The Closet Professor

Names for Hunger
By Mrigaa Sethi

On the walk back from
the therapist to the office
you rub your chest and say

It’ll be all right, my gurgush
There’s a clusterfuck waiting at work,
things that really aren’t personal

but slice you up anyway
You’ll be all right, my malai ka doona
It’ll all get done, my chhunmunita

You think of your mother
whose love birthed all these names
How often she hurt you

and it dawns on you, like a flash
of lightning on an airplane:
love is a bagad billa

At the pantry, you feed yourself
a boxed lunch of baingan and channa
and remember how she once

stood at the door, hours
after she locked you up in a room
a plate of aloo parathas in her hand

and a look that said you were ok now,
the anger under your relief
You swallow the last morsel, feeling
it graze your heart.
Back at work, hungry again.

About the Poet

Mrigaa Sethi is an Indian poet and writer who was born in New Delhi. They were raised in Bangkok and currently living in Singapore. Their poems have appeared in The Seneca Review, ep;phany and other literary magazines, and been anthologized in Call and Response 2 and EXHALE: an Anthology of Queer Singapore Voices. She is also a storyteller and has performed at Other Tongues: A Festival of Minority Voices, What’s Your Story Slam, the Singapore Night Festival and StoryFest.

They are also a journalist and writer/editor who covers lifestyle, business, and social issues across the Asia-Pacific region. Their freelance journalism has appeared in Quartz, the Wall Street Journal and CNN Travel, and she has produced jargon-free business content for clients such as Prudential, TM ONE, NinjaVan, and other start-ups.  Outside of work, Their creative projects engage digital audiences across different mediums. Over the pandemic, she hosted a podcast series for the Singapore Writers Festival, ran a poetry-themed video series, and helped lead an online theatre festival for queer women in Singapore. Their newest passion project is growing Their LinkedIn network of thought leaders and followers, around topics such as creativity, diversity and inclusion, and content marketing.

Mrigaa’s mother is Bonny Sethi, a fashion designer whose one-woman studio in Bangkok – June Fifth by Bonny – specializes in bespoke Indian bridal wear. Mrigaa is quite the opposite of their mother. In an article for the Singapore women’s magazine Her World, she explains:

As a toddler, I would lie on the floor and shriek with displeasure when she put me in dresses and stockings. During my tween years, I would mope around at parties in the high-waisted skirts and floral blouses she picked out for me. I loathed the culottes the girls had to wear at my Catholic middle school – my mother refused to buy me the trouser option – and hid inside a sweaty oversized jacket.

As a teenager, I became more willful, insisting on wearing my father’s roomy flannel shirts and leather belts. Every dressy occasion – office parties, Diwali dos, wedding receptions – became a fashion battleground for my mother and me. 

The tension wasn’t just about clothes. And as I grew older, my gender and sexuality became harder to deny. Fashion anguish aside, I had unrequited crushes on female classmates and teachers that my mother knew about but was unprepared to handle. 

There was no word in Hindi for what I was. There wasn’t anyone like me in Bangkok’s conservative Indian community, where their child’s eventual heterosexual wedding was the dream twinkling in every parent’s eye.

After high school, she moved to the US. In both fashion and romance, she found the freedom she wanted but wasn’t able to find the right fit. Mrigaa found it hard to reconcile their sexuality with their Indian identity. She felt she could be queer or Indian, but never at the same time. Things seemed to come to a head when she moved back to Bangkok from the US seven years later and faced the choice of going back in the closet or being openly gay in the city where their parents’ Indian community resided. Their mother’s bridal business had taken off and become very well-known and was concerned that living with my partner would lead to gossip.

The integration of being queer and Indian took many years, but things changed for the better when their mother stopped negotiating on toned-down Indian women’s outfits for them and started designing clothes that made me feel good: more masculine sherwanis, Aligarh trousers, fitted Nehru collar jackets in rich prints with silk pocket squares. Eventually, it seemed like the cosmos sent their mother a gift. Mrigaa met their current partner whom they say is “beautiful, both inside and out.” On every visit to Bangkok, their mother showered their partner with all the dresses, jewelry, and handbags a fashionista mother could give a daughter. 

About the Poem

Sometimes you read a poem and you immediately identify with it in some way. You may not understand the whole poem, but there is just something about it that speaks to you. “Names for Hunger” by Mrigaa Sethi did that for me. Mrigaa is lesbian and Indian, while I am white, s gay man from the southern United States. Being members of the LGBTQ+ though is not they only thing we have in common. Our relationships with our mothers are complex, and we are constantly trying to work through that complexity.

Speaking about this poem, Mrigaa Sethi said, “I lived in Singapore during the pandemic, and for a time my temporary office happened to be across the street from my therapist’s. After one particularly impactful session, I came back to my office and reheated my lunch of homemade Indian leftovers. They used to cause me great shame when I was a little immigrant kid, but in adulthood bring me great joy. This poem resulted from the collision of my ‘work self’ with some other selves that had lingered after therapy.”

Before I give my thoughts on the poem, I thought I’d try to give definitions for some of the words in this poem that were unfamiliar to me and will possibly be unfamiliar to you. I could not find a direct reference to the first three, but the last three were easy enough to find. If you are familiar with any of these words (some mean something very different in language other than Hindi), please let me know.

• Gargush was the most difficult for me to understand. The word gargush is Hebrew for a traditional Yemenite Jewish headdress. I do not believe this is what the poet was referencing. I think it is more likely a Hinglish (a mixture of the English and Hindi) word for gorgeous, though I could not find this in my searches for the word’s meaning.
• malai ka doona: Malaika is a Hindu girl’s name meaning “angel.” Doona is a type of quilt or duvet, but it also seems to mean “doubly.” By best guess is malai ka doona means a double angel, or maybe a very sweet and caring person. I could not find any actual equivalent in Hindi, so this is my best guess.
• I assume that chhunmunita is the diminutive of Chhunmun, a girl’s name meaning “Cute.” Thus, chhunmunita would mean “little cutie” or something to that affect. Again, I could not actually find a meaning for chhunmunita. Chunmun is also a clothing store in India, which might mean there is a connection to Mrigaa Sethi’s mother.
• Bagad billa an imaginary animal invoked to frighten children. Also, the name Bagadbilla is of Hindi origin and means “A cat which pretends to be a tiger.”
• Baingan and channa is a flavorful vegan eggplant (baingan) and chickpea (channa) curry.
• Aloo paratha is a paratha (flat bread dish) stuffed with potato filling that is traditionally eaten for breakfast.

The poet hears their mother’s voice in their head as they cross the street from their therapist to their temporary office. They know that “there’s a clusterfuck waiting at work.” As a queer Indian, the poet speaks of how often their mother hurt them and that love can be a terrifying monster (bagad billa) that pretends to be something that it is not but disguises itself as something that should be beautiful. As the poet eats their lunch, they realize that their mother did love them but found it hard to express that love through understanding. Eventually, the mother does accept the poet, and they go back to work still feeling hungry for the love that they had felt they lacked growing up.

I can understand the frustration of wanting to be accepted by your mother who believes that what she does, even though it hurts you, is done in love. My own mother lived in denial about my sexuality for years, and she still often hurts me with how she deals with it and the little nasty comments she sometimes makes. Yet, she wraps all of that in what she believes is love, when it is more hurtful than love ever should be. For some, like Mrigaa Sethi, acceptance eventually comes, but for others like me, I doubt it ever will. So, we press on, get back to work, and live our lives the best we can.