The Gallery of Audacious Women | Arundhathi Subramaniam in conversation with Nalini Iyer

Thank you, everybody. As a Seattleite, I want to give a warm welcome to Arundhati to our town.

Thank you.

And it's my— I'll start with a little confession. When JLF wrote to me saying, would you be in conversation with Arundhati Subramanian, I was like, sounds good. I'd heard of her, but I had never read any of her stuff. So I did what every English professor does. I researched her and I found her work. And initially, I was like, woman poet, great. And then I saw the word spiritual and sacred in some of the descriptions and I'm like, I'm a materialist, postcolonial Marxist feminist. What the heck am I gonna talk about with spirituality? However, one of the things I tell my students, when we encounter a text, the most important thing to do is to go in with an open mind and an open heart. And adopting that advice that I gave my students, I approached the text that way and I was very, very surprised in a very good way and really pushed into rethinking some of the binary ways in which I'd been thinking about bodies and spirits and all of that. So I want to start by actually talking to you about the— showing you the books, right? So the 2 books we're supposed to be talking about, mostly we'll be talking about, is this collection of poems called The Gallery of Upside-Down Women, and then this collection of essays called Women Who Aware Only Themselves, For Travelers on Their Sacred Journeys. But then, we all know how wonderful Elliott Bay Books is. And this morning, I discovered that they had a few copies of her anthology, so please go buy them. This anthology is called Wild Women, Seekers, Protagonists, and Goddesses in Sacred Indian Poetry. As a scholar, I will tell you this is a remarkably important book because there aren't that many anthologies that look at women writers, especially over a historical period. The only one I know of is from about 30 years ago, pathbreaking, still relevant, by Susita Roo and K. Lalitha called Women Writing India, 600 BC to the Present. So I'm very grateful to Elliot Bay for having brought this book here. So that I could add to my collection. What's interesting about this anthology, Wild Women, is that not only is there poetry from across historical time by women from different faith traditions that have been carefully translated, but there are also collections of poems by men in which women are the protagonists. And then there are what I grew up with as prayers like the Soundarya Lahari and Sridevi Mahatmyam, which also, which are the voices of the goddesses or descriptions of the goddesses, extraordinarily beautiful poetry. And I was telling Arundhati a couple minutes ago that my encounter with a lot of the sacred poetry actually came through music, through Carnatic music where I grew up listening to and singing along with a lot of this. So the relationship between music and poetry is a very important one. And I'm very excited to have this conversation with Arundhati. And we're going to start with this, Women Who Wear Only Themselves. So what that book is, is a collection of 4 essays. And in these essays, Arundhati writes about becoming a seeker because she was beginning to grapple with questions of truth, loss, belonging, and turned to reading the mystics. She writes about 4 women, Sri Annapoorni Amma, Balarishi Vishweshwarasini, I hope I'm pronouncing that right, Lata Mani, and Ma Karpuri. 4 very different women, 4 very different journeys, but connected by the quest for belonging, seeking the sacred and the divine, and in somewhat an accidental way, becoming spiritual mentors, maybe gurus to others. So first question for you, how did you meet these women? How did you choose to write about these women? So maybe you can tell us a little bit about that.

I will, but I want to start by saying thank you, Nalini, for that, for context and for framing. And thank you all for being here. And I also know that this is a lot of material to take in, so I'm trying to think of the best possible way to unpack it for you. And perhaps the best way would really be to start with Wild Women, the first book that Nalini held up, because that was really the genesis of all of this, the 2 books that have followed. It's become an inadvertent trilogy. It started with just this, that for as long as I can remember, I have read the sacred poets, mystic poets of multiple persuasions, from Hafiz to Saint John of the Cross, from Nammalwar to Tukaram to Kabir, and many between and beyond. They've rescued me when I've needed it. I am deeply grateful to them. But a question that remained for me is, where are the women? Where on earth are the women? And I began then and this happened about a decade ago, I began to feel the need to excavate the voices of women mystic poets of the Indian subcontinent. And of course, many of us, all of us, perhaps not just from India, are aware of a handful of names. Many of us know of Mirabai, for instance. Yeah? We know of Mirabai. Some of us in the south know of Andal, or Akka Mahadevi. In the north, there are people who know of Lal Ded, the 14th century Kashmiri mystic. But the problem, it seemed to me, was that these women have been flattened into states of decorative sainthood. We don't hear of them. We don't see them as women with bodies. as women with hormones, as women with hungers. We just hear of them as these kind of anemic, bloodless puffs of vapor. And that was problematic to me because every time I returned to the poetry itself, I realized there was much more going on here than simple hagiography. The very Mira whom all of us associate with just dulcet love songs to Krishna, Has a poem in which she says to her— this little bird, she says, I'll tear off your wings. I'll rub salt in your beak if you don't bring my Krishna to me. There is this kind of violence of diction that I never expected. There's Akka Mahadevi who says, take these husbands who die, decay, and feed them to your kitchen fires. Give me the imperishable one. 12th century mystic of Karnataka. There's the Dalit woman mystic of 14th century Maharashtra, Soirabai, who says, if menstrual blood makes me impure, tell me who wasn't born of that blood.

