Author: borderlesssg1

Categories
Stories

Magic Afloat in the Air

A Short story by Gauri Mishra

Paharganj. Photo credit: Wiki

She had never thought it would end like this. A chance meeting in a food trail which culminated in the lanes of Paharganj was quite an ordinary occurrence for Sagari. She considered herself a foodie and anything to do with eating captured her attention. Not that she minded any adventures…in fact just the thought of staying at home for a prolonged period of time depressed her. However, this particular day had a lot more in store than just a food trail…

She had been careful not to crush her crisp cotton dupatta when she boarded the metro in the morning. The shared auto ride till the station had messed up her hair a little but she liked that unkempt look. The bright pink kurta was a sign of her enthusiasm and complimented her dusky look. The kohl rimmed eyes were mysterious and honey-coloured giving her an air of aloofness. Just the prospect of meeting a whole bunch of strangers filled her with excitement.

The food trail had already begun when she joined the motley group of people, old and young including a gray-haired man who looked a little out of place with his crisp white shirt and dark trousers, a couple of middle-aged women whose idea of coming on a food trail had little else beyond food and a bunch of over-enthusiastic teenagers who couldn’t stop talking even while the others strained to hear what the guide was telling them about the sweet shop in Chandni Chowk.

The only other person who had come alone besides herself was a young man who had a quiet demeanor and reminded her of the lanky hero in those early Amitabh Bachchan starrers. He had noticed her immediately but seemed in no hurry to strike a conversation. She kept asking questions and the others looked disenchanted with her curiosity about the origins of dhabas (street side eateries) and their owners’ pride in hoarding family recipes. She loved everything about the walk and the little discoveries of secret recipes, the smells and the aroma of spices and the delectable food that filled her senses with a pleasure that was hard to resist.

The young man who had shown no interest in her so far intrigued her. His lack of enthusiasm acted as a trigger for her to take it up as a mission. The pattern was the same always, the more a man ignored her, the more interested she became in knowing how to get his attention. It is not too hard to decipher that she succeeded nine out of ten times. For her, this too was an adventure…unraveling the enigma behind the ordinary exterior and then getting to know the person.

The trail ended before time as the sun had already set and the cool breeze had lulled everyone into silence. The chaiwala (tea stall owner) at the corner of the street was definitely a temptation and she decided to walk up to him for a strong cup of tea. As if on cue, the young man followed her to the bench which didn’t seem too inviting and served more as an indication of the chaiwala’s existence. That is when she noticed the steady gaze which seemed to linger on her.

Immediately conscious of her hair, she made a cursory attempt to look a little more presentable. By then he had taken both their teas from the chaiwala and was holding on to them, waiting for her to reclaim hers from his hand.

“Thanks …you didn’t have to do this.”

“It’s all right, thought I’ll wait for you to finish.”

That is when she realized that her bag’s zipper had come undone and she was still struggling to close it.

Why do these clumsy things happen when you are in decent company? She thought to herself.

The tea had become inconsequential by now. It was almost as if they had both been aware of the ploy which had finally brought them this proximity.

By now, she had gained her composure. It was strange how naturally they both hit it off and the leisurely walk in one of the Paharganj lanes seemed like the most obvious choice of activity. Neither of them was in a hurry. On the contrary, the prospect of spending the next few hours in each other’s company was exciting enough. He kept listening to her incessant chatter about her little room in a shared flat and how it seemed insufficient for her adventurous mind with its creative thoughts and ideas.

She loved to go out, alone mostly and explore the city which had given her an identity. She seemed to know a lot about Delhi, considering the short span of her stay here. She looked eager, starting a new sentence before the first one had finished…laughing at the little jokes which he made with a straight face. Her eyes were full of the joy that comes from living your own life your way and there was no way he could not be fascinated with her charming figure which wasn’t slim but had an interestingly voluptuous look which his male imagination had assessed much earlier in the day.

They decided to eat, and a curiously winding staircase fascinated them into climbing up to a roof-top restaurant which had a quaint look and a wide terrace with stray benches strewn around giving it a strangely nonchalant air, as if the atmospherics were least interested to know who the occupants were. A plate of momos followed by a few beers were enough to make them comfortable with each other.

He cajoled her into a space where she just wanted to live in the moment. He was not the kind of man who looked threatening, instead he had an easy air about him, almost as if there was very little in the world that could jolt him out of his composure. She was equally relaxed, almost on the verge of putting her head on his shoulder, the beer making her feel lighter and happier. The wrought iron bench in the corner of the terrace, with an adventurous branch of the Neem tree winding up to it seemed to offer an invitation and they eased into it, both anticipating an interesting end to this day.

The very essence of this night was the silence around them…most of the people in the restaurant had left and there was nobody to check on them or even ask them to leave…it wasn’t that kind of a place where people intruded into your conversations to ask you to leave. It was the kind of place which let you be and trusted you enough to find your way out.

They talked about life, relationships, travails of living in a big city, and about their dreams which always seemed to be round the corner but remained elusive. She had never imagined she was capable of this. Talking through the night with somebody she had met a few hours ago.

It surprised her a little…her comfort zone and how easily she could treat herself to an adventure. In fact, when the dawn broke, and she took a cab home, deciding to drop him to the next metro station, he didn’t seem too averse to the idea. It was pretty clear to both of them that the romance of the night was over…the magical rapport they had felt with each other seemed to fade away in the sunlight. Their realities had shaken hands and said their goodbyes.

She was quite sure she wouldn’t see him again. What she couldn’t figure out was her own impulse and that carpe diem spirit which ruled her mind on most days.

This happened to her a lot and her consciousness berated her each time she thought about her seven-year-old relationship with her boyfriend who worked in the US. It seemed to her a minor factual detail in her bemused existence. It was almost as if she wanted to have a fill of her stray encounters with men, she found interesting. Was it her way of finding the truth about her committed relationship or just a series of casual adventures?

She had no clue and although these questions kept popping up like little droplets of water on a windowpane, there was never an immediate need to clear the surface and peep into her mind.

Life can be quite uncertain, she told this to herself often enough. The thought of marriage and moving to another country was going to happen at some faraway juncture.

For now, she was pleased with the way her career at this startup was shaping up, she was content to go on her solitary walks in this beautiful city, listen to her favorite melodies in the rain, enjoy her food trails and take innumerable pictures, read to her hearts’ content on lazy weekend mornings. If life had anything more to offer, she was in no immediate haste to get there. She told herself often…tomorrow is another day.

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Dr Gauri Mishra is teaching as Associate Professor in the department of English at College of Vocational Studies, University of Delhi. She likes to dabble in poetry and short fiction from time to time. She is very passionate about teaching and also heads the placement cell of her college.

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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL. 

Categories
Stories

Flash Fiction: Tears of a Revered Mother

Mereen Nizar

Written in Balochi by Mereen Nizar, translated by  Ali Jan Maqsood

That unpleasant winter night breaks my heart. My mother sobbed loudly and stated with tearful words, “Better than this life, I had tied a rope on my neck and killed myself. What misfortune! What sin have I committed that I am being punished?”

After these words, Mother wiped her tears.  

I was caged with chains of childhood and immaturity. My thoughts were next to nothing. I could not start to comprehend the anguish of my mother. I felt so vague and dumb.

