[Reader-list] Sort of a diary after February 28

[Gayatri Chatterjee]

Sort of a diary after February 28

Day 1: I was at home and had not watched the television, so did not know
anything of what had happened. In the evening I spoke to a friend, Minnie
Srinivasan, and she informed in the midst of our conversation, 'Do you know
they have burnt a train full of people returning from Ayodhya? This happened
in Gujarat and now riots are breaking out in Ahmedabad and all over. So
sickening! Now, there is sure to be more riots - the whole thing will start
again!'
I put on the television, felt horror and dismay; and then went back to some
work that needed pressing attention.

Day 2: Woke up in the morning and went straight to the computer to check
emails, with a certainty there would be messages in the Sarai Readers-List.
Those would help me somehow to deal with the anguish that had been gnawing
inside, growing over the rest of the previous day, cutting into a restless
night. Nothing!

Day 3
Day 4
Day 5: I watched the television - sporadically, listlessly - Star News, Aaj
Kaal, BBC. Or reading the newspaper - The Times of India, Indian Express,
Sakaal.

A day before Day 1: Something happened - something that was indirectly
connected with what was taking place in Gujarat and finds place in this
narrative. The two incidents would surely have got all mixed up in my diary,
had I kept one.
The doorbell rang; a Kashmiri youth was at the door, with a story. Five
hundred and odd people had to lock up their houses and flee to Jammu, when
cross-border firing began in Baramullah. They were given some land and tents
for makeshift camps. But it seems the land they were given was adjacent to
the one allotted to previously displaced Kashmiri Pundits, who expressed
unhappiness at these Muslims crowding around their camp. Were the people
from Baramullah eating into their (the early settlers') water and
electricity? Had they got some clue that government distributed ration would
similarly be eaten into by this second (or third) wave of exodus? I did not
ask, but went on listening to Irshad Shah's tale. They had then come down to
Delhi, where allegedly, the police hounded and harassed them. They were
being helped by a couple of independent volunteers, who suggested it would
be a good idea to go down further South - to Pune.

In Pune, the Municipality Commissioner, T. C. Benjamin registered them
immediately and settled them in an empty plot in Kalebari, Pimpri. They felt
happy and safe, Irshad said, they were quite happy to be in Pune; they
consider themselves to be Indians. 'Don't you want an independent Kashmir?'
I intervened. 'No, too many people have died that way and all we want now is
to settle down somewhere.' He continued hurriedly; he would have to visit
many other houses and repeat the same story over and over again.
They had only one problem, now. They have had to leave suddenly, without any
prior notice or arrangement. They had very little money and were facing
starvation. Irshad and some others were going around Pune, collecting food,
clothes and money. They were ashamed to be begging this way, but they must
do this, for the sake of the children and the old. He could start making
rugs, but could not procure here the raw material he needed. There are very
few young men in the group, the rest are children and women - young and old.
And he stopped speaking, indicating we should get what we could - or felt
like - donating.
If the soldiers are exchanging fires and that is the reason why they have
been displaced, why are men missing from this group? Where are the old men?
What are the men doing if they are not here, but there? Even if one
presumes, the men and women ratio there to be very disparate at this moment,
there surely cannot be only a handful of youths in this community? But I
asked none of these questions - very unlike me, I observed.

I live in a rented apartment in the house of a family, most of who are
members of the BJP. My landlord, a bachelor approaching seventy is an active
RSS and his brother (also has never married) was a member of the communist
party. They live together in the adjoining apartment and I occupy the one
that Sharad-dada (the RSS) owns. The other brother, Bhaskar-dada has three
sons - they occupy four other apartments in the building. The
daughters-in-law brought out clothes and money. After Irshad left, they
commented how they had observed the people of Kashmir, particularly in the
villages, are poor; all governments have done very little for these people
and the problem.

Day 1: Irshad's sister Yasmin and cousin Parveen came the next day, not
knowing Irshad was already around. They too have taken the initiative -
Irshad's family has become sort of leader for a section of these displaced
people. There seems to be two groups within them, informed Simrita later,
when she visited the camp on behalf of her documentation centre, Aalochana.
I was relatively free on this day and could sit down with these girls, give
them something to eat and chat.

Day 2: Went down to Simrita's house to hand over to Irshad, the clothes and
money we had collected. Simrita is born in Baramullah; she had studied there
till the age of eight and felt particularly drawn to this event. Irshad was
late because of the bandh; he had phoned and Simrita had asked him to come
the next day - it might not be safe to travel that long distance in an
auto-rickshaw on the day of a bandh of this nature. But he was adamant, for
they were going back to Jammu the next day. They were not feeling safe here
anymore, because of the incident in Gujarat. The government has built houses
in that previously allotted land. They were reluctant to leave Pune, for
they had come to enjoy Pune - but now they were unsure. They would be
totally lost if any violence broke out in here; it is better to be in a
place one is familiar with. They would be able to settle differences with
the pundit community, they were sure.
There had crept up another problem. They did not know how high the daytime
temperature could be in Pune - and the summer is not even here - most of the
children had fallen ill. Personally, Irshad would like to stay on a few days
more, for Parveen and his youngest sister had met with an accident while
crossing the highway (Kalebari is by the side of the Pune-Bombay highway).
Parveen had sustained head injury; he would have liked to get some proper
advice and treatment here, but the group wants to return.