Oh.

Why had I never heard of these women? And that's how an entire process of excavation began. And I realized that there are 2 kinds. There are those, a handful, whom we know, but who have been sanitized and turned into antiseptic calendar art or plaster sainthood. And there are legions whom we haven't heard of. And to just give you a flavor of them and the sense of danger that drew me to them, I want to share a poem with you by a 13th century Marathi woman mystic, Janabai. Jana Bai has a back-slapping relationship with her god. She's a maidservant in a home, and when she's exhausted because her employers are not always very kind, Jana Bai calls on her god, Vikthala, and says, do the dishes, I'm exhausted today. When she's even more tired, she asks Vikthala to wash her hair, to delouse her. And Viṭhala, we are told by Janna, always obliges. So there's a poem by her translated by Arun Koletkar where she says very matter-of-factly, very jauntily, she says, I eat God. I drink God. I sleep on God. I buy God. I count God. I deal with God. God is here. God is there. Void is not devoid of God. God is within. God is without. And what's more, there's God to spare. That's Janabai for you.

Thank you.

There's a 17th century Kashmiri woman mystic, Rupa Bhavani, whom I wished I'd known of earlier, who in one of her poems says, I have not bowed. I never will. The one who listens stands resplendent within me. That is worship. That is what I do. Not a hierarchical bowing and scraping relationship with her God. For those of you who are allergic to the idea of God, I think it's important to remember that these women are not talking about sitting and being worshipful alone. They're talking about not settling for anything less than actually embodying the sacred. So the same Rupa Bhavani says, on the path of Shiva, become Shiva himself. It's not simply about venerating Shiva.

Thank you.

And I will come to those 4 contemporary women, but I have to share a— this is another whiff of Janna to give you a sense of this book, which is very dear to my heart. God, my darling, says Janna Bai. God, my darling, do me a favor and kill my mother-in-law. I will feel lonely when she is gone. But you will be a good God, won't you? And kill my father-in-law. I will be glad when he is gone. But you will be a good God, won't you? And kill my sister-in-law. I will be free when she is gone. I will pick up my begging bowl and be on my way. And then let them drop dead, says Jenny. Then we will be left alone, just you and I.

Oh, the 4 contemporary women you wrote about.

