Postcards #10: Sisterhoods And Broken Hearts
This month in Postcards: notes on time travelling to Indus Valley, the magic of used books, and more
We write to you about the people, places, and ideas that brought team BehanBox joy this month. One postcard, every month.
Dear Behans, this is our last postcard for 2025. Thank you for being a witness to our joys over the last nine months. We hope to keep writing to you about our worlds, and will always be eager to hear from you. See you in the new year!
To All The New Sisters In My Life
My understanding of the politics of desire, movement, and sensuality has been deeply shaped by Shweta Painthamiz’s (also known as @marudaanimummy) work. And so, I was ecstatic beyond words when I finally got the chance to attend their class for the first time. I found myself moving with mindfulness in a way I had never thought possible, surrounded by the most inspiring and powerful femmes.
But the moment I keep coming back to is when I returned to my dorm after the class and women I had gotten to know over the week barged into my room with excitement. They were fangirling over the class and the way it created space for their realities, and decided to practice the choreography with me. We laughed, danced, and felt sexy in our skin; that night, I made friends for life.
Over the next week, we spent countless hours together: cooking chai in the microwave, learning from parai artists and fishing elders, exploring a new city through heavy rain, and holding hands on the shore while we were absorbed by the vastness of the ocean.
They surprised me with a birthday cake when I couldn’t make it home in time, and held me through the grief of losing a loved one. And on the midnight of December 6, we sang together, carrying a commitment towards building the world Babasaheb envisioned.
For the longest time, I was convinced that Chennai was the place where ‘things happened’ – where young people were creating, movements were brewing, and art from the margins loudly claimed center-stage. But what I didn’t expect is that when I would finally visit Chennai, I’d also find friendships steeped in laughter and honesty, sisterhood that pushed boundaries imposed by casteist patriarchy, and moments of complete vulnerability with myself.
Anjali
A Postcard From the Indus Valley
This is the last postcard of the year from me to you, and it comes from a very special place—the Indus Valley Civilisation. Yes, I did a bit of exhilarating time travel, not with any geeky technology, but by holding artefacts in my hands.
Earlier this month, my friend Nandini took me to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. She teaches history there, and as a professor she can book time in the artefacts room—an extraordinary privilege that allows close examination of objects most museum-goers only ever glimpse through glass. I’m told that members of the public can also requisition artefacts, but as with many such things, most people simply don’t know about it.
We were handed a pair of gloves and two magnifying glasses as we entered. On a table no longer than two feet, easels held paintings on one side, while material objects lay carefully arranged on the other. We began with the Mughal era paintings.
Nandini, who is a brilliant historian and an even better storyteller — one who has the ability to make characters from Mughal India sound like members of your neighbourhood. She began with Amir Ali, a master calligrapher from Isfahan, whose work travelled to Mughal India and was used to embellish court paintings. We sat in front of a Mughal miniature of a woman dressed in an exquisite costume, examining the folds of the fabric, the jewellery, the posture and the ideal of a Mughal woman imagined by the painters. At some point, we found ourselves linking the garment to Madhuri Dixit’s costume in Dil To Pagal Hai. Forty-five minutes passed and we needed to move on.
Next came court scenes. We leaned in like a pair of detectives, scrutinising every detail—gestures, spatial arrangements, the play of power and intimacy—and piecing together the history embedded in pigment and line. All history writing, after all, is a kind of sleuthing: from oral memory to written archives, from paintings to shards of clay.
And then we came to the final object. It was no bigger than a tiny mosaic tile.
“Guess what this is,” Nandini asked.
“A Harappan seal, hahaha?” I said, half expecting to be rebuked.
“Yes,” she replied. “I saved the best for last.”
My jaw dropped. In my gloved hand lay time itself—the trace of an entire civilisation. It felt like a communion with ancestors of the subcontinent. In that moment, I wasn’t thinking about chronology or historiography or theory. I was thinking about what it means to hold the past between two fingers. An entire civilisation, compressed into something so small, so silent and yet so utterly alive.
Bhanupriya Rao
The Superpower Of Shapeshifting Nightmares
I must have been around 10 years old when my highly misguided young uncles decided that I should watch Raktharakshas, the iconic horror play in Malayalam mounted by the famous Kalanilayam repertory. It told the story of the ‘ugly’ daughter of a sorcerer who sought to turn beautiful with a forbidden elixir her father had concocted. By next morning she is a vision in white, but there is a hitch, by night she turns into a vampire whose bite is well, infectious.
All I remember was the deafening sound system magnifying the screech of the vampire, the terrifying yells of the victims and pitch dark of the large grounds where the play was held in Trivandrum. For the next many nights I could not sleep at night in my grandfather’s home tucked away in a rural corner where only the moon lit up the surrounding farms.