While I shed tears in a corner by the wall, my mother, lay on her stomach and continued to sob.

Time moved faster. I, as a lame, was dragged along with time towards an unknown destination.

I felt my experiences were maturing me.

And then I witnessed again a similar winter night — my mother — the exact walls and home, but there appeared marks of cruelty on her.

She had lost the courage to be alive. She was inconsolable. Crying and lamenting had depleted her youthfulness. Age had crept in on her and humbled her.

The mother, sitting on the funeral of her innocent child, was missing him.

I continued to be the same person, attached to the same walls of the home. I wandered like a lost soul with grief haunting my thoughts. My eyes began to rain with tears. By then, my mother was not alone. I, too, was torn with pains and worries.

The world had changed: many had lost the game of life, many had won. Many were homeless. People were yet moaning under the fallen walls of weariness. One among them was the same old lady who had lost the game of life and was shouldered by four people. She was kept under sanctuary of the Motherland.

I realised the place and situations had changed. My mother’s laments had ceased. The Motherland had sheltered my mother. The sky began to shed its tears along with mine. I apprehended my mother was shedding her tears for me from the sky.

Mereen Nizar is a Balochi fiction writer and an M.phil scholar in the field of Botony. He writes for different local newspapers and magazines.

Ali Jan Maqsood is a student of Law at University Law College Quetta and can be reached at alijanmaqsood17@gmail.com. He tweets at @Alijanmaqsood12

Originally published in Balochi language in Tawar newspaper in 2015. 

PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

Categories
The Literary Fictionist

Near the River Chenab and Under The trees

Sunil Sharma takes us on a journey to the banks of a river where life, love and death sheathed in terrorism cumulate to a peak

River Chenab: Photo Courtesy — Wiki

The River Chenab can be addictive.

It has a strange pull.

He comes daily to meditate on its grassy right bank.

And to find nirvana.

At the top of the stone staircase, a few steps away from the small shrine to the local deity, he sits and watches the Chenab flow majestically to its far-off home. Across the river, in the vast dusty plain, stands a grove of trees, in the distance. He can see the tree spirits dancing in the mildly-dark grove — like the dryads in an ancient Greek sacred grove. Mysterious airy figures flitting in the air.  The winter morning sun splashes colours in its gurgling waters. Dusk in that lonely plain paints the beautiful river in flaming orange!

He finds the interplay of the sun and the river mesmerizing. Misty December, the shrouded river is sad and abandoned, meandering its way quietly in the fields. The silence of the Chenab could be both healing and frightening. He seeks out the broad-shouldered river like a child hunting for his mother in a deserted house.

The Chenab speaks silently to him, as it has always spoken to its seekers from previous ages. The waters exert a strange fascination over him. He finds the buried centuries on the bed of the river that has irrigated the soul of many states and communities. Chenab is the breath of the people. The moment he sits, the lost centuries leap out of the glinting waters and he can hear folk songs, drum beats and dancers dancing around the bonfires burning in the village square, on moonlit nights. The cold winds of December cannot dampen the general mood of festivities. He can clearly hear the folk singers singing in throaty voices before the assembled rural audiences; the fair maidens blushing and the hardy young men twirling their moustaches. It is a strange riverine world that he witnesses daily from his elevated perch.

One late morning, he found both love and death near the eternal Chenab within a short span of one hour.

First he discovered love.

As he was walking near the Chenab with a blank mind, eyes seeing, yet unseeing, he saw her crying. A solitary woman, younger, in yellow salwar-kameez and red dupatta, sitting on a stone ledge, her feet dangling in the gently-flowing Chenab.  A bird was singing in the clump of trees ahead, near the right bank, her notes melancholy, musical and edifying. Both were surprised by the presence of the other at such a desolate spot.

He had rounded a long bend in the quiet river and immediately came upon the sobbing woman. The bend was in a remote corner and hardly visited by the busy villagers. He was shocked by the unexpected sighting of a fair maiden on a boulder at the edge of the river. She looked like a lost nymph, vulnerable and sad, suddenly appearing out of the cold river, before a startled human traveller. He was rooted to the ground, the river hummed in the tranquil morning.

Her face was very fair, eyes large and kohl-lined, framed by a mass of dark hair. The tears were big and rapid, sobs silent and shaking. Her face was cupped in a pair of white plump hands; a soundless cry escaping from a small open and full mouth. He saw her and felt smitten by this picture of stunning beauty, innocence and vulnerability. The dormant knight awakened quickly, after a hiatus of centuries long dead and interned in some tiny DNA sequence.

He wanted to reach out and protect her like the knights of yore.

At that precise moment, the damsel in distress looked up at this strange apparition from nowhere. Her doe-eyes first registered fear on seeing what she presumed was a predatory male figure. Then, they moved on to look helpless and trapped. She was paralyzed by this abrupt human encounter on a spot where no other being could be espied other than the couple destined to meet in a most dramatic way.

She stared, open-mouthed, tears still coursing down her oval face.

“Why are you crying?” He asked, his voice a little awkward but firm.

The query and the unexpected concern made her dissolve into a fresh bout of tears. The reassuring voice belonging to a stranger in an alien, deserted setting can trigger the release of hidden pain in a gentle human heart. She cried, uncontrollably. He watched. Both helpless and bonding in a strange way over the common form of rumination that can visit the human race so frequently and at odd hours.

Unbidden, he waded through the water, climbed the rock on which she was perched and hugged her tenderly, right hand giving reassuring taps to her upper half of the trembling body. The two entwined figures in a vast desolate place, in a timeless gesture of magnetic empathy were lost to the sense of time as the watch ceased to tick and the Earth stopped. She found him and his embrace harmless but comforting — the way strangers hug each other and comfort during national tragedies of epic scales. The two young clung to each other in a tight embrace and love was born in their lonely hearts.

After they had separated and she had washed her tear-stained face, he repeated his original question, tense modified, “Why were you crying?”

She said, face downcast, voice frail from crying, “Stepmother.”

“Oh!” He got it. “Are you from this village?”

“No,” said the woman demurely.

“Your name?”

“Aisha.”

He said nothing. They continued to sit on the boulder, a little higher, surveying the surrounding scene. The bird had stopped singing in the nearby clump of trees. A stork flew in the languid air. A tractor could be heard on the dirt road somewhere in the background.

“Your name?” She asked, long lashes fluttering.

“Iqbal.”

“Muslim?”

“Nope. Iqbal Singh.”

She said nothing.

Then he asked,“Your village?”

“Six kms from here.”

“Why did you select this hour and spot?” Iqbal asked.

“I wanted to die. Away from my family and ancestral village…Did not want to disgrace my father. I chose this place where nobody would come and find me or my dead body. I want to die.”

“Die?” Iqbal asked mouth open, eyes uncomprehending. Like drowning a priceless gift in an angry or desperate moment.

“Just that. Sometimes you want to die—to escape being a motherless poor daughter or a woman unwanted in home and society. Nobody cares for me. I am becoming a burden to them.” Her tone was now quiet and firm. Thoughts in order and lucid.

“Age?”

