Like you, I’ll bring with me a gorgeously entangled lineage of living, labouring, loving selves — all of which will shape our work…in potent, moving, as yet unpredictable ways. Come to our consultation with hard questions that deserve whole answers — those that can unfold only between you and me…in that alchemical specificity of ‘we’.

For here, for now — so that you might feel safe enough to reach out — let me pull some threads to reweave at your feet…

I am a mixed-race, second generation immigrant and settler — the daughter of a brown South Asian mother and white British father — with a nuanced, full-bodied attunement to the intergenerational and transcultural joys, struggles, sacrifices, tensions, and traumas experienced in diasporic, multiracial families. I speak Urdu (though not as fluently as I’d want) and was raised with deep connection to my Hyderabadi Indian roots — with gloriously (though not nearly consistently) radical values nurtured by a fierce matriarchal legacy of community-builders, changemakers, careworkers, and dissidents: the language of social justice is my mother tongue.

Born and raised in Tkarón:to, I grew up as the only multiethnic, colonially hybrid member of my large, close extended family — never experiencing a solid sense of racial-cultural belonging here, there, or elsewhere. A liminal interloper on stolen place, on homelands, in BIPOC and white spaces, in desi (South Asian diaspora) and pan-western communities…constantly noticing and resisting and reconciling with and for my white-passing privilege...not wanting to do harm, not wanting to be harmed. This has been a pain-full, purpose-full gift: bone-deep critical consciousness that has necessitated unflinching engagement with (my) whiteness; demanded the continuous development and enactment of anti-racist, anti-colonial stamina; created unfulfillable yearning for recognition and connection; enabled righteous, actionable heartbreak and rage about the violent and parasitic stranglehold of white body supremacy and coloniality; nurtured tenacious capacity for tenderness and sturdiness through dialogue across (fluid, prismatic) difference and transmutative conflict; and resulted — at times — in near-total existential alienation and utter spirituopoliticoemotional burnout.

While I am not at all religious, I am holistically, non-denominationally spirituopolitical. The undeniable, palpable truth of fractal intraconnectedness, response-able lovingkindness, disruptive attunement, collective care, and critical hope — the ardent, unrepentant accountability to the radically regenerative possibilities of unarmoured, present, empathic, just interrelating — I’ve always felt, since childhood, deepens and flourishes as I move through my own (enduring and boundless) learning, healing, and growth process. I’m ‘too’ sensitive, ‘too’ earnest, ‘too’ soul-full, ‘too much’ they said: too many times, I fell for it. But I know my wild imagining of how things could and should be; my soaring, broken heart and grounded, aching body; my fragile, mutinous vulnerability; my living, breathing counter-theory; this vow to my belov’d community are my best offerings to this moment, to this work, to this life, to this more-than-human world. (Oh, and of course I collapse into despair, shock, disgust, and cynicism in the face of our recklessness, our brutality, our cruelty, our indifference. Oh, and of course I have to re-member that the only way to re-turn to us is to let my-self feel it — the whole [but partial] terrifying and ugly and [nearly] unbearable wretchedness of it.) Many members of my extended family are (religiously or culturally) Muslim, others are Jewish or Christian, many are no longer practicing, staunchly atheist, broadly spiritual, or inquisitively agnostic. Faith, spirituality, and culture (and their sociopolitical elaborations) have been leveraged as a deep reservoir of ceremony and communion and conflict and control within and between us.

I am a wounded healer: a survivor of sexual and gender-based violence and cyclebreaker of complex, intergenerational trauma who lived for years (and years) in a long, thin, flat rectangle at the centre and front of my forehead. I couldn’t feel my feet, I couldn’t fall asleep, I couldn’t digest my food, I couldn’t unclench my jaw, I couldn’t hold my child, I could not bear contact. I waged an adaptively essential, culturally sanctioned, gut-wrenchingly sensible war of suppression, denial, shame, loathing, perfectionism, numbing, sufficiency, control, and functionality against my disintegrated, dismembered self. It worked. It hurt. I ricocheted between suffocating, suicidal depression and the equally unliveable terror of breath-taking, skin-crawling, heart-shattering, hair-pulling, truth-screaming anxiety. I survived and thrived through song, my piano, sensitivity, play, mothering, service, partnership, wonder, sheer will, surrender, sausage dogs, language, therapy, medicine work, movement, nature, osteopathy, pedagogy, (bestowed and chosen) family, (a black cat named) Minu, and (cherished, expansive) community. I (too) have charted — am charting — the excruciating, exquisite, unfinished re-turn to embodiment: cell by cell, second by second, beat by beat, breath by breath. I (too) have been undone, refragmented, rewounded — by partners, family, friends, humanity, colleagues, teachers, practitioners, and healers. I (too) have had to re-re-member the full stillness and flow — so iterative and urgent and slow, so necessarily deferent to what my bodymind longs for and knows — of this touching, moving, (inter)subjective and collective process. It can’t be forced or rushed.

