A corner where God isn't there: "The Magic Bangle" by Shastri Akella (Best American Short Stories 2024)

The first thing the narrator, Kartik, does in "The Magic Bangle" is attempt to erase his communal identity. He's from Hyderabad, India's fourth largest city, but when his father hits him after discovering a message from a man on a dating app, he decides to pretend he's from somewhere else. He goes around Hyderabad like he's a tourist, giving us, the readers, a good view of the city while he's going about. There are two reasons why it makes sense for Kartik to pretend he's an outsider. First, he feels like an outsider in his own home, where his parents are pressuring him to accept an arranged marriage. Second, since communities tend to give us our identity as much as a way to define us and control us within the communal order as a way to allow us to thrive, it's natural that Kartik would want to escape the control of the community. He imagines a gay utopia where where it's safe to love men, and he pretends to be from there.

But no sooner does Kartik seek to escape the control of community than he demonstrates what seems to be a contradictory impulse: he seeks the safety of a fortress. He wants autonomy from community, but he also wants the security that community can provide. Kartik is keenly interested in the layout of the Goldona Fort, one of the historical sites of Hyderabad, hiring a tour guide to show him "the fort's many tricks." Kartik enthusiastically notes the defensive advantages the fort provides: "Alcoves for soldiers to hide in plain sight. Unseen vantage points from which to pour hot oil on intruders. Kartik likes the clap trick best. When the watchtower soldier clapped, the sound traveled all the way to the courtroom: two claps for an approaching friend, one clap for a foe." 

The protections Kartik puts up are no less intricate.

Kartik hopes for a future in which he can hear the two claps that mean a friend is coming. These hopeful claps, however, are only available to someone who lives behind the enclosed fortress that community provides. So Kartik cannot make the choice that other non-conformists to community standards have made of living without a community. Kartik wants the self-fulfillment equivalent of having his cake and eating it, too, which is to be able to determine his own identity and yet still live safely within community. This has sometimes been called "autonomy within community," and it's sort of the perfect balance most humans long for.  

Kartik tries a few tactics to achieve this. The first is to hide. He tells everyone he's going out of town so he can get away. As a matter of fact, this isn't just hiding; it's repeating the soldiers' trick of hiding in plain sight. He's still in his hometown, but disguised as a tourist. When he meets Shahrukh, they continue hiding in plain sight together. They eat together at the Shadab Hotel in Hyderabad, "a place of communal eating" where "no one blinks an eye at them." It's a restaurant full of men eating together who have just come from Friday night prayers at the Masjid (Mosque). It's the very picture of community, and because of that, the two men are able to have their first date together without arousing the anger of the community. 

While they are seated, a qawwali--a type of Sufi music--plays, and the lyrics include these words from the 19th Century Urdu poet Mirza Ghalib: "Allow me, Imam, to drink in the mosque or show me to a corner where God isn't there." That is, allow me to sit in the symbol of community, but allow me to transgress the community's requirements while there. If not, allow me a place to remain unseen by the ultimate keeper of community standards." It's a wish to remain both true to one's desires but also not to be cast out from the community.

The bangle arrives

When Shahrukh pulls the bangle from his pocket, it feels as much out of place as Kartik is in his hometown. It's a magic item suddenly appearing halfway through a realistic modern story. It promises to answer questions, but it comes with a proviso: if it tells you what is going to happen in the future, you have to make it come to pass, because the djinn who gives the bangle its power hates to be wrong. Kartik later learns that the djinn really is from out of town: she lives in a minaret in the Thar Desert. 

The double-edged sword of identity

Identity is both something a community gives us and something we develop for ourselves. Both self-given and community-given identities have strengths and drawbacks, although we in the West probably think of self-given identity much more positively than we do the community-derived kind. Judith Butler, who probably has had more influence over gender theory and theory surrounding sexuality than anyone, was wary of identity. She believed identity came with high costs for both conformists and deviants, and she wanted both community-derived and self-derived identities to lose their power. She hoped for a general relaxation of our focus on identities. 

It's this relaxation of identities that presents a more permanent hope to Kartik and Shahrukh than hiding does, either out of sight of in plain sight. From the moment Kartik meets Shahrukh, he is in a world where the limits between communities begin to blur. Shahrukh is a Muslim named for a Hindu film maker. He speaks a mix of Urdu and Hindi, thus blending two linguistic communities. When they walk around the city, Shahrukh points to a Hindu temple dedicated to Lakshmi, which is next to a minaret (a tower next to a masjid/mosque), which represents a blend of two religious communities. 

The ultimate symbol of this hoped-for blurring of lines comes with the celebration of Holi, when the people of Hyderabad throw colors on one another:

On Monday they stand on the balcony and watch people on the street smear one another’s necks and faces with color and water. The sectarian difference, made particularly volatile under the current regime, vanishes. The only riot is that of colors staining the air pink, blue, and green. The only guns fired are water guns. The only shrieks are those that rise from throats drunk on bhang: milk steeped with cannabis, ginger, cardamom, and rose and served cold. 