“Do not ask a woman her age,” she said and laughed a clear laugh that rose and blended with the stratosphere. Typical mood swings! “Completed my eighteen years last month. They want me to marry an old widower of my caste and community. I want to study. My stepmother is cruel. She hates me and beats me daily. The widower is her distant relative. A wealthy landlord twice widowed. Giving a lot of dowry. My greedy mother is eager to sell me off to that old lecher. I ran away in a bus to this village and from the village square, came down to this spot.”

“Then?” Iqbal asked the run-away.

“I reached the deserted spot. Climbed up this high boulder in the middle of the river and wanted to take a leap into the rushing cold waters. I took the first steps also…”

“Then?” Asked Iqbal the way kids ask the story-telling tired mothers during bed-time at night.

“I clearly heard a voice.”

“Voice?”

“Yes. The voice that commanded me to stop from drowning.”

Iqbal, surprised, looked around but saw only wild terrain.

“I do not see any mortal here,” he said, holding her hand in his.

“It was not mortal. It came from the world of the dead.”

“What?”

“It was the voice of my dead ammi jaan,” she said. “I know the voice. It commanded me to stop and a hand pulled me off. I sat down and cried. My ammi jaan still cares for me beyond her grave. Her voice is still silky and soft. She doted on me, my poor mother. Then, she sent you here to me.”

The low voice melted his heart. He felt moved. He tightened his grasp — to prevent her slipping through his grip into the watery grave. Her plump hand did not resist. It remained limp and soft; like the hand of a yielding baby to the security of an adult care-giver.

“Your plans?”

“I will not go home. I will stay here.”

“Then, some jungle creature will eat you here in the night.”

“I do not care,” she said. “My home is also not safe.”

“I understand,” Iqbal said in a soothing voice. “I will not leave you here in the wild. You may get attacked by the wolves or hyenas. It is not safe. Or serpents. Or, stray drunk men.”

She said nothing. Only her dainty hand tightened her grasp over his broad muscular hand.

“Come with me to my home.”

“No.” She said, eyes scared.

“Why?” Iqbal asked, a little irritated.

“You are not us. You are them. How can I trust you?” She spoke clearly and frankly. Tone neutral. Stating a cold fact to the world in general.

“Have I done anything wrong? Immoral? Tell me. Did I molest you?” He asked callously and then realised his mistake as tears welled up immediately in her innocent eyes, stung more by the tonal harshness of this strange rescuer than the helpless predicament of a female run-away.

Iqbal softened quickly, “Come and eat there and then decide. I am not going to harm you in any way. Or, my family. We are honourable family of the Sikhs. I do not wear a turban or long hair. My father is a high-school head master and very respected in our small village. My elder brother is a police officer. I am studying in a nearby city college. I am an athlete. Do not worry. Come on. A long way to go.”

She remained undecided for long. Sitting on the boulder, immobile. More vulnerable and rudderless.

Iqbal stood up and lifted her tenderly in his arms, waded through the knee-deep waters and then planted her back on the dry ground. She said nothing.

She trusts me, Iqbal thought. A major battle won. “If you do not find my home safe, let me know. I will inform your family immediately.”

She said nothing. Drained out and limp, Aisha leaned slightly on his broad arm for support.

They started the new journey together; a journey determined by mysterious forces of the universe that no amount of rationalism can ever explain. A mere walk along the bank of the River Chenab had produced a most unlikely scenario for Iqbal. The river that had earlier fashioned legendary love stories of Heer-Ranjha and Soni-Mahiwal had now conspired to re-script the same folk narrative in a new format for these two 21st century young adults. Quietly the duo took the shortcut through the clump of whispering trees. And witnessed their last event…

The thick clump was on a steep rugged incline and afforded a good view of the riverine wilderness below. It led to the dirt road and to the village. As they entered the clump of the tall sturdy trees, they were stopped by another loud sound coming from the plain below, from the opposite side. They stopped and peered from behind the thick hedges and wild undergrowth. They could see a jeep coming up the dirt track, sound magnified by the empty silent plain. They held their breaths.

Soon the open jeep stopped and five tall and slim men climbed down from it. They were wearing masks and carrying guns. A sixth person, a blindfolded captive, was pulled down roughly from the back of the jeep.

Death was in the air.

One of the masked men fished out a folding chair from the dirty floor of the jeep and after unfolding it, forced the blindfolded man to sit down. Another man took out a handycam and began to record the scene. Satisfied, he nodded. Then another man stepped out from the loose group and faced the camera, voice booming in the wild, “We are going to behead the agent of imperialist America and Zionism. This man was acting on behalf of these powers and supported by the Indian government. Our next target will be the Indian government. We plan to destroy these unholy powers on the Earth. Long live the revolutionaries!”

The man next to the seated figure ripped out the blind folds of their captive. Iqbal gasped. It was a famous Western journalist, who had been kidnapped three months ago near the Chenab and whose face had been earlier beamed on all the TV news channels. The man looked ashen and withdrawn. His face looked haggard, although freshly-shaven and scrubbed. His hands and legs were then neatly tied  and the camera started shooting the gruesome episode. A man whipped out a sword from a sack and cleaned it slowly before the dazed foreigner, in a deliberate sadistic act. He was smiling crookedly. The commander of the group asked playfully, “Any last wishes?”

“No,” said the journalist in his late thirties, somewhat defiantly.

“You arrogant agents!” Exclaimed the commander loudly. “So haughty towards death!”

The journalist, beyond any uncertainties of life and death, spat out: “Cowards!”

Another man hit him hard on his face. The journalist did not flinch. His eyes blazed. He had reached the stage of no pain and fear. A state that stared  death in the eyes. “Leave the bugger. He is going to be beheaded soon,” said the commander. “He deserves it.”

The journalist laughed, startling others. “By killing innocent people like me you militants cannot shake the strong foundations of old nations and civilisations. Hatreds lead nowhere. Dialogue and sanity are productive. Violence and hatred can be counter-productive. They are useless. Bloodshed will lead you nowhere.”

The men were stunned by this slow outburst of a trapped civilian facing his own absurd execution at the hands of a few zealots fighting wars on behalf of the terror groups.

“Stop his voice,” commanded the man in ski-mask.

“No. Just record it for the whole world to see. They must know a journalist went down, fearless and defiant. My sacrifice will not go waste. You are all mad guys. Toxic guys spewing venom at innocent law-abiding citizens…”

The sentence was cut short mid-way by the swoop of the gleaming sword of the killer. A neat arc and the head rolled down, still partially connected to the neck. The handycam kept on recording the heinous act in a careful manner. Precisely. Clinically. In a detached way.

The killer raised his hand and this time cut away the loosely-held head of his human victim, eyes scornful and defiant; still triumphant in sudden death to his gleeful killers. The short stocky headless body, in fatigues, convulsed violently for minutes.

This was being recorded faithfully by a steady hand. After a few minutes, the gunmen danced around the decapitated body, firing guns in the air, unsettling the birds that made a racket and flew away. The gunmen left the headless body on the chair and before leaving, called up a few TV news channels and informed them of the location and of the job done. Then they departed, the jeep kicking up clouds of gravel and dust on the dirt track going up to the jungle.

