Tagore and Khan’s Endearing Dynamic
Tagore and Khan walk in. There are two entrances, one meant for each guest, each to swagger their stance, cat-walk onto that set, but not today. Tagore’s arms in Khan’s, they walk together the way people walk, that unstudied gait. She has her glasses on her hands, pearls on her neck, a delicate sari, a wrist-watch — wrist-watch!
Nothing about her seems unusual, as though this was how she would dress up to a party, a gathering, a talk-show, or an awards show. There is something to be said about how the celebrity culture today insists on performing instead of being; elevating who you are to a standard of performance, instead of making who you are that standard. The way Tagore tells stories, you can see the unrehearsed nature, the words she cuts and umms over, the details she wants to keep, the ones she wants to leave out.
To see Tagore and Khan together is to see a mother and son, the constant, endearing — but prone to frustrating— bickering, cutting each other off, an inability to commit to one narrative of a story — Tagore insists Khan took off with a waitress while he was supposed to be at Dublin for university, Khan says she is jumbling the timelines; memory is a contested territory. They keep reaching their hands across the couch to hold each other — it is both “shut up, stop it”, and “I love you”.