Category: Musings

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Musings

Islands that Belong to the Seas

By Paul Mirabile

Courtesy: Creative Commons

Islands belong to oceans and seas and lakes. They are born within the deepest depths of the marine underworld like infants in the depths of their mothers’ wombs. Born often from surging volcanic eruptions, the molten lava hardens into rock. The rock is smoothed by ocean-swept sands that turn fecund over time. They are gradually populated by migrating birds who rest their weary wings and deposit seeds from which sprout rich and luxuriant vegetation. To these shingled or sandy shores, little by little, pirates, buccaneers, conquistadors, renegades, the exiled or self-exiled, slaves, missionaries and migrant workers come to explore and eventually settle.

They all come flocking to this primordial land floating in the waters of the world, birds and humans, animals too follow. Bees buzz their contentment, donkeys hee-haw, goats baa and mosquitoes whine. And yet the islands do not belong to any one of these creatures. They belong to the oceans and seas and lakes — their creators and benefactors.

Ah! The birth of an island! The centre of which rises high above those shingled or sandy shores, the dense jungles or arid scrub, where Vulcan in rampant rage had spat out smouldering rock and tongues of lava. There they now waft as if levitating from their aqueous-bed, home to a new Humanity …

Since my childhood, whenever I poured over maps my eyes would invariably fall on the islands that dotted the oceans or seas or lakes of our world. They held a more significant, a more imaginative, a stronger attraction for me, ones with which I could empathise. For Sicily was my genealogical point of attachment on those maps, a legacy of thirteen civilisations or so which had landed, settled or departed, leaving their immemorial traces both on the land, in the architecture, in our very mixed genes. Sicily is a perfect ‘officina‘[1] which I translate as the ‘melding of Humanity’ !

I day-dreamed while pouring over those frazzled maps and islands, whilst reading Jules Vernes’ Mysterious Island and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Actually, I don’t believe that I love islands because of those novels (or any other), but they did arouse in me a sense of friendship, affection and human compassion towards islands because of the extraordinary diversity of their errant or settled communities, their many languages and customs, their manifold landscapes. Languages that have forged the hybrid compositions of Creole, forged inter-marriages, forged populations whose quotidian merges into the hybrid species of fauna and flora.

I read and read again and again the fabulous tale of Hayy Ibn Yaqzān[2] who lived on his uninhabited island amongst the plants, trees and animals, all alone in wondrous solitude, learning from them: his human qualities, his religion, his love of humanity and sympathy for every quintessential being or object that came into contact with him — be it mineral, vegetal, animal or eventually human …

Islands are bursting with nature and nature is a friend of humanity, thus islands are bursting with friendship — bursting with hybrid species … like their ethnicities and their languages. Even when Nature can become an enemy, this enmity offers islanders the possibility of strength and force through trial and error. When storms arise, they build sturdier homes. When dangerous interlopers reach their shores, they offer hospitality and eventual integration. Perilous sea creatures and beating waves against boulders demand of islanders to muster their ingenuity and imagination. To cultivate friendship, virtue ; to draw closer to one another ; to be able to live only in a way that conforms to Nature … to an island’s generous and bountiful treasures ; to befriend Nature and Humanity, for they are equal in diversity and disinterestedness.

I suddenly stopped dreaming of islands as they pinched with patriotism, narrow nationalism, circumscribed communitarianism. I stopped dreaming of islands and with my fingers touched Sicily, Cuba, Cyprus, Malta, Madeira, and the Princess Islands stringing out in the Marmara Sea. I slid them upon the island of Olkhon on Lake Baikal in Russia, the oldest and deepest in the world; an island where Shamanism, the oldest religion of the world, and Orthodox Christianity vie in relative peacefulness. There my fingers brushed against layers of civilisation, of ethnic blending, of howling winds and raging white-crested waves off boulders and high cliffs and laughing seagulls on the wing. There I heard a myriad of languages spoken by the communities of Humanity both in the public and the private domains: Greek, Turkish, Sicilian, Spanish, Italian, Maltese, Russian, Arabic, Jewish-Spanish, Norman, Armenian and so on. There swelled dark secrets of mythical creatures, of legendary figures whose wild wisdom infused a shroud of enigma that piqued my curiosity towards the universal sympathy that exudes from those aforesaid islands: the fragrance of bougainvillaea, wisteria, honeysuckle and jasmine, of ossified forests laden with the ice of deep winter, of the briny sea spray of stoic rocks, of cries of fishermen at the docks and those of traders at the markets. When I lift my finger that sacred moment, that spell which has been cast upon me vanishes from my waking state …

To Sicily, Cuba, Malta, Madeira Cyprus, Olkhon and to the Princess Islands I weighed anchor and set sail on various shaped vessels — ships that cleaved the high seas or navigated the coasts. At dawn upon disembarking, the colours of the skies drip from violet to orange to red to blue. The fishermen at the harbours or docks always asked me: “How do you like it ?”

“What, the island ?”

“Yes.”

“There is no point on Earth that rivals an island,” I would always repeat in sympathetic earnest.

On shore, wherever that shore be, we would drink coffee or tea in one of the wooden cooperatives for fishermen, traders and sailors. Chickens cackled, dogs barked, seagulls laughed whilst glasses and conversation chimed out the tunes of the islanders’ community spirit: tunes chanted in many tongues, gesticulated in many forms. I broke bread and filled my glass, observing the leathern faces of these hard-working tradesmen mending their nets, fitting their poles, scraping or painting their sea vessels … accomplishing their livelihood together as a whole.

“The wind is blowing from the southeast,” a rough-looking chap declared for all to ponder upon.

“That’s rain !” shouted another with a slight nod of his head.

And then I fell asleep in my bungalow and dreamt of dancing boats and throngs of fishermen talking about their fortunes or misfortunes. Villagers living near the rising waves filled my sleep with their colourful robes or coiffeurs, their daily gestures of sympathy to both nature and humanity.

Pouring over maps filled my childhood. Fingering the points that we call islands submerged me in oceanic rhapsody. Entire archipelagos coiling from North to South and West to East pervaded my soul with the rhythmic cadence of their tides. And as the tides beat out cosmological tunes, my dreams ended. I woke and embarked on many an island adventure in Sicily, Madeira, Cuba, Cyprus, Olkhon, Malta and on the Princess Islands. Points on the map became the unchartered lands of my great middle age sympathetic adventure. I had returned to the lands of my ancestors ! Ships had bore me to those points of human sympathy, exploring fantastic landscapes, communicating in innumerable tongues. There I breathed the air of island sovereignty, simplicity, silence and solitude.

I lived happily on all those islands. And in spite of certain prejudices and intolerances, I rejoiced living with the islanders who are good, heroic, honest and fair in their daily commerce. Who earn their daily living by the sweat of their brow and by the devotion to one another, whoever be that one or other. Inside the cafés faces furrowed by wind and sun concentrated on their drink or their cards or dominoes, whilst outside, hands hardened by generations of toil and moil, mended nets, built boats, cut fish, rowed boats. I rejoiced at all those acts of universal friendship.

I lived happily, intermingling with the melded species of plants, birds and humanity — not only as a spectator, but as an actor: the spectator who observes himself acting, and the actor who perceives his observations. Like in a dream … day and night !

It seemed to me like paradise. Paradise, a word derived from the Old Persian ‘pairidaëza‘ which meant ‘enclosure, a place walled in’: walled in or enclosed by its creator — the water ! But its meaning shifted when read by the Hebrews and became ‘pardēs‘ ‘a garden’. The Garden of Eden ? Yes, a garden so pristine and divine, yet possessing that infamous apple tree of the forbidden fruit. All paradises can descend into the bowels of Hell if tempted by a slithering, sly, snaky and insidious interloper … As we shall soon see !