When Iqbal — speechless and completely numbed by the sudden brutality and mindless violence choreographed with skill by militants in ski-masks carrying sophisticated weapons in a red modified Hummer, with high-fi communications system — looked around, he saw his frail female companion lying unconscious on the carpet of the moist grass and fallen leaves, fanned by a cool breeze in the clump of trees. Shaky, slightly trembling and nauseous, the tall and graceful athlete sat down on the green bed, trying to make sense of a world gone bloodthirsty and lawless.

He looked up to the sky for quick answers, sitting beside the prostrate body of the young woman. His faith  shaken, he waited for some comforting answers from the blue vault above. Only a sun shone weakly there and a group of shrieking predatory birds circled above the dead body of an unfortunate and helpless man in the middle of a thorny wasteland near the bloodied red-Chenab. The trees whispered quietly and then Iqbal also passed out, dreaming of a quiet village home and his loving parents and of the tenuous security of such a familiar environment…

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Sunil Sharma is the editor of SETU. He is a senior academic, critic, literary editor and author with 21 published books, seven collections of poetry, three of short fiction, one novel, a critical study of the novel, and, eight joint anthologies on prose, poetry and criticism, and, one joint poetry collection. 

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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

Categories
Essay

The Syncretic Lore of Guru Nanak’s Legacy

While skirmishes continue to line the borders of India, Sameer Arshad Khatlani, author of The Other Side of the Divide, explores the deeply embedded syncretic elements in the heritage left behind by the founder of Sikhism. Part of his legacy still lives on in Pakistan.

‘Beating of Retreat’ Ceremony at International Border at Wagha. Photo Courtesy: Wiki

Poet-philosopher Muhammad Iqbal’s ‘tremendous work’, wrote German writer Hermann Hesse (1877–1962), belonged to the world of Islam apart from two other domains of the worlds of India, and of Western thought. In his book Incarnations, academic Sunil Khilnani echoes Hesse and notes that Iqbal (1877-1938) was “deeply engaged with the histories, themes, and conflicts embedded in Islamic thought and in literary traditions that fired his imagination.” 

Islam was certainly an important theme of Iqbal’s poetry. But he also wrote about important figures of other religions glowingly in the spirit of his famous couplet: “Mazhab nahin sikhata aapas mei bair rakhna, Hindi hai ham vatan hai Hindustan hamara (religion does not teach us animosity, we are Indians and India is our country).” “Hai Ram ke vajud pe Hindustan ko naaz, ahl-e-nazar samajhte hain is ko imam-e-hind (while India is proud of Ram, priests also teach us about Allah),’’ wrote Iqbal, highlighting the reverence that a vast majority of Indians felt for Lord Ram.

Of all the non-Islamic religious icons, Iqbal perhaps wrote most admiringly about Sikhism founder Guru Nanak, whom he hailed as “mard-e kaamil (perfect man)”. His poem titled Nanak starts with a lament that “our people paid no heed to the message of Gautam [Buddha]”; did not recognise the worth of that “jewel of supreme wisdom”. It then refers to Nanak and says the perfect man “awakened India from a deep slumber”. In another poem, Iqbal pairs Nanak with Muslim saint Moinuddin Chishti, who was a direct descendant of the Prophet Muhammad. “The land (India) in which Chishti delivered the message of truth; the garden in which Nanak sang the song of oneness that homeland is mine, that homeland is mine.” 

Iqbal was born, raised, and died in pre-partition Punjab, the land of Nanak, which was divided between India and Pakistan in 1947. The division triggered violence, left tens of thousands of dead, and led to a virtual exchange of populations between the two parts of Punjab. It tore apart the region’s centuries-old milieu of co-existence imbibed in Nanak’s philosophy.

Nanak remains a unifier even as the vivisection continues to take a heavy toll on the subcontinent. India and Pakistan have fought three wars over Jammu and Kashmir (J&K), where conflict remains a legacy of the Partition. The two countries were on the verge of another war in February 2019 when India carried out a retaliatory airstrike in Pakistan following a car bomb attack in J&K.

Relations between India-Pakistan worsened in August 2019 following the stripping of J&K’s special status that prompted Islamabad to take steps like the downgrading of diplomatic ties. The upheavals had no impact on the Kartarpur Corridor that provides visa-free access for Indian pilgrims to Gurdwara Darbar Sahib built at Nanak’s last resting place in Pakistan. The corridor was completed and opened within a year on November 9, 2019, three days before Nanak’s 550th birth anniversary.

Gurdwara Darbar Sahib remains an enduring symbol of Nanak’s legacy, which is more relevant today when divisive political leaders rule the roost and all pillars of democracy appear to be succumbing to majoritarianism. It is built at a place where a group of Hindus and Muslims are believed to have found flowers underneath a white sheet when they performed Nanak’s last rites. The two sides agreed to divide the sheet and flowers among themselves. Muslims buried their share and built a mazaar or mausoleum in Nanak’s memory. The Hindus put their piece of the sheet and flowers in an urn and buried it.

Nanak and Sikhism’s association with Muslims has been far deeper than what is generally known. His Muslim teacher was the first to point out how blessed Nanak was as a child. He called Nanak gifted and understood before anyone else could that the Guru’s vastly superior intelligence was because of the blessing. Rai Bular, a Muslim landlord, prevailed on Nanak’s father, Mehta Kalu, to be patient with his son’s otherworldly pursuits. Kalu was worried as Nanak wandered with holy men. Kalu wanted Nanak to study. Bular convinced Kalu to let Nanak be and reported miracles associated with the Guru which convinced him of Nanak’s holiness. 

Bular is known as Nanak’s first devotee outside his family. Janam-sakhis, or Nanak’s life stories, and the Sikh scripture Guru Granth Sahib have several references to Bular. Bular is believed to have reported a hooded cobra shielding the Guru from the sun when he lay asleep under the open sky as another sign of Nanak’s spiritualism. Bular is also the one who is said to have noticed that a tree’s shade remained on a sleeping Nanak even as the sun’s position changed. He is reported to have rushed to tell Kalu that his son was an exalted being upon observing this.  Bular convinced Kalu that Nanak was ‘a gem, a man of God‘ and dedicated large tracts of land to the Guru. Much of the modern-day Nankana Sahib, including Gurdwara Janam Asthan, built at the place of Nanak’s birth, is located on the land Bular bequeathed to the Guru.

Bular’s descendants lead annual processions to celebrate Nanak’s birthday in Nankana Sahib.  Rai Hadayat, Bular’s 17th generation descendant, had the honour of leading Nanak’s 500th birth celebration. Bular’s descendants have been the custodians of Nanak’s estate.  Rai Mohammad Saleem Akram, Bular’s descendant, now manages the estate. The revenue generated from the estate is spent on the welfare of the local Sikh community and the upkeep of gurdwaras in Nankana Sahib. 

Maharaja Ranjit Singh, the Sikh Empire founder who came from the same Bhatti Rajput heritage as Bular, recognised his contribution to Sikhism. He bestowed the title of Rai Bhadur on his descendant, Rai Issa Khan, and made him a revenue collector.  More recently, the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak (management) Committee (SGPC) acknowledged Bular’s “immense contribution” to Sikh history in May 2018 by putting up his portrait at Amritsar’s Central Sikh Museum. 

