Every day when I try to answer this for mummy, I am made aware of the lack of societal apparatus to explain something that cannot be thought of as economic, social, or symbolic capital. I think very hard, look through books and come unstrung at the utter lack of things that count. A to-do list of things with only 7 things ticked out of 9, a (literally) marked reduction in compulsiveness, is not symbolic capital. The postcard S sent me said it was okay to have bad days, arrived on a day I was fighting depressive thoughts, parked on my bed in a fetal position; that I found S on Instagram and that her care for me goes beyond a stranger-on-internet’s, does not – just like the hearts that are connected to mine through Kolkata and Kashmir, do not – count as my social capital.
Learning a new art all by myself, stitching a skirt, making photos in it in front of graffiti through a city I love, being sure of myself, and being satisfied, does not count as any capital. “What of it?” I am asked. As if to hold me tighter in this loop, the society made textbooks that made societies that made more textbooks, to not coin terms and rob the importance granted to things done for the joy of it alone.
And I have nothing to show still, I don’t even have a technical gift that I can mortgage. Neither a voice that can win patriotic hearts nor brute luck that can pay in fame. What I have instead, is effort and 1000 hours to put in it. My talent is a matter of my will. I make art of what I care for. And this thing I care for has to do with emotion. Whatever I feel I want to express very clearly, to put it over. To make sad songs very sad and happy songs joyful. Build a certain emotional capital? And nothing of it. Nothing that counts, at least.
Mummy worries. But I have survived, till now. Thrived, if you count success in books read, the people I talked to, days I spent with my baby till she still has trouble pronouncing words, and the joy I feel that goes down to my bone.