Trisha Dhar Malik
“youtube Venice”
On a tab alongside this one there is a Venice—not the real Venice—but a 4K live-cam version of it. I see its skies post-sunrise and feel outofbody about technology. I think constantly over four days of the smallness of the human experience against the Cannaregio Canal and primary colored buildings and children and music and water and water and water. The play I am writing is about water, so I am paying close attention to water and how it looks like a finger that has been wet too long. Wrinkled and fluid like the inside of a body. The inside of death. On the seventh day I make a list:
Is this a real study if it’s on a screen? Is anything real online? Not really, probably.
—Note: think of how the words “instagram” or “iphone” have never made it to your poetry because you find them cringe-worthy. Even though they are your biggest villains.
—Note: the phrase “cringe-worthy” has never made it to your written word either.
Think: nothing real has.
How can I submerge myself into a world that is on a screen then? Should I rely on my memories of the place to make it real and meaningful?
Can a city become tired of putting on a show? Is that when climate comes into the picture?
—And loss? And death? And burning?
Think: fire.
Why do I think I have to be in a big, European, important or sexy city to make art?
—Wonder: do you think your sadness makes you interesting or more writerly and actorly?
Are you good or just brown?
What would Venice think—if she was your lover?
Your mother? A dead aunt?
A friend that’s a boy?
Now it’s dark in Venice and still sunny where I am. I can tell because I can hear girls on my street giggling and the light in my room I can see it shift. The music shop that is my neighbor is playing jazz that is eerily similar to the jazz in the background of youtube Venice. A man with a suitcase bumps along the street looking at his phone, lost. Everything is every one and every one is everywhere which is why I am tired of this city I think. Would I be tired of Venice too—when I learnt to really love it? I give myself a paper cut and shazam can’t find the song they’re playing. No result, it says and I wonder of what?! Now two girls are making a tiktok or dancing on their phones by the cafe by the boats by the canal, which I find insulting to art in this world. I want to scratch that line because it’s mean but I won’t. I’m trying to be okay with my mean. Anyway they are only on my phone and they seem harmless and sweet and dancing. Maybe if I looked like that I wouldn’t be so mad. I am thinking if the city is tired because everyday it has to wake up and host. What if it doesn’t want to? Some man threw up out of the speeding boat / And the couple can’t stop kissing / It feels like there is nothing poetic about an exhausted city / One that has to wake up for you. / Every day it has to put on makeup and clean itself. But Venice is on my phone, protected from everything else and fires. Orange-colored and protected—encased and inside of me. I click it away and go to school to learn something or forget. The screen glitches before it blacks—to hint at ghosts.
Trisha Dhar Malik (she/her) is a queer writer and theatre artist based in Mumbai, India, and has a complicated relationship with her Mumbai, India. She has acted in several plays during her time studying in Canada, including "Water, Baby!" which she also produced and wrote. With a combined Honours in English and Creative Writing, she is now back home in Mumbai, navigating what it means to be twenty-three and know nothing.