Another Muslim, Nawab Rai Kahla, made it to the Sikh hall of fame in July 2017. The SGPC unveiled his portrait at the museum in recognition of the courage he showed in sheltering Guru Gobind Singh, one of Nanak’s nine spiritual successors, in 1705. Kahla, a vassal of Aurangzeb who ruled a small principality in present-day Indian Punjab, offered Guru Gobind refuge in defiance of a Mughal decree to hunt down the 10th Sikh master, who was at war with the Mughal Emperor.

Kahla’s descendants are the custodians of Guru Gobind’s holy pitcher called ganga sagar which he was given as a token of gratitude along with a sword for sheltering the guru. Ganga sagar is believed to hold water despite its asymmetrical holes. Former Pakistani lawmaker Rai Azizullah Khan is the relic’s current custodian. He inherited it in 1975 from his family, which managed to carry the prized relic with them when they fled to Pakistan at the time of the Partition.

In 1705, the goodwill generated by the Malerkotla ruler, Nawab Sher Mohammad Khan, for speaking up against the execution of Guru Gobind’s sons, Zorawar and Fateh, has held his successors and principality in good stead since. The small kingdom in India was an island of calm; a Muslim sanctuary in East Punjab when the neighbouring areas were emptied of Muslims in 1947. Malerkotla continues to be East Punjab’s only Muslim pocket.

Folk history attributes Guru Gobind’s blessings to Malerkotla’s unique history. He is said to have blessed the nawab when he learnt about his letter to Aurangzeb protesting the un-Islamic execution of Zorawar and Fateh. By the time the nawab stirred the Mughal consciousness over the injustice, it was too late. But his gesture was not lost on Guru Gobind. He is said to have declared “his roots shall forever remain green”. 

The rubabi tradition of performing devotional songs, kirtans, at gurdwaras is associated with the descendants of Nanak’s Muslim companion, Bhai Mardana. Guru Nanak sang his poetry to the tunes of a lute-like musical instrument, rubab, that Mardana played. Mardana’s descendants came to be known as the rubabis. The rubabis had performed kirtans at the Golden Temple for seven generations since Guru Tegh Bahadur, the ninth Sikh Guru, roped in Mardana’s descendants, Bhai Sadha and Madha, for the job until the Partition ended the tradition. Only baptized Sikhs can now perform kirtans. 

The Partition weakened the syncretic links, but the ties are inseverable. They are enshrined in Sikhism. Guru Granth Sahib is the anthology of sacred writing of Sikh gurus and saints, including Muslims such as Baba Farid.  It is revered as a collection of revealed words—Gurbani (literally from the Guru’s mouth). Guru Arjan compiled the first edition of the scripture then known as Adi Granth. He had it installed in 1604 at the Golden Temple, which he declared Ath Sath Tirath (shrine of sixty-eight pilgrimages). Guru Arjan is widely believed to have invited a Muslim saint from Lahore, Mian Mir, to lay the foundation of the most exalted Sikh shrine. Muslim saints such as Mian Mir and Farid are highly revered figures in Sikhism. Farid’s picture at the entrance of Gurdwara Janamasthan underlines his importance in Sikhism.

Muslim saints like Baba Bulleh Shah and Waris Shah also contributed to unifying literature that bound people together. Waris Shah gave full shape to Heer-Ranjha, which remains popular on both sides. He followed in the tradition of Baba Farid, the pioneer of Punjabi literature. The syncretic message cut across the religious divide and bound Punjabis together. 

Things began to change in the 19th century when, according to writer Ian Talbot, revivalists began to peddle “the myth of a golden age when their faith was pristine and unsullied by syncretic traditions”. The myth weakened the shared cultural values of the rural population and replaced blurry community identities and replaced them with defined boundaries. Even Punjabi became a language of contention. The Muslim and Hindu revivalists increasingly began identifying Urdu and Hindi as their mother tongues. The Sikh-Mughal conflict was used to exacerbate religious fault lines. Emperor Aurangzeb’s high-handedness in dealing with the Sikhs was highlighted. The spiritual Muslim leader Bulleh Shah’s (1680) moral stand was conveniently forgotten. Shah, a Syed and the Prophet Muhammad’s direct descendant, hailed his friend, the ninth Sikh Guru Tegh Bahadur, as a ‘holy warrior’ when he was put to death. He earlier dissuaded the guru from seeking revenge on Muslims “for the cruelty that the emperor Aurangzeb had inflicted upon his (Sikh) people”. 

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Sameer Arshad Khatlani has been a Senior Assistant Editor with Hindustan Times, India’s second-biggest English newspaper with a circulation of 10 million daily, since July 2018. He has worked in a similar capacity with both The Indian Express and the Times of India. Khatlani has reported from Iraq and Pakistan and covered elections and national disasters. He has a book, with Penguin, On the other Side of the Divide, published in February 2020. Read one of the reviews here.

First published in Sameer Arshad Khatlani’s blog.

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Categories
Poetry

A Burden of Beasts

By Maithreyi Karnoor

The climb is steep and the water deputed to cool

The heaving body orgasming to the cold outside.

Ration your tears for the out-of-breath

Achievement of each breath-taking summit.

The Himalaya is a rock and a hard place

Treacherously beautiful like unrequited love.

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The mountains that do not care for your burdens — personal, political—

And are unmoved by the selfie-flashes stacked as high as the peaks

Offer lessons in humility in a thousand shades

Peeking out of cracks and crevices — sometimes entire valleys —

Only to be refused with loud whoops for group poses.

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The gush of the muddy glacial melt hurrying on purposefully to Pakistan

Since long before it was tickety boo*,

The unamused tinkle of the bells on the necks of mules

Carrying civilization on their backs — toilet bowls, gas cylinders,

Celebratory beverages, wet-wipes, instant noodles

And hand sanitizers — for the connoisseurs of the wilderness,

The dry coldness of Spiti’s winds like the gaze of outlived love,

The amusement in the muted breath of the accompanying porters

At your victory signs, do not outdo the racket of bollywood

Ricocheting off the rocks with Himalayan dignity.

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The Beas in not wanting to be the same river twice

Flows on as an aphorism.

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*tickety boo:  Term used by British colonials  to convey all is fine.

Maithreyi Karnoor is the winner of the Kuvempu Bhasha Bharati prize for translation. She was shortlisted for the Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize, and twice for the Montreal International Poetry Prize. Her novel Sylvia: Distant Avuncular Ends will be published in early 2021.  

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Categories
Musings

From the Pages of a Soldier’s Diary…

By Mike Smith

My adoptive father was too old for military service when war broke out in 1939, but young enough by 1941 to be sent to India with the RAF (Royal Air Force), where he stayed until after that war’s end.

I’ve served, but not in an army, for five years under difficult circumstances, though nowhere near as difficult, and not half a world away from everything I knew about and had been led to believe. So, I have only an inkling of the stress he must have been under.

I have a couple of tiny diaries that he kept. Diaries were illegal for soldiers, I believe, which might explain their size. But they were sufficient for what he had to record, which by the second volume had reduced mostly to the chiselled capitals, day after day, of no mail.

