people to be discriminated on the basis of their hair as late as 2020ish.  

I want to write these stories, and I want to have an interesting day job... and that there will be room in my life for them both and for a few more things beside. 

Riddler: When is a door. Written by Neil Gaiman.