In a carnivalesque moment, identities are blurred and it's possible to glimpse a future in which safety in community will be able to co-exist with one's own preferences. We don't know exactly what the magic bangle tells Kartik and Shahrukh about their future, but it involves the sound Kartik has longed for, the two claps that mean a friend is approaching. 

I would need a hell of a lot of bhang to not hate being around this many people who think it's okay to smear color on me. 

The story brings to mind another theoretical concept Butler was fond of, one she took from Foucault, the concept of "performative" speech. Most language merely repeats past usages of language, which is what makes it intelligible. But speech is also constantly being used in novel ways, ways which make the language change and evolve. At the extreme end of creative speech acts are "performative" acts, those which make something come into existence. Making a promise is such an act. In the story, a djinn predicting the future is performative, and woe to those who work against it. 

In a sense, though, the whole story is a performative act, an act of conjuring a better future through imagining that future. Akella himself reads the story that way in his author note from Fairy Tale Review: 

I recently endured a homophobic attack in Hyderabad, my hometown. In “The Magic Bangle,” I reinvent Hyderabad’s old district as a queer utopia. This decision was inspired by the myths my maternal grandmother once told me. In the South Asia of her tales, nonhumans and humans were equals, wish-granting djinns didn’t demand sacrifices, and god was a friend whose blue face you could playfully smear with mud. The telling of such fairy tales, I believe, isn’t escapist; it’s a way of wishing a desired future into being, of believing that “another world is not only possible, she’s on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.” (Arundhati Roy)

India already has much of the blurring of cultural and social lines that would make such a utopia come to be. Hindi and Urdu are both spoken in many families. Masjids are next to Hindu temples. Although the Modi administration has tended to make lines worse by acts of preference to Hinduism, the pieces are there. "The Magic Bangle" is a prayer to a hoped-for future to appear. 

Post-script: is political progress possible without identity politics?

I'm certainly sympathetic to a desire to blur lines and a dislike for identity politics. Butler was one of the few theorists I found myself (to the extent I could understand her) agreeing with as a student. It seems a bitter irony that one of the products of the influence of theory in American culture has been identity politics. 

Part of Butler's concern was that even if you create a new identity that is recognized by the community--say, LGBTQ people--that new community will no sooner come into existence than it will seek to create its own standards, which will reward those who conform and punish those who do not. Shows like Modern Family get big kick out of showing just how rigid some gay communities can get with policing dress, speech, and acts among their members. When many people say "that's gay" to mean "that's stupid," I think they're more referring to something like this, to a highly rigid, dogmatic, and fastidious guarding of arbitrary rules, than they are saying "homosexuality is stupid." 

Beyond the way sub-communities will continue to ostracize and create more and more sub-communities, I also find it gross the way identity politics gets commodified by capitalism. I often think that the reason corporate America embraces DEIA programs so fully is because it's good for the bottom line. If you can get people to self-identity as part of a community with knowable wants, then it's easy to sell to them. Get your Pride Day swag. Play your fuck-the-man rap music on an app you paid for on a phone you paid for while driving a car you paid for. The guy next to you is listening to a conservative podcast telling him how evil your music is using the same phone and driving the same car. No wonder the number of identifiable interest communities keeps growing.

So I'd love to put an end to America's obsession with identity, except there's a voice inside my head that just won't let me. LGBTQ didn't just become an identifiable community because evil corporations created them. It became a community because society was denying its members a necessary constituent of happiness. In our particular form of government, the most effective way to acquire rights is to form the type of community that is called an interest group, one that can collectively pressure the government for change. When dealing with the government, it's best to be able to present clear and unified demands, which means marginalizing sub-groups. There was a time not so long ago when groups like this were literal fortresses for LGBTQ people, when they meant the difference between life and death, or at least life and a life not worth living. So while it may be annoying when Pepper raises an eyebrow at your choice in ascot, that particular policing of community was inevitable the moment there was a group being unjustly discriminated against in society. 

I was all ready to give "The Magic Bangle" my full-throated approval, and I do, in fact, really like the story and join in its prayer for a future without borders. Part of me, though, wonders if the skillful literary resolution of the story can be turned into a real-world solution. Can performative speech really change the world, can an incantation really perform magic? 

Kartik tells a story of two lovers who are not allowed to be together, so the gods turn them into two intoxicating substances, tobacco and cannabis. It seems like it's only in moments of intoxication that borders really break down. The revelers at the Holi celebration have been drinking milk mixed with cannabis. Maybe that's what it takes to break down barriers is just a succession of intoxications. If so, "The Magic Bangle" is itself such an intoxication, and I hope those who read it felt a moment of blurred lines and blurred identities like I did. 

See also: Karen Carlson's reading of this story here.