At present the tides of time have consumed my youth, so I have decided to write a humble meditation about my mingling amongst the islanders of so many islands, of so many archipelagoes. I see them all from the porch of my bungalow, stretching out like a necklace of pearls. A pearly necklace cast in its oceanic casket. So I write and wander upon the silent, deserted roads of the many islands that I have treaded; that I have seen, touched, smelt and tasted. The time has hence come to render homage to those islands, to the nature of those islands, to the nature of those populations.

At this point, I expect readers will retort and point out that not all islands should benefit from such a distinguished homage: How about Cyprus, and the Turkish-Greek conflict ? And Sri Lanka and the terrible war that raged between 1983 and 2010 ? Japan and England, too, big islands indeed but islands, nevertheless. Was the subjugation of Welsh, Scot and Irish not enough? No, those English islanders set out on the high seas to subjugate other ethnic communities … other islands! The first being Ireland, invaded in the XIVth century and conquered uninterruptedly by Henry the Eighth and Oliver Cromwell. The ‘de-Irelandising’ of the island, or more appropriately formulated, the genocidal ‘civilising mission’ produced exile, persecution, misery and death until the founding of the Irish Free State in 1921 and finally the Republic of Ireland in 1949![3]

Were the Japanese not content to eliminate any foreign intrusion on their precious island ? No, they set out to decimate and enslave the ethnic communities that thrived on the islands of the Pacific: Guam, Wake Island, the Philippines, the Solomon Islands, the Aleutian Islands, etc. Japan’s violent and bloody imperialism during WW II, and England’s century’s long brutal colonisation have marked all our History books and memories of their so called ‘civilising missions’. Be it the imperialistic brutality in the lands of the rising sun or that of the setting, as the French say: c’est bonnet blanc et blanc bonnet ![4]

Yes, these counter examples are, alas, historically documented. Are they then accidents of history or sorrowful exceptions? I will answer that in the case of Cyprus, the Cypriots, a fine blend of Greek and Turkish ethnic commingling since the Middle Ages, with a sprinkling of English since King Richard the Lion Heart (1191), became the unfortunate victim of Britain’s ‘civilising mission’. One needs only to read Lawrence Durrell’s Bitter Lemons of Cyprus[5]to understand the sad and tragic events that erupted in the 1950s and their never-ending aftermath and continuity. Cyprus belongs neither to Greece nor to Turkey (and certainly not to Great Britain), but to the Cypriot Greek and Turk, who in turn know perfectly well that their grand island for centuries has always belonged and will always belong to the brilliant whiteness of the Mediterranean Sea! The tragedy that befell this island sprang from the combined effort of British cynicism, Greek nationalism and Turkish overweening military reaction.

As to Sri Lanka, Sinhalese and Tamils had been living together since the twelfth century, assuredly not under the most perfect idyllic neighbourly conduct, yet the intermingling populations, be they Hindu, Christian or Budddhist, carried out their daily lives without too many eruptive disturbances. It was only with the full British conquest in 1815, and their fancied game of pitting one community against another, there, favouring the Tamil populations of the island, that a slow but steady bitterness, rancour and animosity grew within the Sinhalese population. The pent-up enmity exploded as soon as the British abandoned their ‘mission’, leaving both communities in a sort of political vacuum: Who was to govern? Who was to replace the ‘civilisers’ once they decamped without preparing Sinhalese and Tamil for self-rule, as the British had always done in the benignity and magnanimity of their decolonisation? The vacant legacy they left behind was rapidly filled with ethnic rivalry, exposed to Sinhalese vindictiveness and Tamil claims to share power and land in spite of their minority status. Each community claimed their rights as the deprived community at the expense of one another, a situation so similar to the void left behind by the British in Cyprus. The dramatic events that followed became the final act in the history of Britain’s ‘civilising mission’ performance …

In these two cases, the two communities, forsaken victims of the British colonial mindset, instead of achieving ethnic unity, wallowed in the abysmal chasm of oblivion. Islands that could be paradises plunged into the throes of Hell !

To conclude, an island belongs to the vast waters that enshrine it, as its etymology translates: a ‘land’ in ‘water’. Islands do not belong to imperialists or colonialist powers ; they belong to the oceans or seas or lakes that give birth to them, to the nature that stretches its silken carpet over them, to the ethnic groups or communities that gradually settle upon them, intermingling, trading, marrying, creating together a hybrid or Creole culture worthy of any ‘continental’ civilisation. For this very reason, there should not be any dominate power on an island, or official boundaries which sever communities from one another save the natural one that has nurtured and provided for its very existence: the surging billows and silent tides of their eternal creator …  

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[1]‘Factory’ or ‘workshop’ of production. It is of Latin origin

[2] An allegory written by Alī Ibn Sinā or Avicenna (950-1037) Hayy Iby Yazqān, the Bird Salāmān and Absāl interpreted and adapted by Ibn Tufayl with the same title, born in Muslim Spain in the XIIth century. See Lenn Evan Goodman, Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy Ibn Yaqzān, gee tee bee, Los Angelos, CA, 2003.

[3]The slaughter of all Irish aristocrats, the prohibition of inter-marriage between Anglo-Normand and Irish and the prohibition of the Gaelic written language in 1592 were part of the English ‘civilising mission’ in Ireland.

[4]‘It all amounts to the same thing’ or ‘It’s six of one and half a dozen of the other’.

[5] Lawrence Durrell, Bitter Lemons of Cyprus, 1957.

Paul Mirabile is a retired professor of philology now living in France. He has published mostly academic works centred on philology, history, pedagogy and religion. He has also published stories of his travels throughout Asia, where he spent thirty years.

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

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

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Musings

Of Dreams, Eagles and Lost Children

By Aysha Baqir

Pictures provided by Aysha Baqir

Conceived in the twilight dreams of poets, philosophers, and political activists, you blazed in the dulled and drugged minds of millions caged and enslaved in the divided and ruled subcontinent. Inspired by the Divine word, Iqbal sought your freedom in his poetry and prose, and likened you to the Shaheen— the king of birds– and exhorted you to soar to freedom. He died nine years before your birth, but his figurative verses, by design or fate, fashioned you into the shape of the sublime and magnificent eagle.

Today, perched on the peak of the Arabian Ocean, you struggle to soar. Designed to defend and fortify your power, your predatory hand claws fetter and numb your mind and movement. You stretch your neck towards the east and tilt your hooked head. Your forward-pointing eyes boasting of binocular vision are fixed towards the rising sun for a glorious future, but you are blinded by fear and greed. Your blood vessels pulses with power and rhythm but you hunch, clench your long spiked wings, unable to spread them, stroke the wind, and take your place in the skies. Immobile and unable to nurture, you attack your own — the most vulnerable and the weakest.

Agreed that your birth, doctored by a misguided and designated cartographer, was both cruel and chaotic[1] The impatient foreigner, recklessly ignoring centuries of daily human connection, the age-old water ways, and land markings, fleshed you out from outdated maps and census reports. Fearing a dangerous rebellion that brewed in the burning summer and desperate to flee the threatening chaos, the imported white-man culled and cut the eight hundred thousand square kilometres of you in thirty-six days. You burst on the world map in the muggy, sweat-drenched August of 1947, soaked in blood and roughly clumped in the likeness of Iqbal’s eagle.

But with creation, there is demise – and your birth slit a wound that festered a carnage. Within days, unprecedented violence tore neighbourhoods and communities apart. Friends-turned-foes, looted, plundered, burnt down villages and raped and hacked thousands of innocent women and children to death. Lit by the hope to reach their new homeland, fifteen million Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs, fled across the jagged border, but two million succumbed to death. Traumatised by your birth, you continue to kill and slaughter. Seventy-six years later, you deceive and double cross your ‘wajood ki wajah,’ your reason for existence, and with it, the spirit of your independence, idealism, and self-actualization.