Raktharakshas returned to me this week in the form of Lokah, Chapter: Chandra, the Malayalam blockbuster directed by Dominic Arun. The film claimed to star the first female superhero in an Indian film, played by Kalyani Priyadarshan. Chandra is the imagined derivative of the yakshi, as was the central figure in the play of my nightmares. But this is not the yakshi prototype, the much-reviled shape-shifting female figure of popular Indian horror-lore — the woman in white who stands under the pala tree luring hapless men with her stunning good looks and proceeds to mangle them. She is a do-gooder born of a story of caste oppression whose fangs only find bad, bad men, especially those who victimise women.
I am not a great fan of the horror genre and I would have been happier if Chandra could hang off tall buildings or turn into a spider but the film made some interesting points about female prototypes in popular culture. As for Raktharakshas, I hear that it is being mounted again across Kerala on an even more magnificent scale. Clearly, it is a good time to be a yakshi.
Malini Nair
A Museum For The Broken Hearted
It started with an axe and ended with a red wedding dress, this museum about broken hearts. It had a designated route of discovery, a path through the hushed halls and white walls to find longing and lament along the way. It was about sad endings, yes, but also hopeful beginnings. Have you heard of the Museum of Broken Relationships?
It is only the second kind of its kind — established first in 2010 in Croatia and in Thailand in 2024 — and was tucked away in a vibrant corner of Chiang Mai, serene under the sun, when I found it last month. This two-story museum houses objects and stories donated from across the world of people separated by war, death, disease, deception, miscommunications. Missives of turbulent pain and quiet remembrance.
Their poetries and letters and diaries are all about one moment. When they realised the relationship is doomed (“Fuck her”). Or when the manipulation and deception was revealed (“This equipment and six frozen embryos remain from the treatment. Nothing remains of the marriage.”) Or when they had hope (“I wish I could go back and change things.”)
These tactile memories held power over them, and it felt intrusive to see these, out of time and out of their original homes, but people had exorcised parts of themselves away for a reason: in the hope of letting go or reaching out or as inheritance to future lovers and those who nurture broken hearts. I donate it…so that I do not have to cling to it anymore.
In a nook by the window was a ‘confessional room’ with a stack of at least 10 hardbound diaries, each with brief entries from visitors who were. Brave enough to pour their hearts and reveal its gashes to strangers. The museum invited me too, extending its space and boundaries, to hold my grief. I obliged.
My heart felt heavy when I reached the red dress; I wanted to stay longer, but the broken hearts had taught me one thing: I should know when to let go.
Saumya Kalia
The God of Used Books
As the year comes to an end, on these cold nights my mind keeps drifting back to the animated film The Night Is Long, Walk On Girl. I find myself returning to it, discovering something new each time, in the absurdity, the kaleidoscopic animation, and the surreal storytelling Masaaki Yuasa brings. The story unfolds over a single night in Kyoto, following the Girl with Black Hair as she wanders through the city. She drifts through bars and university events, crashes a wedding, joins an office drinking party, chases small desires, and mostly lets experiences come to her naturally. One of those desires is finding her favourite childhood book at the Shimogamo Used Book Fair, called ra ta ta tam, which she lost growing up.
“Suddenly having the book I’ve been thinking about appear right before me…it makes me feel like it’s some sort of fate. Like there’s a god of old-book markets…setting up my lucky encounter with the book I desire,” she says as she begins her search for Ra Ta Ta Tam.
While moving through the stalls, she then actually encounters the God of Used Books in his human form. The God of Used Books exists to keep books moving from one owner to another, to ensure they aren’t hoarded or forgotten. He connects the right books to the right people at the right time. He punishes those who hoard or resell used books at high prices, as they block the flow of stories.
“A book is reborn each time it’s passed on; it’s one of the things that ties us together,” he says. He explains that all books are connected. For example, the girl, holding the complete Sherlock Holmes collection by Arthur Conan Doyle, is connected to an old man with a Jules Verne book – Doyle was inspired by Verne, who admired Alexandre Dumas, author of The Count of Monte Cristo. That story was later adapted in Japan by Ruiko Kuroiwa, which you can find in the Japanese literature section. The God of Used Books sees every book, reader, and author as part of one long, connected story. Walking through the fair, the main character passes by all these books, each linked to another, carrying its own ripple of influence.
This year, I feel as though the God of Used Books was watching over me. Many moments of joy and realisation have been shaped by books I borrowed, bought, used, shared, or let go of. Each one carried traces of someone else’s life before reaching me.
Urvi Sawant
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