letter from mumbai and elsewhere

you can read part one (paywalled) here if you’d like. this letter is somewhat retrospective; i am not currently in mumbai. it touches on incels, reunions, john berger, the iran war, beauty, other things. also if you live near madison, WI, i’ll be speaking at UW-Madison this thursday, 4/16, 7 PM, more details here.

i want to thank, as an aside, the paid subscribers to this newsletter. you help make possible this and the couple of essays that i’ll send out over the next few weeks, pieces i read and researched a good deal for. if you’ve been a paid subscriber in the past but had to pause recently because of finances or whatnot, feel free to write me and i can comp you for a couple months. <3

I woke in Bandra from a dream where a character in my manuscript was trying to tell me something. In the dream I was trying to meet with him like a journalist meets a source, and I tried frantically to prepare for this, reading stacks of papers, consulting a dictionary, writing down precooked phrases. Repeatedly I would show up at our agreed-upon location, glimpse him, wave, chase him down. By the time I got there, he was gone.

If this seems on the nose to you, well, brother, imagine how it seemed to me.

I emerged from the dream feeling sharp disappointment, an emotion I have skillfully dodged most of my life. I had, it was true, been trying in my waking days to learn something that would help me solve the problem I was negotiating in my novel’s closing act. But my fiction had not intruded into my dream life since I was drafting the final forty pages of All This Could Be Different and I was unguarded against this sort of psychic reenactment. I climbed out of my bed, drank bottled water, brushed my teeth with it. Diasporoid-coded, I thought, as I tipped the plastic bottle over a pink blob of Parodontax, then wondered why my mind had chosen the pejorative, right-wing term over diasporic. The rental’s AC unit was broken and it was a very warm morning. I drank more water, sent some texts, took a high-dose cholecalciferol pill.

I hung my head back over the mattress’s edge and smiled widely. Not because I felt any of the attendant emotions of smiling, but because I had learned very young a diamond-hard truth: you can trick your mind, and if you do it right, you can have the life you want. If you do it enough, you might eventually become its master, instead of the other way around.

There was one reason, I guessed, as to why my internal lexicon had gone with diasporoid. In the mid-2010s I spent a lot of hours when I should have been asleep on various white supremacist and broad-spectrum incel forums. I thought about this time an unexpected amount during my first few days in Mumbai. Partly because it was, to my own shock, now a decade ago, and partly because my circadian rhythm was shot to hell, between jet lag and the parties my cousin S, who lived one neighborhood over, had been sweetly inviting me to.

After the parties, I’d take an auto back to the rental studio in the early hours of morning, head shimmering lightly, dodging a rat or two on the dusty stairwell just like I might have on the Brooklyn pavement (New York City, always with me, baby 🫶🏽). Once inside I stared out the window into the hazy night air. A week or so before this, a U.S. Tomahawk missile had struck an elementary school in Minab, Iran; I felt haunted by photos of tiny bloodied backpacks. I lay on the bed and circled my various internet lookouts like water around a drain. As the fan whirred, I watched A.I. slopaganda videos from the Trump administration and the Iranian digital channel Explosive News. It was, I think, this enervated, tired-but-sleepless, scanning-for-understanding-and-also-danger state that caused me to remember visiting with the incels and MRAs and neo-Nazis a decade ago.

In 2024, after Trump won the Presidency for the second time, I wrote this in a newsletter I titled every day is all there is:

I’m calm because the future is unknowable. It sprouts unexpectedly, unpredictably from the seeds and mycelium of the past and of the cultural underground. This is my deepest belief, politically. You can find the thread of it running through everything I’ve written. The future is unknowable; it answers to power, and power is malleable, subject to its own shocks and successions.

When I wrote that the future sprouts from the mycelium of the cultural underground, I was thinking, in part, of those once-fringe reactionary spaces I hovered around in during my twenties. It sure seemed, looking at the language and culture and headlines of the moment, that in ten years they had shown up, grown up, won big. I imagined an American left flank that could do the same. That could turn the car around before the cliff’s edge.

But truthfully, I felt gaps in my understanding around the question of how you could actually go from underculture to overculture, from organized networks and digital clout to real and unified power. It’s not like I had been a studious mapper of the online sewer-right all those years either. I stopped in part because I could feel it warping my brain. You are what you eat, after long enough. Whatever you train your attention on is in fact training you, disciplining you to its values and way of seeing. The lurking, the following armchair eugenicists and usernames like @poojeetass1488 on my burner accounts, the reading Cas Mudde or whoever—after a while, it all began to seem like a big waste of my precious and unguaranteed time on Earth.

It was now my fourth or fifth morning in Mumbai. I’d eaten masala omelet and highly buttered toast and bought a tender coconut from a roadside seller to drink. My mechanical smiling appeared to have worked: serenity and goodwill toward my fellow man had found me once again. I went on a rambling walk and found myself—due to directional incompetence and an ongoing attempt to reduce dependence on Google Maps—unintentionally in a slum. I exited said slum. My cousin texted me that he would be going to a show for work and then to a friend’s apartment to chill and asked if I wanted to come along. I was about to say yes, and then a new text pinged in.

It was N, my friend from my year of high school in the States. He had driven from Dubai to Oman, and via Muscat, gotten, against some odds, out of the Gulf. He and his colleague would be flying through Mumbai, then Hong Kong, then the U.S. Odds were newly good that he might make his baby’s birth. He and his colleague would do drinks and dinner at the five-star hotel they were staying at before heading to BOM airport late that night. Would I want to join, bringing along whoever I wanted?

it’s ON THE COMPANY he wrote, because I WENT TO WAR.