I was born to a Hindu mother and a Muslim father. In some universes, this is a happy story.
Lana Wachowski, in Disclosure, the documentary, spoke about “...the magic trick of creating something out of thin air and then using that thing as a handhold to pull yourself forward.”
The myrtle flower in Arabic; a young bird in Japanese and the Moon Goddess, who represents strength and conviction, in Hawaiian - these are all meanings of my name.
I have spent most of my life being who I am and doing what needs to be done. It took me a remarkably long time to notice that this is not the norm. To be fair, no one really told me. Well, if they did, they clearly did not use a 7-point presentation and attached googlesheet. So, by the time I realized that I was different and not doing what most of my peers were, it was too late to stop.
For over a decade, I was the Artist Leader at Orchestrated Q’Works - a theatre collective I founded. It was the first trans-inclusive performance-making collective in my city, the only one to deal with womxn’s and queer narratives. I have been teaching drama, gender education and writing in both formal and informal settings since 2008. As both a theatremaker and educator, I found my joy in exploration, storytelling and community-building. Creating support systems and safe spaces - physical and mental - for people, especially queer people. Finding ways to tell stories no one was willing to. Through colours, through words, through bodies. All this when all I really wanted to do was to build a place I could belong.
Writing has always been my instinctive form of self-expression. I write lists when I am too depressed to remember my own name. I make mind-maps when I hit a hurdle. And when I am struggling to find my place, I write about family, found despite the world’s proscriptions; about asexuality and under-represented ideas of love, romance, sex and platonicity. About a future that takes into account queer lived experience and imagined reality. I have also written numerous plays, fiction pieces, vignettes, story documentations, essays, articles - but at this point, that’s all par for the course.
The pandemic changed my focus. Not my intentions though. In order to keep the hearth burning, I started writing for a gaming company and came across the word transmedia while studying narrative design. Pennies dropped, gears churned and balls began to roll. It was one of those moments, where something one resists all their life suddenly becomes the most obvious kind of truth. Video games made me realize that stories need not be constrained by form, graphic or word. That there is power in the thought, “Why do it one way when you can do it all ways!”
Which is why I am currently studying transmedia storytelling and narrative design. Reading and researching themes and topics you can see above. And working at the same time to create my own world, slowly and steadily populate it with interconnected and enmeshed characters, plots and ideas that expand across platforms. This website is where I am putting together the experiments and explorations from my journey towards publishing and production. It is also an invitation to anyone who visits to help shape it. Despite or perhaps in spite of all the ridiculous constraints of our times - social, political, economic, pandemic (which at this point is basically a universal term for our collective human suffering).
Let's see how it goes. Let's continue to give it our all.
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