Yeah. So of course I was hanging around these other crazy women, and somewhere in the great hush of the pandemic, when it was just me and the computer and little else, I realized that while I'd been so busy on this process of literary archaeology trying to unearth women of the past, what I had somewhat undervalued was contemporary women. And I realized I had actually been sitting on interviews with some remarkable women whose conversations had sustained me over the past 8 years. And I went back and I started looking at those interviews again. And I realized that what began coming together was a series of essays on 4 women who are utterly diverse. Utterly. And I wanted them to be diverse because they're a reminder of the fact that the spiritual path can be walked in all kinds of ways. So one in there is on the path of Tantra. One of the women in there is on the path of bhakti, or devotion. One of the women in there is on the path of nada yoga, the yoga of sound, which leads her to places of great silence. One of the women in there is a monk. Another woman finds her spiritual journey unfolding through a consort path. No formulae at all. As many ways, as many women, as many human beings. But these 4 women for me were important Because they give you a sense of really the unmapped spiritual richness of the Indian subcontinent. We go on endlessly talking about our ancient past, which can be a bit tiresome sometimes. And here for me were examples of women who embody a living series of wisdom traditions in their own ways. They're also women who are not celebrities. So they remain largely unknown, largely undocumented. Their ashrams are not part of Lonely Planet guides. You won't find them in there. They're women who choose the murmur over the megaphone. They're not women who are celebrities in any way, and that was a vital part of this book. Also, I remember when I was in college many years ago reading a Christian feminist theologian who pointed out that if the obstacle on the path for many men— for, we are told, for everyone on a spiritual journey, the obstacle is the ego. And she asked this question that has remained with me ever since. She said, if the obstacle for men is the ego, is it really the same for women, particularly since women are so routinely encouraged to fritter away their sense of self? And so the question she left me with is, what is the point of surrender, which is something that every spiritual tradition enjoins? What is the point of surrender when you are being asked to give up a self that you've never been taught to value? What is the point of that surrender? And so that question recurs in my conversations with these 4 extraordinary women. There isn't time enough to tell you all about them, but I will just say this. It's called Women Who Wear Only Themselves. And I call it that because there's one— well, there's actually a sartorial metaphor in the book. It's not entirely metaphorical. There's a very strong element of clothing that runs through it. The monk wears ochre and wears it proudly. She talks of how she actually washes her clothes in mud. She talks of that very visceral process. But there is also another woman, Balarishi, who was coaxed into becoming a— guru, perhaps when she wasn't ready as a child. She says that she really didn't want to do it, but her parents pushed her into it because she had paranormal powers. But she could always divine, she says, as people came in, she could tell who had KitKat in their bags, who had chocolate basically. She called them in first. And so she got the name KitKat Swami for a little while. But Balarishi actually chooses, she says, to pull off the white robes of renunciation that her parents had encouraged her to wear. And she now sometimes chooses to wear blue jeans. There's a woman in ochre. There's a woman in blue jeans. And there's another woman who took my breath away because she chooses to wear no clothes at all. I remember the first time I went in to meet her. Nothing prepared me for this woman seated on that chair, completely at ease in her own body, seated like a lion. And I realized in those 4 hours I spent with her that when you peel off, as she has done, as Annapurna Amma has done, peeled off social, cultural decorum, peeled off her clothing, peeled off her associations with her family, choosing to follow a guru who's been dead for 3 centuries, but who's still very alive for her. I realized sitting there what nakedness actually means. And I realized that when you are able to live in this state of such terrifying vulnerability, that you are also in a state of formidable freedom. 'Cause there's nothing to protect. Nothing to hide, nothing to conceal. That image will remain with me too.

So one of the essays that absolutely grabbed me was the story of Lata Mani, who I know as a scholar who wrote the brilliant book on sati in British colonial India, which is still cited everywhere. And I'd heard that she'd had an accident. and quit academia. And also what was, for somebody who, she was a few years ahead of me in terms of her career. What was remarkable in the late '80s, early '90s, she was also one of the few South Asian women who was out, queer, and proud. And her partner, Ruth Frankenberg, was also very well known for her work in whiteness studies and so forth. And what really, and you sum it up very well, because you start talking to her and you say, she fascinates me because she began life as a scientist, South Asian feminist materialist academic who, as you write, is a skeptic turned spiritual apprentice, Marxist turned meditator, scholar turned bhakta. It almost seems also that Ruth Frankenberg was part of her journey in the spiritual quest. This is one of those few partnered spiritual journeys. And perhaps you could tell us a little bit more about this remarkable woman and Her struggles.

Yeah, her struggles, but also her triumphs. This is a woman who lived, as so many academics and scholars do, as so many of us do, lived largely in her mind. She was a Marxist and feminist and a very significant historian. She happened to be driving to her work, her place of work in the university one day in California, and her car collided with a Pepsi truck. And at that moment, Lata Mani's life turned turtle in more ways than one, because this woman who had spent so much of her life in her mind was now plunged into her body. And when she was plunged into her body, which was a site of excruciating pain because she was now diagnosed with a brain injury, As she went through that pain, as she breathed into that pain for months and years on end, she found that the body itself became her guide. And so her path is one that she would describe as the path of Tantra, working through the body, working with the body, seeing the body not as a barrier but as the basis of the spiritual journey. And on that journey, her guide has been— a very real guide has been for her the goddess Devi. And as real for her, and perhaps more real for her than many of us, just as that guru who's been dead for 3 and a half centuries, Sadashiva Brahmendra, is more real for Annapoorni Amma than I was when I was sitting right in front of her. Are these strange women? Absolutely. Are they oddballs? Absolutely. Would you like to invite Jena Bai, who wants to kill her mother-in-law, to your home? Perhaps not.

