“More Than Machine” for Issue #68 of Uppercase Magazine (2025)
A year from now, here are five things from this week that I'd like to remember:
MONDAY
I sit on Zoom with three friends, all of us hoping to connect after the slog of winter holidays and time away from ourselves. I look forward to our monthly calls—we are all four South Asian, all four book-makers, all four interested in bringing our identities to the forefront of an industry that, with all of its promise, still resists a bend towards change.
One friend lives in Minneapolis. Her life is grocery deliveries and running escort for those too frightened to leave their homes; her life is organizing and comforting her community; her life is checking social media to see where it’s safe to go; her life is trying not to fall prey to the horrors of social media; her life is carrying her papers on her person, though she is a US citizen, though she knows her papers may not spare her. When you look eye to eye into a gun, it’s a roll of the dice. How generous or angry or sad is the gunman today?
Another friend lost a parent swiftly, unexpectedly, during a personal season reserved for joy. Our hearts explode with the conflict of emotion. Our faces contort with grief while we listen to her story. I feel tiny muscles in my face move involuntarily. For hours, we listen. We speak sparingly, holding space for each other to exist in this liminal space between the reality of our lives and the memory this call will soon be. The tears fall rapidly.
I cry for two days after. I am not unfamiliar with death. It is not hidden in our culture: We hold the bodies close, we help the spirit go on. Still, the sadness I feel seems to double in size. The anger burns me up inside. I call my parents and ask them to explain Hindu death rituals to me, why the dead are cared for more lovingly than those who are still alive. I can’t stop thinking about violence—in life, and death, and then again while we escort the dead to the afterlife. Why I am so shaken? For a few days, I interrogate myself for my weakness. Why am I so affected by another person’s pain? Why can’t I let it go? How will I ever handle this grief when it is my own?
It’s a few weeks later now. My mind is beginning to sing, rather than scold, as I have instructed it to do. I do not feel shame for my sensitivity; rather, I recognize the barbaric nature of having ever asked myself to detach from another person’s grief. From a community’s grief. From our country’s grief. My children are five and two. Already, they feel the discomfort of observing pain in each other’s eyes. They ask questions. They move towards each other. They try to help. Though they feel discomfort, they do not avert their eyes. They do not look away.
I stretch and check the walls of my body, the home that houses this mind. I exercise to keep my head on straight. I draw so that I can care for my children and husband. I sleep so the anger doesn’t burn me up from inside. I call my representatives. I donate to the cause. I chisel away our resistance towards change.
T opens the back door to collect N, and the cold air soars into me like a stone. It is six degrees this morning. I shake the cold off and head upstairs to write, to call, to help, to do whatever I can to keep the lights on inside this home of mine.
TUESDAY
A photo of my essay and illustration, “More Than Machine” for Issue #68 of Uppercase Magazine (2025)
I wrote about making art when it feels hopeless to do for my column, Being, in the current issue of Uppercase Magazine:
“It is easy to criticize your role in society as an artist—to say that your work is less urgent than that of someone who works in medicine or education. It is artists, however, who have sparked change in every single generation, through the books they have written, the paintings they have created and the music they have played. Writer Ursula K. Le Guin said, “Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.” Many people believe that art is separate from politics, but who you are and what you believe in fortifies what you create. What you create can make someone reconsider their own actions and thoughts, so clarify your values and pour them into your work.
Part of your role as an artist is being able to imagine a world that does not already exist—a society that responds differently to the needs of those living within it. If you lose the ability to imagine, you lose the opportunity to create a sense of possibility within your work or ignite it within others. Imagination requires hope, not only the belief that something new is possible—but that it is worth working towards.”
A photo of my illustration and essay, “More Than Machine”, for Issue #68 of Uppercase Magazine (2025)
Issue #68 of Uppercase Magazine (2025)
You can read the entire essay, More Than Machine: Guidance for Creative Resistance in Issue 68 of Uppercase Magazine.
P.S. As for resistance on a more personal level, I wrote about how creating this illustration helped me understand and process my own life in last week’s letter.
WEDNESDAY
Monarca offers training in becoming a legal observer; Publishing for Minnesota is offering original art, manuscript crits, and business resources and more; Immigrant Rapid Response Fund from the Women’s Foundation of Minnesota will direct your money to where it’s needed most. Stand with Minnesota. Call your representatives.
THURSDAY
“To draw yourself back into being” by Charlotte Ager.
FRIDAY
All goes back to the earth,
and so I do not desire
pride of excess or power,
but the contentments made
by men who have had little:
the fisherman’s silence
receiving the river’s grace,
the gardener’s musing on rows.
I lack the peace of simple things.
I am never wholly in place.
I find no peace or grace.
We sell the world to buy fire,
our way lighted by burning men,
and that has bent my mind
and made me think of darkness
and wish for the dumb life of roots.
—The Want of Peace by Wendell Berry
Of all the things you can put in front of your eyes, I’m grateful that my little letter is one of them.
If you’d like to support me, please buy my books. My art prints and line of greeting cards make excellent gifts for yourself or a friend. You can also hire me for your next project—I’d love to work together.
xx,
M
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