Trapped in mnemophobia of suppression, you deny and desecrate the creed that your founder, Mohammad Ali Jinnah gifted you, i.e., the land and its freedom. “You are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or any other place of worship in this State of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed, that has nothing to do with the business of State.”[2] Did Jinnah fight for your independence to lose you to your fanatical oppression of others? Did God gift you the cradle of fertile plains, the vast web of waterways, fortress-like mountains, havens of harbours, and mines of minerals so you could abuse your own?

In the wild, your namesake, the king of birds, knows better than to turn on its young. Driven by an intrinsic parental instinct, it patches a nest high in the branches and cliffs, secure from the sight of predators. Both parents, in turn, incubate the eggs until they hatch, nest their eaglets, spread their wings to protect them from cold and heat, and tear off the hunted meat to hold it close to the beaks of their young. In face of approaching danger, the male and female defend their young aggressively. They nurture their eaglets for weeks, teaching them to hunt and survive until the little ones can fly off to seek their food and future.

A parent to over ninety-five million children, how do you compare? Millions of your young ones live and work on the streets every day. They feed off garbage dumps and stray barefoot and in rags, unprotected from the onslaught of the harsh climate and the criminals, while you guard your pastures of livestock, fields of crops, and fruit-filled orchards. Yet, you choose not to feed your children – and only a chilling low of 3.6 per cent, aged six to twenty-three months, consume a minimum acceptable diet[3]. 

Abused and violated every day, the children are forced into selling drugs, prostitution, and trafficking, and many succumb to accidents or fatal diseases. More than half a million of your children are raped, assaulted and killed in one year – not by anyone else, but by you[4]. Over half of the little ones do not have access to health, hygiene, clean water, food, and more than forty million minds wither out of school[5]. When they turn into criminals you blame them for their condition. You hoard your wealth inside mansions, factories, banks and vaults outside the country and shackle millions of your children to hard, gruelling and unpaid labour. There are no laws enforced to protect the children, and according to leading experts an “eighty-eight per cent are subjected to violence and physical abuse within their homes regularly”[6]. After the catastrophic floods that ravaged your lands last year, more than four million of your children continue to drink the contaminated and stagnant waters[7].

You make laws to break them, sign treaties, pacts, and MOUs to betray them, print signs, banners, and pamphlets to tear them, and host meetings, dialogues and conferences to applaud your resounding lies while a frightening number of your children perish every day[8]. Is your independence a construct of borders and boundaries to keep others out, while you molest your own? Is your independence a construct to suppress, violate, and annihilate the weakest? Is your independence a construct to kill your children? If independence profits and feeds off the flesh of others, it is only a fool’s fabrication. Like a chain, a nation is only as strong as its weakest link. When you celebrate your independence, remember that you are only as strong as your weakest – the  malnourished and uneducated — forty-five percent of you. Thousands of your children will sleep shivering and starving tonight and some will not open their eyes tomorrow. One day you might not too. 

[1] https://www.telegraphindia.com/culture/a-sloppy-surgery-how-cyril-radcliffe-carved-the-indian-subcontinent/cid/1697854

[2] Presidential Address to the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan 11 August 1947. https://pakistan.gov.pk/Quaid/quotes_page2.html

[3] https://www.unicef.org/media/136311/file/Pakistan-2022-COAR.pdf

[4] https://www.thenews.com.pk/print/1005427-over-half-a-million-children-raped-in-pakistan-annually-but-most-cases-go-unnoticed-experts

[5] https://www.unicef.org/media/136311/file/Pakistan-2022-COAR.pdf

[6] https://www.thenews.com.pk/print/1005427-over-half-a-million-children-raped-in-pakistan-annually-but-most-cases-go-unnoticed-experts

[7] https://reliefweb.int/report/pakistan/4-million-children-pakistan-still-living-next-stagnant-and-contaminated-floodwater

[8] https://tribune.com.pk/story/2407303/child-sexual-abuse-up-by-33-in-2022-report

Aysha Baqir is an author and activist on a mission. She founded a pioneering not for profit economic development organization, Kaarvan Crafts Foundation, in 2004 to alleviate poverty.  Her novel Beyond the Fields was published in January 2019 in Singapore and 2022 in Pakistan and shortlisted for best-Debut English at the 9th UBL Literary Awards. She is an Ashoka Fellow and recipient of Vice Chancellor’s Alumni Achievement Award from LUMS. She is working on her second project.

www.ayshabaqir.com

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

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Should I Stay or Should I Go?

When and how do you know when it is time to change your life, job, relationship, friends, plans or location? Keith Lyons examines the push and pull factors of change

Courtesy: Creative Commons

If you ever feel trapped in a predictable, boring routine, or wake with a nagging feeling that something isn’t quite right with your life, perhaps it is time to take action. But how can you decide to leave your familiar workplace, hometown, or social networks and start a fresh career, move to another place, or find new friends? And what happens if the grass isn’t greener on the other side – and it doesn’t work out? 

These are the dilemmas many of us face at different stages of our lives. The challenge when we’ve got just a bit too comfortable and lazy in our comfort zone. The inner voice that whispers of incredible opportunities in other places. The gut feeling that reminds us that right here and now we aren’t living our best life. 

If most Sunday evenings a sense of dread creeps up on you, and you feel you aren’t able to be your true self, maybe it is time for a change. But how can you escape the harsh circumstances of your life, whether it is your fate or misfortune, largely out of your control? 

I believe there are many aspects of our lives that we can influence. We can be the architects of better lives, authors of inspiring life stories, creators of meaningful existences. 

But first, we need to take stock, and clearly identify what the problem is, so we can find solutions that will work. A useful exercise is to write down all the things which are making us unsatisfied.

A list makes tangible our concerns, showing not just the things which irk us, but also providing guidance on what we are seeking on the other side. Whether it is a relationship, role or place which is the issue, it could be because you don’t feel fulfilled, engaged, valued/appreciated or inspired where you are right now.

For some, it is the negativity of the environment or culture, while others are held back from being their authentic selves by too much drama, toxicity, and hostility. Ultimately it might come to whether you like the person you are right now. 

If you are shrinking rather than growing, and bending over instead of standing tall, it might be time to move on, if you can. Looking back on my life, in my late 30s my significant long-term relationship ended, and as I came to the end of a job contract, I didn’t feel in a good space, living in a damp house, feeling depressed about how things had worked out and the gloom of winter. I thought back to the last location I felt content and happy, and booked a flight to get back to a place where I’d lingered while on holiday. That move — to a place some 10,000kms away — did work out, but I had never imagined previously that I would end up moving to live and work in a very foreign, yet welcoming, country that was a world away from my mundane existence.

Let’s also acknowledge that in some circumstances, you can’t easily extricate yourself from ties, responsibilities, relationships and locations. For example, you might have duties to your family, expectations around obligations to others, or constrains on moving — ranging from financial and political to cultural and social.

Ideally, you want to find your place, your tribe. You want to be surrounded by others who understand and support you. That could mean hoping for a geographic cure, or even finding your community of peers whose values align with yours online. 

The hardest part is overcoming your fears and anxieties going from the familiar to the unknown. You might have the concern that things won’t work out. Or the worry that you will never be happy, and that there is something wrong with you. That’s perfectly normal. No, there isn’t something wrong with you — this is just a reality of our existence. Change is scary. 

Those who’ve made tough choices in their lives report it does take courage to put into action the difficult decisions, but once the first step is made towards a fresh start, it can be liberating and empowering beyond expectation. 

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Keith Lyons (keithlyons.net) is an award-winning writer and creative writing mentor originally from New Zealand who has spent a quarter of his existence living and working in Asia including southwest China, Myanmar and Bali. His Venn diagram of happiness features the aroma of freshly-roasted coffee, the negative ions of the natural world including moving water, and connecting with others in meaningful ways. A Contributing Editor on Borderless journal’s Editorial Board, his work has appeared in Borderless since its early days, and his writing featured in the anthology Monalisa No Longer Smiles.