I had, and to my regret, lost, a small pamphlet of Hindustani, issued to him by the Wild Woodbines cigarette brand. I can still count to ten – ek, doe, teen* and some more but probably not with good inflection. And phrases, the meanings of which have faded, can be brought to mind and tongue like fragments of old tunes. For a short time during my childhood, my father employed a man from the sub-continent, and he taught me a little more. I suspect he was badly treated, perhaps unknowingly, probably without conscious malice, by the other workers and left under circumstances that smacked, even to my child’s eye and ear, of dogs going to live on a farm.

His very presence, I think, must have owed something to my father’s experience of India. It had pervaded his consciousness and never left him. Neither did the malaria he had caught there. Throughout my childhood in the fifties, I was a chota wallah*, and slept in a charpoy, and was exhorted to jaldi jao*, not, I suspect, the politest way to summon or dismiss someone.

Quite co-incidentally I encountered an ‘old soldier’ of doubtful veracity, who plied me with British Army issue ration blocks dated to the 1940s, among which were ‘curry’, probably of the lamb or goat variety. To these, water was added, and the mush boiled. The smell was nice. I liked curry. But father would light a cigar, just as he did when our dog farted, and he’d reminisce about India, not fondly. The poverty and dirt had appalled him. He had misunderstood, or at least not become aware of the taboos on which hand did what. Yet he’d taken part in a failed distribution of tinned beef raided from the quartermaster’s stores, equally appalled at people literally dying in the streets of starvation, while the cinema reassured British troops of the vast food supplies kept for emergencies.

The Hindus had refused the meat, with a hostility that he never understood, but their refusal in the face of death both amazed him, and, I believe, destroyed his faith in the religion of his own country — he had a pious sister who, he told me, could never have made such a sacrifice for her faith. He had a brother-in-law too, who was a conscientious objector, and would never hear a word said against him. I think the Indian experience might have contributed to that. He told me also of a hut full of his comrades being ‘rescued’, from a harmless snake that was occupying the threshold, by one of the punka wallahs*, a man who never by word or smirk, he said, ever betrayed their moment of terror.

Sadly, my father died before I was old enough to have a really grown-up conversation with him about it.

So, India, though I’ve never been there, and though I’ve never talked to more than a handful of people who have lived there, has always been on the periphery of my life. My father had a camera with him and was far more of a photographer than he was a diarist. The black and white contact prints — from a Leica 35mm I believe — show jungles and deserts and temples and street scenes, even those streets with the dying upon them. They show servicemen in shorts and tropical kit, mostly standing in front of vehicles or planes. They show local workers on government service, which may or may not be the source of an acronym used in pay-books that has become tainted with misuse.

Since a short trip to China in the 1980s where a man dressed in military uniform welcomed us at Beijing airport with a smile (the smile seeming more fundamental than the uniform, I recognised he was just like me), I’ve believed we are all closer than we are distant, though we often stand or crouch on different sides of barricades erected in error and folly and for the benefit of those who would control us.

Recently I’ve had the good fortune to be rewarded with commendations and prizes in a series of flash fiction competitions run out of India, and to have the occasional piece taken for use in journals. For the years that I ran my BHDandMe blog, the 3rd largest group of readers was from India. Perhaps that drew me to reading writers whose names I don’t know how to pronounce and whose landscapes I have never seen except on a screen. And that’s been good for me, and in a strange way has brought me closer not only to them, but to the memory of my father.

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*ek, do, teen…: 1, 2,3… counting in Hindustani

*chota wallah: small man

*jaldi jao: Go fast

*punkah wallah: manual fan operators.

Mike Smith lives on the edge of England where he writes occasional plays, poetry, and essays, usually on the short story form in which he writes as Brindley Hallam Dennis. His writing has been published and performed. He blogs at www.Bhdandme.wordpress.com 

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Categories
Humour Poetry

Songs of a Sloth & Dragon King

By Vatsala Radhakeesoon

 
 
 Queenie the Sloth
 
 Queenie the sloth
 lives in the labyrinth 
 of the Olive Green Pen
 and toils daily to trace
 straight lines on pink A4 sheets
 
 Her behaviour often confuses me
 and when I ask her,
 “Do sloths work so hard?”
 She laughs then sings,
 “Banished was I ten years back
 from Yellow Land of Lazy Hands
 for building a bridge  from Ant-land
 to River of  Silvery Friends
 O sloths!
 O sloths!
 Laze around, laze around 
 and let the Earth rock
 on its own beats!
 That’s what most sloths do, don’t they?
 But I’m Queenie
 and I’ve chosen my way
 Yes I’ve dared, I did, I did it
 and I’m happier with my purposeful life”
 
 “But don’t you miss your family?
 Don’t you ever feel sad  on New Year?”
 I asked
 
 “Oh no, no my friend!
 In life, Never regret!
 Have a cookie 
 Enjoy a chocolate drink
 Laugh, pray
 and let your mission shine
 all day!" 
 
 
 King Snaky-Dragon
 When King Snaky-Dragon
 loses a battle
 he often wears  
 his huge fan-brush hat
 and orders the largest canvas
 
 As he paints
 a leafy green Pringles can
 and writes with the finest brush,
 “Drum it’’.
 Mischievous Raccoon whispers, 
 “ Flip the fan, flip the fan!”
 
 The king frowns 
 and shouts,
 “Don’t you ever dare to challenge my wise fan!”

Vatsala Radhakeesoon is an author/poet and artist from Mauritius. She has had numerous poetry books published and she is currently working on her flash fiction/short stories book. She considers poetry as her first love and visual art as a healer in all circumstances. Vatsala Radhakeesoon currently lives at Rose-Hill, Mauritius, and is a freelance literary translator and an interview editor of Asian Signature journal.

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Categories
Musings

Hope comes in strange shapes

Keith Lyons looks back at the challenges of 2020, and explores the expectation that lessons learnt will translate into action in 2021.

‘Hope comes in strange shapes, when you don’t expect it’

– Ray by The Muttonbirds

There are two things we all need going into the new year 2021, one is the temporary painful prick of a needle where your arm meets your shoulder, the other is an optimistic state of mind expecting and wanting things to change for the better.

Growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, the year 2020 seemed far away. 

Yet it held so much promise.

That future date, boosted by science and technology, would usher in a high-tech world of chatty robot servants, human jetpack suits and anti-gravity flying cars. By 2020, I had somehow come to believe the notion that telepathy would be the main form of communication, and that books and newspapers would be a thing of the past. I might even get bored by the slowness of personal jetpacks, so would (naturally) prefer teleportation. 

By the year 2020, nobody would have to work, everyone would have so much leisure time, and life expectancy would be over 100, I surmised from young adult sci-fi books from the library and Popular Science magazines. 

So how did 2020 work out for me? 

Probably pretty much the same way it worked out for you. 

The year 2020 proved to be a big year, or as President Trump said ‘bigly’ — or was it is really ‘big league’.

Either ways, the year brought together the world’s 7.6 billion human inhabitants and also kept us apart. Not since the Second World War has the entire globe’s population been so affected by a global event: a pandemic.

The actual coronavirus, also variously known as ‘the China Virus’, ‘the ‘Rona’, ‘the boomer remover’ so tiny and small it can’t be seen with the naked eye. It is way smaller than a single red or white blood cell. But like a mosquito in a room with an elephant, coronavirus has been the main irritant as it has spread beyond Wuhan to our communities, aged-care facilities, hospitals, and loved ones. Only a few remote spots on Earth have so far evaded COVID. 