I might, just for the fun of it.

Well, she might do the deed for other people's mothers-in-law as well. They're inconvenient women, but to me, they just, they're staggering in their audacity, in their sheer temerity. All of them in their own way, each one of them. So, 56 women mystics down the ages, and 4 astounding contemporary women.

So, So the mystics come from a variety of religious traditions that, you know, you have Buddhist poetry, you have Lal Ded, you've talked about a Dalit mystic. Are there similarities in how they perceive these divisions of religion, caste, et cetera? Or how do— I mean, do we see any common threads running through these mystic traditions?

That they have a great appetite for life and that they will not settle for easy prescriptions. They will not settle for someone who tells them that God is just up there. They want the answers now. Their existential questions are questions that they're willing to stake their lives on. They're not asking questions that we haven't had. It's just that they're willing to stake their lives on those questions. I think that's the biggest commonality. And the fact that that appetite, the appetite for life, the appetite for the beyond, the ability to acknowledge the body, the ability to acknowledge the beyond, and not see the two as separate. That to me is wonderful, that Bala Rishi is able to talk of KitKat and menstrual blood and her— And her husband. Part of Nada Yoga and the mantras that flow through her, all in the same breath. They're not making— they're not creating easy dichotomies. As someone just told me, oh, you were— this was preceded by a session on food, and now you're going to talk about the ethereal stuff. Absolutely not. These are women who tell us that there is absolutely no difference between mud and metaphysics. No difference at all.

Thank you. So we've talked about other women on their spiritual journeys, but in this collection, The Gallery of Upside-Down Women, which I love the title, by the way, it's so whimsical and yet so representative of the way women, these women do things differently. They don't settle for a preconceived script that has been given to them. So how has— talk to us about your journey as a poet, and I suspect writing poetry is part of your own Sacred Journey. So talk to us about your poems, this collection.

I'll talk to you about them, but maybe the best way would be to read a poem from them.

Yeah.

To give you a flavor of the poems. This was inevitable given that I was hanging out with these lunatic women. It was inevitable that they would leak into my work. So I use these women in a way to talk about my own life, But equally, I try to dream my way into their lives. So the poem I'd actually like to share with you, it's called The Gallery of Upside-Down Women, largely because there was a major 6th century Tamil woman mystic, Karekala Ammayar, who chose to walk upside down, we are told.

Mm-hmm.

Who knows whether these stories are real or apocryphal? It doesn't matter. That image of the upside-down woman walking all the way from Karkal in the deep south to the Himalayas to meet Shiva is an abiding image. It's a beautiful image. But that's not the woman I want to read to you today. I'm going to read a poem— because this is a woman who's not talked of. I want to read you a poem about a 12th century mystic called Sule Sankava. Sule Sankava wrote poetry to Shiva. She was a mystic. She was also a prostitute. And in her poems, she speaks of the men around her. And she says, the men around me are unsurprising. I have a transactional relationship with them. They give me what I need. I give them what they want. It's fine. But she says, my God, my God is different. And her word for her God is Nirla Jeshwara, the God without shame, the shameless God. And this to me is one of the most exciting definitions of the divine that I have ever heard. The shameless one. You don't have to purify yourself to reach this God. He will get his hands soiled trying to reach you. You don't approach him with a shred of guilt or shame. You just approach him as you are. So Sule Sankava, it just felt she merited a poem. So I have a poem which is a dramatic monologue in her voice, which I'd like to read to you. And I have her here just reeling off a litany of names of other women mystics. You don't have to know them. I mention them because it's so important to name women. Terribly important to name women. And it's the great tragedy. It could be really— all of this is really the result of the great tragedy of forgetting them. So I name them playfully. But they're a very important part of this book and a very important part of this entire trilogy. God's forgotten nickname, Suley Sankava. Who says harlots don't have choices? We can't choose our clients, and believe me, I've seen them all. Fried, boiled, scrambled, Poached, sunny side up, runny side down. But we can choose our gods. I chose mine because he came without a name, and on some nights, without a body. I chose him because he waited his turn, didn't ask me to hurry or clean up, didn't complain about the line of shuffling men at my door. When colleagues badger me for details, I turn sassy. I say, Mahadevi's god unhoused her. Janas deloused her. Andals aroused her. Avatars doused her. Some like them fried. Others like them boiled. Some like them immaculate. I like my gods soiled. But they aren't impressed. He must have a USP, they claim. A sun sign, an address, for God's sake, a name. I grow quiet. He has a garland of fancy titles, I say, but they don't quite work for me. Perhaps he is the world's greatest lover. But how does that matter when planets shrivel and char in the flaming cemetery of his gaze? And maybe he birthed the 3 worlds beneath the delirious hurricane of his feet. But how does that even count if he's too bloody innocent to read The lurch and plummet of a contrarian heart, the fine print of my breath. And yet, he is mine, friends. He is mine for a simple reason. For he rushes to my side when I utter his darkest, most intimate, most forgotten, nickname, the one coveted by every god there is, my god without shame. Thank you.