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

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

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Bangal-Ghoti-Bati-Paati or What Anglophilia did to my Palate

By Ramona Sen

I grew up on the periphery of the widely divisive Ghoti-Bangal[1] debate. I gathered, from snide remarks made by friends, that the east and the west of Bengal’s Radcliffe Line ate very differently. One disapproved of the other’s propensity to add sugar into savouries, the other complained that chillis should be garnishing and not the mainstay. Some friends were Bati — half Bangal, half Ghoti — who claimed to ­have the best (or worst) of both worlds. When questioning eyes turned to me, I mostly shrugged; I wasn’t sure. Inquiry changed to incredulity with “what ki­nd of food do you e­at at home?”

“Umm… just food.”

As a child, I didn’t think much of the food that was put on the table. For my mother, food was entirely functional. Everything was cooked just enough to be edible. The more items that could be served steamed or grilled, the better. Gravies were light, dals[2] were boiled, vegetables were lightly stir-fried. Bengalis typically have elaborate recipes for everything – even dhyarosh[3] can be cooked in a mustard-and-poppy-seed paste — but my mother wasn’t having (or giving) any of that. She disliked cooking and she simply wasn’t a “foodie”.

The effects of the Raj linger, even 76 years later, in the way many of us eat, speak, dress. It’s evident in our childhood reading lists and the movies we want to watch on loop when we miss home. But no matter how many variations of Egg Benedicts we’re ordering at newly opened cafes around town, food at home tends to remain dependably authentic to an era which predates invasion by the shepherd’s pie. In kitchens across Bengal, the choto maach or boro maach[4]sizzling in the pan can tell you a lot about which side of the border the antecedents of the residents lie, even if their speech patterns don’t immediately give it away.

The kitchen I grew up with refused to pick a side. Bland aloo sheddho[5], which was neither a buttery mash nor a spicy bhorta[6], sauteed borboti[7] which your average agent of the Raj would likely pass, and oven-roasted chicken (honed to perfection over the years) kept me supple and appreciative of the contents of other girls’ tiffin boxes. Our daily fish was nearly always a basic rui[8] which neither the Ghotis nor the Bangals could be moved to wage war over. Occasionally a dollop of mustard oil and a crunch of chilli to liven up the boiled dal might make my friends scream “Bangal!”, but the subtle flavours of the kosha mangsho[9] from my grandmother’s recipe book waved the Ghoti banner. Every now and then my mother used the oven to bake a light sponge cake which I doused with warm custard, negating both sides in favour of the Union Jack.

What makes people Ghoti or Bangal, I once asked a friend who was shaking her head at my inability to identify with either. I was the opposite of a Bati… what did that make me? Paati[10]? My friend’s classification was simplistic — those with ancestors who hailed from East Bengal before the 1947 Partition were Bangal, those who hailed from West Bengal were Ghoti, and the two camps were violent supporters of rival football teams. I wasn’t so sure that that was all there was to it. What I was looking for, was a feeling of belonging and cultural heritage that trickled down the generations — a feeling which made younger people resonate with the traditions of either side, even in an age where an acquired love for sushi (with perhaps an extra dollop of wasabi for the Bangals, perhaps) was beginning to bind us.

My mother’s family was in Chittagong before Partition but my father’s family was mostly from Calcutta. I was told the move from Chittagong was harrowing, as it was for everyone who was uprooted from their homes. I remember my grandfather as a scowling, angry man — he might have been 17 when they fled home and managed to reach Calcutta, relatively unscathed. His father, my great grandfather, had had the foresight to arrange accommodation, exchanging his house with another which lay on the right side of the new border. The family who had vacated this house were The Khans, and we referred to them as reverentially as the rest of the country referred to Bollywood’s leading families — who had vacated their house. I envision my ancestors, terrified and exhausted from the journey, staring up at the black gates of the sparkling white house I used to visit in my childhood — three red steps leading from the small front garden into a wide verandah beyond. I didn’t know then that the tall wooden doors with stained glass panes were a hallmark of Islamic architecture, I just thought it was cool. My grandfather’s eldest brother remained a silent man throughout his life, shaken by being uprooted from his plush life in Chittagong. The second eldest brother died soon enough, of heartbreak they said, not for the loss of a woman but for the loss of land. My great grandmother spent her last days painting the scenes she remembered of rivers and lush green farmlands. No doubt the busy market road in front of the too-small-but-actually-large house in Calcutta was not inspiring enough.

What did they eat? Just food?

My mother remembers her grandmother dressing for dinner — pinning on a brooch, clasping a string of pearls around her neck — seated at the head of the table, frail with cancer. Her trembling hands would pick up the knife and fork to slowly carve the fillet of fish before her. I have memories of my grandfather doing the same in the last year of his life, struggling to arrange a bib on his shirt, snapping at the nurse if she forgot to provide him with adequate cutlery for his bowl of Pish-pash — an Anglo-Indian one-pot chicken-and-rice dish. Through my mother’s childhood, the neighbourhood, dominated by Anglo Indians and Muslims, dished out biryani for Eid and plum pie for Christmas, making both biryani and pudding-with-brandy-sauce the highlights of my youthful eating.

My great grandmother’s memories of Chittagong dinners included chicken roast and mulligatawny soup. I was eating the same every Sunday inside dining rooms which demanded that the men, like my grandfather’s mother, dress for dinner. Here, I developed a palate for butter-oozing Chicken a la Kiev and Roast Mutton with Mint Sauce where I mixed the spicy green with the onion-brown on my plate, fascinated by the contrasting flavours. I was taught to tell the fish knife from the vegetable knife (and that eating with only a fork was an abhorrence), so I didn’t drive my cutlery-obsessed grandfather, Little Lord Fauntleroy, into a fury. This weekly enacting of colonial times made “just food” at home entirely worth it for the rest of the week.

If I couldn’t stand any more of pepe diye paatla maacher jhol [11] which even a Ghoti would balk at, I’d call my father on his office landline to ask, in whispers, if he wanted to bring something home for dinner. He’d make a noncommittal sound over the phone which nearly always meant alright. Those were days I couldn’t wait to dig into dal-bhaat[12] cheered up by burrah kebabs [13] or plain old omelette served with a side of fish and chips. The additions didn’t make my mother happy; she wanted her children to be reared on roasts and grills, not softened around the middle with too many fries and Tartar sauce.

My father, who had none of the baggage of displacement, had decided early on that only a bland “Continental” diet (a cuisine reminiscent of the Raj, which still prevails in Calcutta) could keep at bay the many digestive disorders the Bengalis are prone to. Grilled fish with varying condiments was the most ordered dish of my childhood, which I watched him cheerfully douse with lemon butter sauce, convinced it was better for his cholesterol levels than deemer devil[14]. If I was lucky to have him fetch me on report-collection day, he’d take me to a restaurant near school where they served grilled fish with a creamy spinach puree, which made me see why Popeye the Sailor Man could be hooked to green leafy vegetables. Years later, unable to digest hospital food, it was his turn to whisper if I could bring something for dinner. I knew the “something” would have to be fillet of fish, grilled and served with beurre blanc[15].

Despite my mother’s efforts to the contrary, I turned out to be quite the “foodie”. I have a deep interest in eating, more so than many people who grew up with distinctive flavours at their dining table. Conversations about food will keep me riveted. Feeling flavours come together in my mouth like art will always brighten up a bleak day. My mother, who continues to eat boiled pumpkin for lunch, is bemused by this turn of events. When I left home, my functional eating habits followed me to different cities. With no patience for cooking a meal, I stocked the fridge with cartons of milk, crates of eggs and loaves of bread. My friends, on the other hand, attempted to recreate the recipes they’d grown up with, spending their weekends trying to recreate aloo posto[16] or a malaikari[17]. Since food was functional for me, I took the path of least resistance before the stove — a sunny side up served me well, because what I really wanted was a fish supreme[18].