The virus, which is new on the scene having probably come from bats in a Yunnan cave via the Chinese live animal trade network, is not just extremely infectious and contagious in its transmission from human-to-human, but its fatality rate is much, much higher than influenza, possibly as high as 3%.

With only 13 months of study into the impact and quirks of this new virus, it is still too early to know the extent of the havoc coronavirus causes, but already we are seeing not just many deaths (coming up to 2 million worldwide), but also far-reaching consequences for those that get it and those working to treat the afflicted. Already there’s talk of ‘Long COVID’, with the effects of the virus lingering for months beyond the initial illness. While in late 2020 several fast-tracked vaccines were released for general use, there is still no cure with no drugs proven to treat or prevent coronavirus. 

You don’t need me to tell you this, but for most people, the universal experience of the pandemic has meant 2020 has been dubbed ‘a roller coaster’  by many, others preferring the oft-used ‘unprecedented’, while some call it like it is — ‘dumpster fire’. Amid the fear and the losses, we have all asked ourselves some serious questions about our life and the meaning of life itself.

“Most of all, perhaps, it is the year of not knowing,” wrote J.M. Berger in The Atlantic. These were the questions he brought up. Is it safe to send my kids to school? Can I go to the store? Do I still have to wipe down the mail?  The quandary for many in 2020 included ‘is it safe to go to work’ (do I still have a job?), ‘is it safe to exercise’, and ‘can I trust the government/public health officials’? 

I’ve got to confess, even though at the start of 2020 I was travelling in India, Thailand, Myanmar and Indonesia, by mid-February, I arrived in my homeland of New Zealand. The following month we were put under lockdown which lasted five to seven weeks, effectively ‘flattening the curve’ and eliminating the virus from community transmission. I am one of the few people to watch the movie Tenet in a movie theatre surrounded by other audience members. Over 2020, and into the first week of 2021 with the attempted coup by Trump, watching the news has been surreal and disturbing. 

As we tend to do, the year-end is a time for reflection on the past 12 months, and a looking forward to the new year. But it is safe to say that few people have had a stellar 2020, with most wanting to get it over with and welcome in 2021. There’s been an interesting reaction I have noticed among some, who somehow thought that if we just make it to 31 December 2020, everything will be alright. As if the bad things from 2020 will not carry over. Yet it did.

We go into the new year with rising infection rates from the pandemic, many countries clocking up record days for infections and deaths. Let’s not forget the backdrop of economic crisis and of course, climate change. And on top of that the technical problems for the first-time users of Zoom. 

There are two important ideas that many are carrying into the New Year. The first is a technical solution to our problem, a vaccine which will not only possibly prevent individuals from getting the infection, but also lead to more immunity in our communities.

Actually, there’s more than one vaccine, with around 50 vaccines currently in trails, and some have already rolled out since December. The aim is for 70% of populations to be vaccinated to stop the pandemic. Already some 24 million shots have been given across 41 countries, according to the Bloomberg tracker. That’s quite impressive in a short time. Think of all the bodies now building up their natural immunity to be able to prevent contracting the illness and also passing it on to others. However, in the last year nearly four times as many people — 90 million — have caught COVID. 

As well as the prick in the arm of the vaccine, there’s another associated concept many expectantly have carried from 2020 into 2021, and that’s hope. While for some it is the belief that surely this year can’t be any worse than last year, for many there is some light at the end of the tunnel, and the prospects of 2021 being a re-set year when we move towards a world that is more equitable, sustainable and just. After a year of postponement, suffering, hardship and despair, there’s some momentum going forward, a cautious optimism, an empowered sense of resilience, and a belief that together we’re not going to be defeated by a deadly virus. 

Looking back on the last year, which saw some questions raised on whether lockdowns infringed on freedoms, and was the wearing of masks a political statement, there seems to be a very ugly side of humanity and human nature which has been exposed.

Before, conspiracy theories tended to be the domain of weirdo uncles and ‘know-it-alls’, but now this minority is more vocal and manipulative in spreading outlandish falsehoods using social media, in particular Facebook and YouTube, linking Hollywood elites, child sex trafficking, 5G causing coronavirus, deep state, compulsory vaccinations and microchips. As we have learnt in the last twelve months, those gullible enough to believe these wacky theories can’t be swayed by rational arguments, evidence, or myth-busting. Often these made-up stories, fake new hoaxes and ‘alternative facts’ can be used to fuel violence, terror or racism. 

But as well as some unsavoury aspects of human behaviour clearly evident in 2020, we have also seen the other side; the respecting of public-health guidelines, the revelation that some low-paid jobs are actually the most essential, a sense of community unity and shared responsibility. My wish is that through the ‘life and death’ wake-up call we’ve had in 2020 with coronavirus, that we reflect on what we have learnt and make small steps in making the changes real in our lives. After all, the events of 2020 have impacted not just on how we live, work and play, but on our health, wealth and global security. 

There are other stories that have come out of 2020, a new resolve, an awareness of things previously taken for granted, and the discernment that the most important things in life can’t be bought online. These more personal learnings are shared among many, with the realisation that what you thought you once wanted isn’t necessarily what you need.

As well as sorting out what’s important, a number of my friends have grown to value the importance of self-care, or at least the need to stop doom-scrolling to avoid getting easily triggered and upset.

Lockdown and time alone have heightened the importance of relationships, the choice to slow down, and what benefit there is in appreciating the small things. Connection with the natural world has been a green cure for many too, as demonstrated in numerous studies including one titled: less screen time and more green time. And if there is an idea that has come out of the harrowing times of 2020, it might be the desire for a kinder world, starting from loving oneself, and extending out to all. 

Keith Lyons (keithlyons.net) is an award-winning writer, author and creative writing mentor who has been based in Asia for most of the 21st century writing about people and places. Find him at Wandering in the World (http://wanderingintheworld.com).

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Categories
Review

A Story from Manipur

Book review by Rakhi Dalal

Title: Waiting for the Dust to Settle

Author: Veio Pou

Publisher: Speaking Tiger, 2020

In his debut novel, Veio Pou weaves fiction to chronicle the forgotten history of Naga people, a past whose dust, even after three long decades, is yet to settle. Waiting for the Dust to Settle is set against the backdrop of Indo-Naga conflict in Northeastern India.

The story of this novel follows the life of a ten-year-old Rokovei from Senapati district in Manipur from late 1980s onward. He lives a peaceful life with his parents. Fascinated by the convoy of army trucks passing daily in front of his home, he secretly wishes to become an army officer. Once, while visiting his native village of Phyamaichi, he witnesses atrocities committed by the soldiers on the villagers. His disenchantment with the army comes to the fore when he becomes aware of his people’s sufferings as a consequence of confrontation between Naga undergrounds and the Indian Army. At the center of this novel is the Operation Bluebird, carried out in the state in 1987.