So we have a few minutes left. I think we should open it up to questions because I could keep talking to you for like a couple hours and we don't have that time. So I can't— because of the lighting, I can't see if someone's got their hands up. But I think there's microphones going around. So, sorry, excuse me.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I first wish to thank you for highlighting all these voices of women who've been hidden by time, by society.

I love the fact that you are highlighting the spiritual poetry of women, but that makes me think of—

all those voices which were not preserved perhaps through the centuries because their poems were not considered spiritual? You think there's any hope for women who may have the most authentic, truth-filled poetry but are not covered under the umbrella of religion, devotion, and spirituality? We must make distinctions here, which is why there's a— there are lots of distinctions to be made between the religious, the doctrinal, the theological, The spiritual, right? So would Sule Sankava have customarily been considered a religious poet? Perhaps not. She's a prostitute who chooses to speak to Shiva. But she's— I would see her— I'm putting them under the broad rubric of mystic poet. But are there other women who need to be mapped? Men, women? You can do endless kinds of mapping. This is one kind of mapping. There are other maps waiting to be made of all kinds. But to my mind, what's exciting about the finest sacred poetry everywhere is that it blurs the boundaries always. It is always deeply sensual, deeply sensual. There are erotic poems in there which we haven't had the time to read. So I think a lot of these are also— the idea is also to throw us back on our own binaries. And to make us think about those too. Yeah.

Hi, thank you for sharing. I'm a Tamilian, so this is the first time I've heard avvayyar used in completely different context, so that's cracked open something for me. 2-part question. You've talked about different paths that people are— bhakti yoga and etc. Which path are you on, and how does one find out? The second part is, how does one find out The path for themselves? Like, is it always one path or multitudes?

That's a wonderful question. I think the path is always a combination of things because each one of us has head and heart and mind and is capable of action. So we're all in different doses of the same thing. The only way to find out is to burn a little and to allow yourself to discover a path that feels deeply true for you. And often you're improvising as you go along. It's not a prescribed path. I don't think any one of us today is on a— or very few of us, unless we are on monastic paths like Markarpuri in the book. Most of us are evolving a path as we go along. For many people, for me certainly, having a practice, a daily practice, has helped enormously.

Yes. I have a quick question. In the back, all the way in the back. Oh. I'm from the Nair tradition in Kerala, which is obviously a little bit different in its orientation, just because it actually has a more prominent place for women in the family. Our family name and property is actually passed on by the women. And our religious tradition is very much surrounded by, or is encapsulated by, a worship of Maryamma, which is The family goddess. It's not— it's much more personal. There's usually a family temple. It's usually in the backyard. I'm wondering if you've done any research on that or how this might connect with some of the things you've learned about.

Well, I mean, I wouldn't know specifically about her, but I do know that there are lots of poems in this book that are goddess poems. So there is a tripartite division. There are women seekers. There are women who are seeking the divine, and there is the divine feminine herself who is addressed. So there are canonical goddesses, mainstream goddesses, tribal goddesses, folk goddesses, and of course, the goddesses of the clan. So many of them have— the genealogies are linked. They're not as separate as we might think. They're quite linked. There are some Aryaman poems in the book, actually. Yeah. Yes.

Well, Devika has signaled that our session time—

Sorry. No, Devika, you cannot.

OK. One more question.

No, we can't. Wait a minute. Here's when I take over from the moderator.