Friends who grew up eating elaborate home-cooked meals do in fact, have less polarised attitudes to food, rarely oscillating between a craving for steamed cabbage or salmon-cream-cheese sandwich. Some days I might land up uninvited for lunch where I know the regular fare won’t be disappointing and a friend’s mother will serve an aloo jeere[19]from her Bangal repertoire, which makes the jacket potato of my youth pale, like the coloniser, in comparison.

My palate, free of both pride for my own boring larder and prejudice against a particular tradition, is perennially ready to accept the offerings from other people’s kitchens. I’ll eat anything my friends cook; I watch in wonder as they spruce up a boring boiled dal with crackling spices and I appreciate the cauliflower in the rich gravy of the kalia. Of course, when I can, I still order a chicken Forriester [20]or a tipsy pudding (it wobbles). I’m Paati in that!

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[1] Ghoti is a colloquialism that refers to people from West Bengal and Bangal are people from Bangladesh.

[2] Lentils

[3] Okra

[4] Small fish, big fish

[5] Boiled potato

[6] Mashed

[7] Beans

[8] Rohu or ruhi fish found commonly in rivers of South Asia

[9] A dry preparation of mutton

[10] Typical

[11] Papaya with watery fish curry

[12] Lentils and rice

[13] Indian lamb chops dating back to the Mughals

[14] Devilled eggs

[15] Butter based emulsified sauce, a French recipe.

[16] Potato with poppy seeds

[17] Coconut cream gravy with prawn

[18] Fish roll wrapped in egg and stuffed with bacon

[19]  Potato with cumin

[20] Evolved from the French a la Forestière, which conjures up mushroom and pork strips

Ramona Sen has authored a novel, Crème Brûlée (Rupa Publications) and a novella, Potluck, (Juggernaut Books). Calcutta is the city of her soul, the backdrop of all that she writes.

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Us vs Them

By Shivani Agrawal

The best example of escaping reality comes alive in our relationship with the environment. Its pervasiveness and service to us at all times at no cost, makes it one of the most granted entities in human affairs. The sheer ease, simplicity and inconspicuousness with which it surrounds us makes it terribly easy for us to not notice it. Even our day to day seemingly harmless acts like drinking from thermocol glasses and reckless usage and disposal of plastic carry bags go a long way in affecting the dynamics of environment, at least, within our local limits.

Recently, I had a revelatory moment. It was a thing so simple yet it struck me after such a long time and much intellectual struggle. I was having tea at one of the tea stalls near my university. Sitting on a chair, by myself, I was enjoying my free space. Just then, a few birds (common mynahs and jungle babblers to be particular) came near me, chirping loudly (read irritatingly for me) hoping for some fallen crumbs for their food. However, I was a little more open-hearted and threw some pieces of snacks I had bought. Needless to say, they ate them hungrily. I continued the process and the birds left no chance to leave their share.  Soon after, another group of men sitting near me started throwing pieces of their snacks a little further away to two opposing groups of birds. As soon as the pieces were thrown to them, they would squeak loudly and fought with each violently to get hold of the titbits. This whole procedure was irritating as well as amusing.

Their noise irritated me. I felt as if the birds did not want to let us enjoy our tea siesta in peace and were determined to spoil every minute of it by creating a ruckus with their banter. However, after a moment, it struck me that maybe it was not they who were trespassing their space but we were who were encroaching on theirs. I realised that if we look around carefully, there seem to be very few places that we have left for these biological friends of ours. With our endless, large-scale, and unplanned constructions and lifestyles, there are hardly free spaces anymore where they can nest.

We have not left spaces for them where they can fend for and take care of themselves comfortably and find their ways out; places where their food would be available easily, sufficient ground to hop and skip and jump, habitats where they could build their homes and protect their young ones. They need spaces where they could grow and live comfortably and not be tress passers all the time. The earth belongs as much to them as us.

The earth has been inhabited by human beings in a hegemonic and an insensitive fashion. The living styles of humans have been conceived in such a manner that they leave little space for other creatures as if we are the only ones living on this planet. The intricacies of the interconnections are lost in this process. The fact of interdependence in the biological world is hardly remembered. There is great amount of interdependence among the creatures of the world which makes the earth sustainable. Without it, there could be little scope for life. The fact that the existence and survival of one species is dependent on others can no longer be ignored. All creatures great and small need to share the planet.

Physical spaces are increasingly cleared to make way for human activities with little thought for the habitats of other beings and their presence is seen as an encroachment. As our biological compatriots, they have an equal right on this planet as us. It should always be remembered that their existence that is dependent on ours but rather our presence in a chain of inter-linkages which makes our survival plausible.

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Shivani Agrawal is a Research Assistant on a project on Gujarat’s coastal security. She enjoys reading, writing, teaching, quizzing and playing table tennis.

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Mother Teresa & MF Husain: Touching Lives

By Prithvijeet Sinha

Mother Teresa–Goddess Of Peace by MF Husain. Photo provided by Prithvijeet Sinha

Art is often made out to be something unattainable, acquired strictly by virtue of good taste. To me that supposition has a very myopic idea of what actually constitutes art.

Art is spontaneous, sensual and immediately attractive to the naked eye simply because it is all around us in diverse forms, beginning with the canvas of nature.

From the first rays of sunlight to the final nocturnal lull of the moon, waxing and waning with our existence, a landscape is the first index of the omnipotent power of the hands that create. The stakes are just as natural when an influential figure who has provoked meaningful thoughts has her portrait occupy a space which we commit to our memory. Memory is to art, after all, what the intermingling of colours and shapes is to the structure of an artistic creation – even more than its form. Hence, beholding an artwork that inspires is a moment of personal reckoning with the feelings it evokes.

An artwork that has greatly impacted my artistic consciousness is ‘Mother Teresa–Goddess Of Peace’ by the indefatigable Maqbool Fida Husain. Mr. Husain is entrenched in the fabric of popular culture for his unmistakable, humbling style and use of colours eschewing any hint of beautification that sometimes becomes an accursed necessity in art.

His portrait of the benevolent social messiah is no different. Mother Teresa is someone who has graced his canvas in many iterations and the Goddess of Peace is one among the many he painted around the 1980s. As founder of Missionaries of Charity, Mother Teresa occupies a unique space in our cultural consciousness as we know it, caring for the neediest masses that society is quick to eliminate from the mainstream. That she was painted by another unassuming individual who was austerity personified made them equals. Mr. Hussain, on his part, dissociated his oeuvre from the elitist pretensions of galleries and terminologies of the ‘art world’, making art that touched hearts.

The artwork has Mother Teresa in the middle, in her trademark white sari with a blue border, faceless — an individual whose attire spelled a divorce from pretensions of the world. It is in perfect consonance with the painter who mostly walked bare feet and had not even a single iota of self-recognition about his position as an icon. He was an everyman. To him, it was a vocation but also a necessity to survive.

For others it is the 9 to 5 rule. For him, it was his art.

For Ms. Teresa too, it was personal duty that called for sacrifice of the ego. So, they were doing what they thought was essential in maintaining the order of who they were, in direct relation with an often imperfect world.

The central figure in the painting is surrounded by a young girl, a cow and a dove in flight holding olive tree leaves in its beak. The cow symbolises innate innocence and spiritual purity in concordance with the child while the bird signifies the efforts of people to uphold peace and effect constructive change, never shying away from the reality of poverty that millions endure.

The way her attire is spread out is as if she is holding the beleaguered world in her empathetic care (a baby in this case is on her lap) signals a last hope. She rises above the maternal role of primary caregiver alone. She is a universal figurehead, a genderless representative. That’s why her motives and actions translate so well through the brushstrokes of another. That’s the reason her faceless presence isn’t about fear but as a blank space meant to be filled with the image of any face that could set the same compassionate precedence as her.