I am a (once adolescent and single) parent, kinship guardian, and othermother who has practiced a literal lifetime of mothering as activism — grounded in the regenerative ethics of intersectional feminism and reproductive justice. The first in a line to be targeted, impregnated, and abandoned — barely out of childhood, by another child who’d been traumatised too. I’ve yearned and failed to meet the unattainable standards of ‘good’ motherhood; bought in to the lie that my ambivalence was ‘unnatural’; resisted the evisceration of cultural, religious, and patriarchal surveillance, indictment, and banishment; striven and struggled to protect my children from the damage of (my) (trans)generational torment; strategically enlisted the pernicious veneers of class, credentialism, a well-planned party, and acceptable femininity; benefited and suffered from misreadings of my race, gender, ethics, and sexuality; rebuilt self and family through art, scholarship, apology, and spirituopolitical legacy. My awe-striking, pride-surging, soul-salving children have long since left the home we built together: my daughter is 28 (with a steadily blossoming career as an objectively wildly talented actor) and my cousin-nephew-son is 35 (and a new — deeply present and devoted — parent himself, with his equally attuned partner…which makes me, at 45, a cousin-taunty-grandmother!).

I grew up in non-cis-, non-hetero-, and non-mononormative family and community, with deliciously flexible (and confusingly delimited) sexual and gendered possibilities. I’ve understood my pan, poly queerness all my life, and have always been out (only) with those who (I thought) would hear and hold me (though the language I used through my youth was bisexual — when this was contorted to mean, even more so than now, that you ‘couldn’t be trusted in relationship’, and that you weren’t ‘gay enough’ or ‘straight enough’ or that you were ‘either and just in denial’). My experience of my gender has been in a revelatory state of unravelling for the last decade, rewoven through my work as a critical gender and sexuality activist-scholar. Like bell, Cherríe, Andrea, Aurora, Audre, Gloria, and so, so, so many more of my treasured spirituopolitical fore-bearers and collaborators not cited here or here or here or elsewhere, but honoured through my skin and skills, my promise(s) and pain, my bow and my brea(d)th, I came to this and other fleshy theory as a location of healing…I’m in magnificent, significant, uncontainable flux. This is another intergenerational legacy: both my nanima (my activist maternal grandmother) and my father (a poet whose art was the first I loved) wrestled with cisnormativity and played with the fluidity of gender in explicit and implicit ways. Their chosen name meant ‘King Lady of the World’ and they used masculine conjugations (pronouns are already gender neutral in Urdu). His nom de plume (which became his chosen name) is a purposefully non-binary pairing of an androgynous first name with his mother’s maiden name…seeking and affirming re-becoming through un-‘doing’, excavating and embodying a discarded matriarchal (be)longing.

I have been in long term, cross-racial partnership with a Japanese-Irish, cis (brilliant, hilarious, beanpole Buddha of a) man for 17 beautiful, effort-full years. He fails superbly at heteropatriarchy. Before this, I had been in delightfully queered sexual, romantic, (non-)monogamous, and poly relational configurations of different pleasure-full forms (though they weren’t necessarily labelled as such). Our partnership, from its very germination, has meant renegotiating my senses of sexuality, sensuality, flexibility, safety, (self‑)recognition, selflessness, and (be)longing. I’ve re-begun, again, to come to terms with the implications of this over the past few years — as we navigate the complex relational re-becomings of mid-life and an empty nest. As we tend, together, to the implicit tensions, triaged conflicts, and unhealed wounds re-surfaced and ripped wide open — hemorrhaging and critical and suddenly all-too-explicit — by the isolating, alienating, ongoing trauma of the pandemic.

Life-altering, -threatening, and -ending despair and fear (chronic depression, anxiety, and suicidality); tyranny, silence, secrets, and violence (these and many other devastating manifestations of developmental and sociopolitical trauma); disability; neurodiversity; substance use; parentification; breakdown, infidelity, estrangement, and abandonment; and early-onset degenerative illness and death have shaped my family’s intergenerational, relational experiences. As have unwavering dedication to service, community, advocacy, and healing; voracious appetites for art, language, politics, ritual, biryani, and revelry; insatiable devotion to lifelong learning and teaching; deep bondedness with animals and the natural world (from soma to soil to seed to sea to stars); remarriage and multigenerational guardianship leading to inscrutably, inextricably interwoven familial roots and branches; longing and (still) working for acceptance, forgiveness, and unvarnished intimacy; and abiding and paradoxically (un)conditional (good and hard and real) love.

And finally…because it’s only very narrowly made it onto any of these pages, given the context (and then thanks almost entirely to tubular beasts, passed and [still] present): along with radical depth, attunement, tenderness, vulnerability, humility, complexity, creativity, and compassion, I bring necessary delight, playfulness, frankness, pragmatism, (often bone-dry, sometimes gallows) humour, ease, laser focus, and a hearty dose of incorrigible spunk to my life and work.

I hope I get to meet you, to more than know you, and — if you so choose — to grow and change and heal with you.

With love and reverence, in solidarity…