Moderator has ruled. Poet does not.

Moderator has to be— I cannot conclude without reading you a poem. You have to conclude with a poem.

Absolutely.

So it's against the rules of a poetry reading. to end with prose. I have 5 minutes, so I can take that question. Yeah.

Go, go, go. Yeah. Go, go. Somebody has a mic here. Just please allow her to ask the question.

Oh, I don't know where it is. I have it.

Oh, yes. Is it on? Okay. I love that the Wild Women book, I just dipped through it. And talking of Carnatic music, in the Dasa tradition, there is the Nindastuti. Which of your poetesses there have nindasutis that we can research?

Oh, gosh. You should look at Habba Khatun for a start, the Kashmiri woman poet. But some of the best nindasutis are also written by men. So let's not forget Namdev and his wonderful litany of expletives. This is a terrific literary inheritance that we have in the subcontinent. swear at God and love him in the very same breath. So you throw a tantrum and you call it a prayer as long as you address it to God. It's wonderful. Yes?

It's just been really beautiful.

It's been just really beautiful and a treat hearing you.

And my question is, would you be willing to share your journey and your path and how it's evolved? Arundhati, there's one last question here also. Will you hear both of them together?

OK, I'll hear them together and reply with a poem. Yes. Yeah. Mine is more a request. Here.

I'm here.

I loved how you blended the intellectual, the embodied, the spiritual, and the material.

One thing I had is, just as we have many minds, we have many bodies, especially as women.

We have the maternal body.

We have the lustful body.

We have the menstruating body.

And I was wondering, looking at the poets, which— Yes.

body spoke to you in the poem you loved best? What a wonderful question.

Wow.

So I'm going to answer that very quickly by saying I have a whole series of Avvaiyar poems. There you were asking about Avvaiyar. Avvaiyar is a Tamil woman mystic whom we are told chose the aged body. She chose to become a crone. I'm deeply fascinated by the figure of the crone. Even Amrapali, the Buddhist nun, whom we— many of us in India have seen as the beautiful Vijayanti Malla when she acted as the courtesan of Vaishali. But the Amrapali in the Therigatha is different in that it's an extraordinary Buddhist anthology where Amrapali looks down at her aging body. She moves southward anatomically from top to bottom. And she's mapping her body, what it once was, what it now is. And there's heartbreak, but there's also pride. So I have a long poem of my own in the gallery of Upside Down Women to Amrapali. And I wish I could answer your question, but I don't think Devika is going to forgive me.

2 minutes. Go ahead. 2 minutes. Maybe you want to read your poem. Read your poem.

We're going to talk afterwards. The reason I'm going to read this poem is because every time we mention words like sacred, people believe that one is— has to settle into a state of solemnity. And yes, there are some crazy women in this book, and they're meant to be taken seriously, but that doesn't mean there's anything solemn about them. You heard that in Sule Sankava. And this is about contemporary women. It is also, if you're not a woman, it is about chai. So it's an anthem to women and it's an anthem to chai. I'm going to end with that.

Yeah?

When 2 women drink chai together. All's well in the world when 2 women drink chai together. Time holds its breath. Star anise glitters. Ginger gives up the ghost. Lemongrass grows rogue. Cinnamon is less sinned against than sinning. Bodhidharma awakens when 2 women drink chai together. Aeolian harps trill. Kettle drums roll. Mind meets heart. Part becomes whole. Apothecaries smile and sommeliers Sing. Lao Tzu intones the Tao Te Ching. Nilgiri meets Darjeeling when 2 women drink chai together. Froth of jade, jewel dew, ancient cauldron, friendship brew. One's a hermit, 10's a jamboree. The perfect number is always 3. A cackling duo and a pot of tea. 2 women drinking chai together. There will be time to love our men, but not when caffeine meets estrogen. The defense budget and the state of AI must stand aside as earth meets sky. Ours is not to question why. Teaspoons tango and Hippos fly when 2 women drink chai together. There will be a time when both God and beast are included in our cosmic feast. And one day it won't be out of line to quaff a martini or a bottle of wine. But right now, friend, it's been too long. Ooh, long. Ooh, long. Ooh, bloody long. Since 2 women Drank chai together.

Thank you. Thank you very much, Arundhati. Next time you're in town, we're going to be the 2 women who drink chai.