Today, my evolution as a writer and poet owes its debts to that day when this artwork became wholly animated for me, creating a blueprint that continues to inspire and provoke thought. That’s the power of art– to create a space in memory and nudge us forward towards change, whether it’s a painter for the cause of artistic integrity and no monetary considerations, a messianic voice for the spiritual upliftment of the downtrodden or a writer preserving their collective legacies through his contemporary words.

The passion in these two people’s efforts to always strive in achieving integrity in service of the truth is soul-stirring. It is so easy to be swayed by conformity, even if it’s within the confines of an educated middle-class structure. The painting is a gateway to that natural state of mind which only creates and never jostles for accolades. I see that in myself.

Sincerity is a prized attribute which is often splayed wide open, to be attacked by a modern world where propagandas and muddled agendas defeat our simplicity of being. But people like Mother Teresa and Mr. Hussain show us the path where one walks the line, forging a map of individuality where materialism just cannot make a dent because the intent is to look at the truth of millions who cannot raise themselves from a cycle of grinding dispossession and exploitative tempers.

Art takes its imprints from the unvarnished truth. This artwork achieves that, illuminating all who dare to effect constructive actions and challenge conformity.

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Prithvijeet Sinha has been prolifically publishing works of various hues in journals and magazines like   Cafe Dissensus, Confluence, The Medley, Borderless, Wilda Morris’ Poetry Blog, Screen Queens, Rhetorica Quarterly, Lothlorien, Chamber Magazine, Livewire  among others. He believes writing to be the true music of the soul.

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Wanderlust or Congealed Stardust?

By Aditi Yadav

We are but stardust, swirling and travelling eternally across the universe. The interweaving of matter and energy in the cosmic space-time tapestry has always struck us with wonder and curiosity. As the Japanese poet Basho resonates in his Narrow Road to the deep north, “The months and days are passing wayfarers through endless ages, and travelers too the years that come and go. Those who float their life away on boats or meet old age plodding before a horse- they spend their days in journeying and call the journey home.”  Humans have marched on, often quite literally so, in the journey of life’s evolution.

To evolve one needs to survive despite all odds. It is an enterprise in desperation, driven by the basic instinct for survival. For several millennia, wandering to forage for food, moving on for a safe shelter and fleeing away from inclement weather or wild animals was the only way of life — on one’s toes, on the run, hanging on to dear life. Braving through raw and ruthless nature — the scorching sun, blistering winds, numbing snow, bone-chilling blizzards, tempests on seas, ravenous typhoons– what an extraordinarily heroic travelogue has been the journey of homo sapiens!

When the ‘wanderer-hunter’, settled as a farmer, the new sense of settlement brought in the novel element of ‘belongingness’ to a certain place, and the consciousness of possession or ownership. A brand-new idea of life bloomed. A settled and relaxed idea of ‘home’ now formed a part of new civilization. As a consequence, resource ownership in itself gave rise to trade, conflicts and wars. All of this entailed travel.  The merchants traveled distances to barter and earn. Many religious leaders travelled around to propagate and preach faith and worship – perhaps, as service to humanity, or maybe, as an attempt to know human consciousness. In another dimension, the ambition to rule over land and capture resources drove people in leaps and bounds on land, and establish colonies across oceans. What was once a globe of free vagabonds turned into a battlefield of fragmented land, air and water masses with contest for boundaries.  Most of it were accompanied by bloodshed and colossal loss of human life and bio-spheric devastation.

But there was a class of travellers of the other kind — the ones who travelled for the joy of travel, excitement of discovery, to pen a new story, or write a new song. Freebirds like Alberuni, Fa-Hsein, Hyecho, and their ilk left behind valuable records and are documented in history. I often wonder about the history of female travellers. Who was the first female who ventured forth all by herself? What became of her? Did she disguise herself as a male? There is no way of knowing. Maybe she could not document it due the lack of knowledge of the written word, or perhaps, she did not want to be discovered at all. Although in my heart, I do pray she had a safe and happy journey.

The eternal flame to travel has propelled us to reach escape velocity and launch travel into space. The space programs, the Mars rover, the moon missions are our most fascinating travel adventures. Sun light or star light that we bask in at any given time is a light from the past travelling toward us. The future light may be travelling too, waiting for us to reach out perhaps.

Even with such incredible progress, there is so much that suffocates us. What is home, when the soul does not feel at ease? The Vedic sages taught that for those with open hearts, the world is but one country — everywhere one goes is home. The earth we know, owes its existence to migrating populations. It’s ironic how immigrants are discriminated against in the modern times. May be the suffocation we often feel is only the pettiness that has crept in.

Travel to free yourself of these shackles, dear heart! Despite the constraints of finances, opportunities, fetters of the 9-5 schedule, travel – what are you living for, if not for the liberation of the self? My thoughts don’t wait for spring. They forever bloom and fall off like the petals of cherry blossoms. Yet, there is joy in visualizing how they blow with the wind, rest on someone’s shoulders or gently settle on the surface of river, drifting along without a thought about the destination. They die somewhere, without even knowing. To have blossomed and traveled is fulfilling enough.

The instinct to wander and travel, is as old as life itself — for that’s how life has propagated. The roots of life find nourishment through the peripatetics of body and mind. It is a malady that humans are born with; a melody in sync with one’s heartbeat. “Travel inside out and outside in. That’s the fate humans are born with”, sings the systole-diastole of the heart, resonating the cosmic big bang-big crunch. A whole world lies outside your window, and several worlds live inside you. Traverse the infiniteness of yourself, measure the earth in your stride while Keats sings on, “Let the winged Fancy roam, Pleasure never is at home.”

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Aditi Yadav is a public servant from India. As and when time permits she engages in creative pursuits and catches up her never-ending to-read list. Her works appear in Rain Taxi Review of books, EKL review, Usawa Literary Review, Gulmohur Quarterly, Narrow Road Journal and the Remnant Archive.

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What do Rishi Sunak, Freddy Mercury& Mississippi Masala have in Common?

By Farouk Gulsara

Rishi Sunak. Courtesy: Creative Commons

Rishi Sunak’s appointment to 10 Downing Street has made people aware of the significant presence of Indians in the African Continent. Indian-African cultural and trade exchanges had been ongoing as early as the 7th century BC. Africans are also mentioned to have significantly influenced India’s history of kingdoms, conquests and wars.

The second wave of Indian migration to Africa happened mainly in the 19th century with British imperialism via the indentured labour system, a dignified name for slavery. It is all semantics. What essentially happened at the end day is a large Indian diaspora in countries like South Africa, Mauritius, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania and many more. Many of the Indians who made their way there as labourers, over the generations, began to play significant roles in the economy and professional representations in these countries.

A certain famous Indian diva born in Zanzibar to British colonial civil service who kicked a storm in the rock and roll is, of course, Freddy Mercury (1946-1991) as Farrokh Bulsara.

Statue of Freddy Mercury in Montreux, Switzerland
Freddy Mercury
Courtesy: Creative Commons

Idi Amin declared himself the President of Uganda after a coup d’état in 1971. The first thing that he did was to expel Indians from Uganda. His reasoning is that the South Asian labourers were brought in to build the railways. Now that the rail network was completed, they had to leave. They had no business controlling all aspects of Ugandan wealth.

In Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala (1991), the protagonists, Jay, Rinnu and young Mina, had to uproot themselves from Kampala overnight when Amin decreed that all Indians were no longer welcome in Uganda. With a single stroke of the pen, they became refugees. 

By 1990, they are shown to have become residents of Mississippi. The 24-year-old Mina is entangled with a local Afro-American man. This creates much friction between the two families. That is the basis of the movie. 