In September 1958, the Government of India enacted Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) in the North-Eastern states to quell Naga resistance. In July 1987, the National Socialist Council of Nagaland (NSCN) attacked an Assam Rifles post at Oinam village, in Manipur’s Senapati district. The Naga undergrounds of NSCN looted large arms and ammunition from the post. The Assam Rifles launched a counter-insurgency operation code-named “Operation Bluebird” to recover the looted arms and ammunition. This intense search operation, which was carried for three months in nearly thirty villages, was a torturous period for the residents of those villages. The Rifles committed large-scale human rights violation, including forcing two pregnant women to give birth to their babies in full view of the soldiers.

By spinning the narrative around the operation, the author attempts to give voice to the otherwise erased account of a people’s history from the consciousness of a country. The final erasure came when in 2019 the Manipur High Court disposed case against the Assam Rifles, filed by Naga Peoples Movement for Human Rights (NPMHR), after twenty eight years citing dislocation of entire record of the case. Nandita Haksar, who was the lawyer who filed the case on behalf of NPMHR, wrote in an essay that the entire record consisted of twelve volumes of evidence and ran into thousands of pages.

Through account of Rokovei and his family’s life after Operation Bluebird, Veio Pou brings to notice the physical as well as mental sufferings endured by the victims of army brutality.  Disillusionment of natives with respect to Naga undergrounds and their cause, the splitting of NSCN and rivalry between Naga factions, increased awareness among natives for better education, the issue of racism that people from North East face in Mainland India, are the themes dealt prominently within this novel.

Rokovei, while studying in Imphal, witnesses the hostility between Kuki and Naga factions after their conflict in the 1990s. When he moves to University of Delhi few years later, he comes in contact with Lalboi – a Kuki, but does make friends with him because he is the only other boy from the state in his class. After coming to Delhi, he realises the difference of living in a place where no ASFPA is enacted, an experience which should have come as a breather but is marred by racism which he confronts and leaves him astounded. The prejudice that he faces makes him wonder about his identity. Rokovei wishes to find answers. His conversations with his cousin Joyson, with whom he lives in Delhi, gives him a clearer perspective on the history, issues and realities of his people and state. 

Finally, keeping in mind better prospects for the future, he settles down in Delhi. It is the year 2008, five years after the leaders of NSCN visited Delhi to meet PM Vajpayee and yet a solution to the political question his people face is nowhere near. Rokovei ponders over the relevance of Naga resistance which had once started with the dream of a sovereign state but was subsequently made weaker by the split in the party. He reflects upon the corollaries of a struggle which had left the natives disappointed because at stake was a peaceful existence that has long been denied them. For him the dust hasn’t settled yet and his hopes are tinged with despair. 

The history of a place is essentially the history of its people. To recapitulate it, especially when it is complex and painful to remember, must be an arduous task for the people who have witnessed harrowing times and have lived every subsequent day of their lives watching the repercussions unfold. To pen a fictional account of such history therefore requires conviction and also courage to endure the trauma all over again.

This book is not only an attempt at chronicling the events which led to the political question that kept haunting the lives of the Naga people but is also an effort to bring their predicament to the attention of people who have little idea about their sufferings and about the gravity of denial of justice to them.

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Rakhi Dalal is an educator by profession. When not working, she can usually be found reading books or writing about reading them. She writes at https://rakhidalal.blogspot.com/ .

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Categories
Musings of a Copywriter

Private Lessons

Devraj Singh Kalsi takes us through a hilarious episode of elopement with a surprising conclusion

It took me quite a long time to conclude whether it was a noble act or a mischief. Those historical legends who rode away on horseback with brides and wives of their choice did not inspire me as much as my tutor with his daring act of elopement. Trains and motorbikes replaced horses and my English tutor, an aspiring novelist with a magnum opus in progress, managed to gallop ahead with élan in the hostile terrain.

He returned and churned a gripping tale – a real tour de farce – of his nocturnal conquest featuring burly cops who swooped down heavily at his door and the nail-biting chase that followed. The rush of adrenalin ejaculated a tall promise to repeat his heroic feat and make him feel proud of me as a worthy disciple who followed in his footsteps. With such an ambitious dream I entered the age of reckless youth, but ended up wrecked after a spate of rejections, with no girl ready to partner me and pillion ride on this challenging expedition.      

The English tutor suddenly disappeared when I was supposed to appear for my board exams. I was not aware he was going on a mission or else I would have rallied behind him with full moral support and offered prayers for his victory. While I was deprived of last-minute suggestions and struggled to revise my lessons, my English tutor was chalking out his strategy for the operation. He was a brave young man with dollops of chutzpah to elope in those days, invite the wrath of his family and community for displaying sapiosexual tendencies. He resurfaced with an invite almost a fortnight later, back with a taut narrative of how he and his childhood lover bribed a young priest to formalise their marital bond in a small temple after dusk and boarded the midnight train for the chills and thrills of a honeymoon in the hills.

After successful consummation, the excited couple took the earliest train to return home and seek the blessings of those who had opposed something sacred like marriage. A reception was organised at a marriage hall. I was his only student who was invited to attend the function where vegetarian food and liquor were served.

He introduced me to his erudite wife who looked pretty tired of meeting strangers with a faux smile. She was teaching English in a private school while he was looking after his family business to disguise his joblessness. The courage to marry without a job made him a role model in my eyes. His audacity to run away from the city with the daughter of a retired cop was a dramatic coup of sorts that would kindle interest for its potential as a frothy Bollywood caper. Visualise night sky and temple, gunshots in the air, and the married couple in sherwani and lehenga racing ahead on a wobbly motorbike and a police van chasing them on a highway. Get the drift. 

My English tutor revealed that he was working on a literary novel — slightly autobiographical as it was inspired by the childhood events. He could wait for another couple of years to get suitably employed and within this period he had to climax his literary worth as his wife had married him because of his literary prowess. A child arrived the next year, and his literary dream was aborted. He began teaching part-time, perhaps feeling insecure of his ability to produce something magical in words, feeling a surge of chauvinistic umbrage as his spouse worked hard to run the home like a householder while he sat brooding at his teakwood desk, looking at the window and the world outside, waiting for inspiration to strike.  

Even though our meetings became scarce after my school days, he remained my first idol. He was an exemplary teacher who taught practical lessons and encouraged me to outperform him — though outperform had several connotations and I was not quite sure of the context and what he implied.   

He legitimised running away to marry and became a hero of sorts even though there were other members in the family who married outside the community. Here was my teacher inspiring me with his love story, to elope if required and achieve success in the mission. I had grave doubts about my ability to convince a girl to do the same but he became a love guru I consulted later in my career. His wife discouraged his interactions with the former students and so we grew apart. His novel did not appear in print — not even as a self-published masterpiece. It is more than twenty years now. His social media profile updates mention Headmaster of a primary school.

When I sent him my writing samples online, he wished me good luck in my writing journey. The despatched links have not been seen even after three months — perhaps he has lost interest in reading and writing. The closed chapter of life he does not wish to revisit. I resisted the urge to ask him about the fate of his literary novel — and let it remain unclear, inconclusive and open-ended like his favourite Night Train At Deoli.    

*sherwani: A long formal coat worn often by grooms in India

*lehenga: A long skirt worn often at weddings by the bride in India

Devraj Singh Kalsi works as a senior copywriter in Kolkata. His short stories and essays have been published in Deccan Herald, Tehelka, Kitaab, Earthen Lamp Journal, Assam Tribune, and The Statesman. Pal Motors is his first novel.  


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