It is interesting to note many Asiatic societies complain that the rest of the world practises discriminatory, racist policies against them. In reality, they are quick to differentiate each other within their community — the high-heeled, the aristocratic ancestors, their professions, the fairness of the colour of their skins, you name it. And they call others’ racists. For that matter, everyone is a racist. The Europeans subclassify their community by economic class. The seemingly homogenous Africans also differentiate themselves by tribes. Remember Rwanda with their Tutsi and Hutu civil war? Even the Taiwanese have subdivisions. China and Russia have varying ethnicities across the vast span of their lands.

Interestingly, the politics of the oppressed is much like what we read in George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) and saw in the South Korean 2019 Oscar winner Parasite. Like how some animals are ‘more equal’ than others, the maids of the Parks feel more entitled than the freeloading dwellers of the bunker. Even amongst the oppressed, there is a class consciousness to sub-divide the oppressed.

Photo provided by Farouk Gulsara

Race-based politics is so passè. In the post-WW2 era, when the people of the colonies needed to unite to reclaim their land, it made a lot of sense to join under race. Past that point, it did not make any sense for the dominant ethnicity within the nation to claim the country as theirs. At a time when purebreds are only confirmed to be prized pets, it is laughable that politicians are still using racial cards to get elected. Each nation’s survival depends on its competitiveness, anti-fragility, and ability to withstand a Black Swan event. Race does not fall into the equation. With changing social mingling at school and the workplace, interracial unions are the norm. How is race going to be determined anyway? The fathers? The mothers are not going to take that lying down, of course!

The Afro-Americans were emancipated in 1863 after the Civil War, after generations of living as slaves. The black community, at least, still complained that they had received an uncashable cheque from the Bank of America for insufficient funds. Many Indian (and other races, too) labourers were no longer labourers by the second generation and had managed to springboard themselves out of poverty to occupy important positions in society. What gave? Did the coveted American dream slip them by? 

Coming back home to Malaysia, it appears that we will forever be entangled in race politics. In an era when minions around us who were basket cases decades ago have leap-frogged by leaps and bounds in science and technology, our leaders and people stay inebriated in the intoxicating elixir of race superiority. Imagine starting a political party in the 21st century where only people of a certain race can hold critical positions. In day-to-day dealings, expertise is compromised to maintain racial purity. Intertwined with race these days is religion.

Farouk Gulsara is a daytime healer and a writer by night. After developing his left side of his brain almost half his lifetime, this johnny-come-lately decided to stimulate the non-dominant part of his remaining half. An author of two non-fiction books, ‘Inside the twisted mind of Rifle Range Boy’ and ‘Real Lessons from Reel Life’, he writes regularly in his blog ‘Rifle Range Boy’.

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Tsunami 2004: After 18 years

Sarpreet Kaur revisits the past with the hope of a better future

A vivid memory

A smile escaped my lips looking at the familiar newspaper, still just four pages of content. I can remember all those birthday listings, retirement announcements and situation vacant columns that formed part of this paper — coloured from the front-back and the time-tested black and white print in the inside. A balcony, a cosy chair, a newspaper and a cup of tea– what could be more perfect!

Suddenly a gloom overshadowed the day– it was 26 December 2022. The paper was filled with a long list of ‘Remembrances’ by families for their loved ones who lost their lives on that dreadful day. I could see a glint of sun here and a wrinkled grey of clouds somewhere on the canvas of azure water but my mind was not contemplating the beauty of this sea, it has already flown 18 years back — the cries of women, the heart-wrenching silence of kids, hopeful eyes in search of families, those shrieks to get as less as a glass of water, the echoing wails…

That day I discovered how fickle human life was, how harsh nature was, how devious some humans are and how godly some of our human mates were, all this was demonstrated in mere few hours. Who did this?

This very sea. This very sea did it. I am sure the sea must have had valid reasons. I can still feel the same shiver running down my spine. On that fateful day of 26th December 2004, this sea was furious, not serene as now. It was fuming with anger, ferociously.

Now, the houses on Andaman and Nicobar Islands are all decked up with big stars and shimmering lights, the faraway humming of carols have started accompanying the sea breeze. The winds are not humid anymore. It’s a calm breeze, the thunderous clouds have said goodbye and given way to the clear starry nights. There is an air of general merriment all around but still, there is something– no actually, that one thing which will always bring in the dark shadows no matter how many bright stars are hung over the doors.

That fateful night of the day after Christmas was followed by a heart-wrenching Tsunami. It drilled a big hole in every home on these islands. Someone lost a mother, someone a father, many lost everything and for a few their whole generations got wiped out by the sea. This year on the 18th dreadful anniversary of the Tsunami which we wish had never occurred, we will rewind the horrors. Now one might wonder at the need to do so. Why are we doing it? What’s done is done. However, we must recall because remembering our past is the only way to learn to have a better future.

Revisiting what happened

The first tremors were felt early in the morning. My whole family leapt out of the bed and went straight to the road and then the nearby playground. I could see dozens of people coming out of their houses, all with blank expressions about what was happening. Then after a few minutes of heart-tightening tremors, they stopped and we all smiled our relief to each other.  Then the news started pouring in. How a newly constructed house on a pillar gave up and crumbled like a house of cards. Another one said how the old building in Haddo wharf collapsed to the ground and one could hear the wails of people stuck inside it.

The ships were being sent to the sea to avoid damage. The ropes from the bollards were being ferociously untied. One merchant vessel, in all the clamour and chaos, cast off with one of its ropes still tied to the bollard. This bollard via the rope pulled it back and under the fast swell of the sea it rotated 180 degrees to one side, everyone shouted from the jetty as it was about to crush the smaller wooden ship with people on it. But God does exist because, by the miracle of God, the miracle of brakes or wind or something unknown, the ship stopped and drifted forward just a few inches away from the tumbling boat. The sheer force of the water had moved a Maruti 800 upright with one side towards the trunk; some people hastily tied it to the trunk itself with a rope to stop it from going into the sea. Dinghy boats were floating in the middle of the roads, a few others were already upside down and you could only make out the flat surface. One could see remorseful faces all around. They were not sad; they were looking terrified. Some were curious about what was happening. The Islands had never seen or felt such a thing ever. The Chatham bridge was underwater, the ships were floating to the level of a jetty, and the cars, autos, scooters everything one could see was floating. There was only chaos and chaos around.

Every second everyone was inching closer to the grave and it was said that when we witness something as crude as a Tsunami, humans tend to come together and show their humanity. But the Tsunami proved that it was not true. We, humans, are the worst kind of animals because on that fateful day, just when the Tsunami hit the Islands, a few shopkeepers doubled the rates of paan, tea etc. Some of the elected local representatives went into their burrows and the people who chose them were left off to fend for their own. The next few days saw no electricity, no water and no food.

People cried over the shortages.

Wards were filled with casualties, and the parking lot of GB Pant hospital had turned into a waiting room. These were the condition of the people around Port Blair. We have not yet touched on the other islands. What was happening in Katchal, Nancowry, Champin, Great Nicobar, Campbell Bay and many other small islands in the south was something no one could ever imagine. Whole villages were being swept away, the bodies were being gulped down. The terror of the sea had been unleashed.

In Nicobar, the devastation was unimaginable. Half of the trees had been uprooted. Trinket island was torn in half; Champin island was lost beyond communication and Kamorta was thirsty and hungry. The view was filled with battered houses, hanging roofs, crying infants, stranded grounds, tumbled life and floating bodies. No words or adjectives could ever do justice to what the people of the islands witnessed and suffered because of Tsunami.

We witnessed the humaneness of humankind too. The crew members of MV Sentinel were saviours who brought hope to the people of Nicobar that yet there were some who cared for them. The crew worked tirelessly saving precious lives, dinghy after dinghy was unloaded by the crew, the children and women were the first to come, they boarded and were fed on the ship.

Amidst this full chaos when the administration locked horns with humanism, these very people of MV Sentinel without worrying about their jobs and their own families, negated their orders and continued helping their people. On these islands, many influential people fled first on the crafts of money. However, some leaders outright rejected the ghastly idea of leaving the people behind to go on safer grounds. Till the end, they stayed.

Air force helicopters, coast guards, naval ships, army troops in conjunction with the administration worked together in those trying hours carrying out relief, search and rescue operations to their maximum capacity.  However it must be remembered that this was the first time the local people, administration and the armed forces were witnessing a disaster of such proportions. Many accusations were made on the duties of many in the position of power at that time without understanding the due pressure under which each and every one was. That made it much more pertinent to remember those days so that due precautions and arrangements could be made to revert future tragedies.

Without getting into too much of technical wordplay, we need to look at the reality of Tsunami which was all about behind the scenes. It is a well-known fact that the TV showed only selected pictures, trimmed numbers and blurred ideas to people out there. The tragedy of the Tsunami is imprinted on the heart of that lady who was shouting from the dinghy down below — “Mujhe mera bacha vapis de do. Return my child to me” , when her child was taken away by the rescue ship onboard but suddenly the Captain refused to board any more passengers. The real horror is known by that bunch of humans who were waiting in the dinghy in the middle of the sea waiting for their turn. Real heroism was portrayed when the crew members of MV Sentinel said they would ot leave without leaving a single person behind. How slowly time went by when that girl waiting in GB Pant hospital for her parents to arrive. The real shock was sensed by the people on a stranded island listening to the radio: “Rescue teams have reached and all our people have been fed” while those mentioned were in a stranded island peeling the last coconut they had in their tattered bag.

At that time in that place and in that condition, people were looking out towards the shore with keen eyes, not for food, not for clothes, not for water — they were looking for hope, some sign of hope that yes someone was looking out for them, hoping that their existence mattered. Hope was all that they wanted.

Many years later, one could wonder how the sea which is a treasure for the fisherman, a mate for the sailor and home to the maximum of our living organisms could be so cruel. Then the other picture slides over showing the battered down forests, deforestation over acres, those oil spills, poachers, floating garbage, plastic entangled dugongs and almost extinct species. We leave no stone unturned and give plenty of reasons to the sea to be angry with us and once in a while nature understandably loses its cool.

We sure have come a long way since the first Tsunami, we have all the sensors, ships, rules and a detailed mechanism to handle such a situation and everything, but still, ARE WE READY TO BEAR THE NEXT HIT? Have we prepared enough to take head on the sea as the opponent? NO! no matter how technologically advanced we get we will never be ready to take on nature. The only thing that we can do is be respectful towards it. Yes! Development has to go side by side and change is the only constant law of nature but our greed could lead us to dig our own graves. Let the development be sustainable in its true measure not just on paper. This earth is not ours, we are mere tenants. Let us mend our ways before the owner loses his cool again.

(Special thanks to Denis Giles)

Sarpreet Kaur is a teacher, a Ruskin Bond fan and an aspiring writer. Her articles and stories have previously appeared in The Hindu, New Delhi Times, Cafe Dissensus, Muse India and many other magazines. This adapted from an earlier version in Andaman Chronicle.

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Categories
Musings

The Scream & Me

 By Prithvijeet Sinha

Scream by Edvard Munch (1863-1944). Courtesy: Creative Commons

Dignity of expression is an underestimated phenomenon; in times like ours where everything has to be blurted out loud from the biggest amplifiers, subtlety has become a jaded mode of creative power. What can be understood in two words and understatement needn’t be stretched to a point of vulgar oversimplification through metaphors and symbolism anyway. The sorry state of affairs obviously then finds an outlet through the arts.  Ideally, painting should capture the world as a beautiful sanctuary, where our place as heavenly creatures endowed with virtues galore and innate innocence, is sanctified. This it does in thousands of visual motifs.  But painting also evinces an ample canvas on which our internal world of chaos finds an adequate representation. That is where ‘art’ finds its footing.

For me, one artwork that will always stand the test of time when it comes to representing our internal implosion affected by socio-cultural, political consequences is Edvard Munch’s ‘Scream’ (1893).

I don’t know when exactly I discovered it because it seems to bear such an omnipresent place in our cultural consciousness. However, to the best of my memory, my tenacious relationship with ‘Scream’ commenced more than a decade ago when I first set sight upon its hollowed out, skeletal figure, a personality who, it seemed, had placed us instantly in his/her shoes. Munch’s work thus has gone on to frame every moment that has blown the lid off societal hypocrisies and depravity, for this writer. It’s a scream that we all innately identify with because so much of our lives is spent repressing our self-expression, our sense of self-esteem and by extension, our rights. As our mental health, a culturally coded reality ignored throughout modern humanity’s materialistic stride, becomes a perennial victim of that repression, we yearn to speak. Recount our potential lost chances. Claim our minds, bodies and souls as our own. Retaliate at the status quo and in fair essence, scream.  Scream at the void, at our preceding generations, at calloused authority.

If you ask me then personally, the painting’s stance of an individual left in the middle of nowhere, imploding with the gesture of putting his hands on his ears and crying out, melting with the weight of the world, is most likely to be identified with my journey till now. That literal and oftentimes implicit scream is attached to parts of my whole being where nothing of prejudice, repression or even plainly documented neglect from our adults and guardians should reside. Yet they do.

I scream when my talents as a writer are taken to be temperamental or above careful analysis, as only an individual feat. I scream when a writer’s sensitivity doesn’t translate to a real vocation in the eyes of the world. I scream when my sustained silences groan and moan for days on end, only to be met with a premise of being ‘physically weak’ on my part; when my insides churn with inflaming pain attributable to chronic stomach troubles and indigestion since that day in 2000 where I was cursed with a bout of jaundice. When the strength to write gets overpowered by my depressive disenchantments; when gender roles are used as a rapier in common discourses, I scream.  I scream. I scream. Never audible enough to be heard. Always observing a kind of bourgeois tact that makes me come undone. I scream when the men tail me in moments of solitude at riverside parks, put hands on my body and refuse to acknowledge that there are asexuals out there who don’t crave the crassness of physical pleasure. Or even verbal grooming and cajoling.

I scream when the river gets dirty, filled with pollutants. The trees fall down. When a peaceful day is brutalised by the ancient prophecies of time; when concrete balls, lances of disease and traffic blasts produce a most grotesque symphony of the nature of the world, a preserve of noise, sound and fury signifying nothing especially as our mental states are poured out into doctors’ tables for consultations and fees, I scream. Gulping the air around me and melting with all the foregrounds and backgrounds this world can assist me with, to no avail, I get hollowed out.

Peace is a luxury to us mere mortals. Chaos is the lightning rod that governs us throughout. Since truth can never be shortchanged, Scream always haunts us with its presence, intimately involved in our implosions through the clogged networks of time and memory. I felt its echoes in Apichatpong Weerasethakul’sMemoria(2021), as Jessica, the protagonist, travelled along a network of vibrations emanating from aural worlds around her, dictated by the stillness of nature holding more than it dares to reveal; or, in that eight-minute unbroken piece de resistance in Dea Kulumbegashvili’s Beginning(2020) where her central figure drowns out the pandemonium of sexual defilement by laying her head on the ground, to keep herself sane and from death’s purview.

That scream is released in the final two minutes of the lyrics of Phoebe Bridgers’ breakout single ‘I Know The End’ (2020) where an apocalypse of the mind finds its literal projections compounded by rock guitars and drums, where the serenity of the preceding passages leads to an honest overflow, where aggression is supplanted by an exhausted sigh in the final coda. But also one, where silence is not an option. To me, Munch’s imprints let me reconcile with the fact that more than the politics of life and death as well as class, we are eternally doomed to imparting a facade of silence and repression to our ethos. It’s the inescapable truth and when bigotry such as the ones we encounter infects discourses, The Scream gags to be left out. It should, must be let out.

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Prithvijeet Sinha, has built a prolific published corpus based on the intersection of poetry, cinema and culture. He hails from the cultural epicentre that is Lucknow, India.

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