Day 3: Another friend Vani, occasional writer in The Times Of India, had
raised some warm clothes and footwear (these were particularly asked for). I
had a lunch of drumstick soup and fried okra in Vani's house, after a
three-hour session with some students of St. Mira's College, where a state
level seminar on terrorism is organised for March 5-6. I showed and
discussed Roja. I asked the girls whether they knew the displaced Kashmiris
were leaving Pune that same evening. I asked them to visit the station -
their essay might acquire greater depth and resonance, after an encounter
with people who are experiencing all that directly.
Went to the Pune station at 4.45pm and met Parveen, Yasmin (she has touched
me so deeply) and Irshad. Met their mother and realised where the strength
for such impromptu leadership comes from. But could see only two men in
late-fifties in that crowd.


    *************

Day 5: What is this silence? I am reminded of September 11 and thereafter.
Every morning we would wake to receive mails; they kept on pouring in all
day long. There was no time to read all of them. My son, working in a
molecular laboratory asked whether he should un-subscribe himself from the
list, since he could not do justice to all of those messages. Why isn't
anyone writing anything now?
I know the Sarai Readers' List is not the only 'site' to look for what
people are saying and doing - far from it. And yet, here is documented what
a sizable number of the intelligentsia - the very established ones, those
who are silently operative in their own spheres, those who are beginning to
make their marks in public spheres, visible spheres, and so on - thought and
wrote after the September event in the US. Why shouldn't the same happen
now? A number - any number - writing and sharing, informing and probing;
there would be some respite if not solace.
This silence must be questioned, investigated, talked about. I had phoned
Jeebesh a little while ago, enquiring whether my daughter's friend from
Zurich could travel from Delhi to Lucknow on March 5 and then I raised this
question. Jeebesh said in that case there was an outside enemy, in this
case, it is us. How can that be - if that is how this situation can be
analysed?

Before I can think of writing anything worth typing out, my thoughts are
constantly distracted. I am thinking of my childhood, when a book Deshe
Videshe by a Bengali Muslim pundit of Bengali, Sanskrit, Urdu and Persian,
and a popular novelist, Sayyed Maztuba Ali, had been some kind of a Bible or
Ram Chalisa that we read once a month - if not the entire book, them opened
pages at random and read passages. Kabul then had become our intellectual
Monte Carlo, a city with many doors leading towards Berlin, Paris and
Baghdad. We had come to love Sayyed's servant Abdul Ali (from some Northern
Provinces in Afganistan), whose eyes were like 'a gulab jamun served in a
white saucer'; of course, we did not know the many shades and degrees of
political correctness. Here was a cosmopolitanism or internationalism unlike
anything I had seen in the cities I had visited - Calcutta and Delhi. Here
was trafficking of intellectual thoughts and opium; here was friendship and
adventure.

Come to think of it, the Gujarat happenings are also about the other -
people, who think and act on feelings of communal hatred, follow mindless
and politicised religion and take recourse to constant violence. We are none
of that; so how is it that we cannot find voice to analyse, mourn and
verbally attack, what we would never ever do - kill? It does not matter who
is being killed, in the first place (Godhra incidence) it is people we do
not see eye to eye with and in the other cases (the aftermath all over
Gujarat) there are the same lot, but mixed up with them are a whole lot of
us. Whatever it is, why cannot we condemn this horror?
There is another angle to it.
When WTC, whether seen as an icon of American Imperialism or of American
Dream, is attacked, a lot can be said in a circumstance like that. True. For
the sake of argument, let us say, these people here have not attacked any
state, nothing so precise. Secondly, religious fanatism is growing by the
day and we are constantly aware, anguished and also voicing the same. There
is nothing 'new' that we can say (but of course that does not change the
fact of our enormous anguish) and that is the reason behind this silence.
This too is true. But neither of these is quite sufficient to appease hearts
and brains that question 'why aren't we saying something?'

    ****************

In effect, these people have attacked the civil society; shown how helpless
that has become. May be we are silent because we cannot explain how such
monsters have emerged out of the civil society - that we knew to be better
than governments are. May be we have always thought of those religious
bigots as 'them' (as we do when we talk of a film audience as 'them' or
'mass'). We are now seeing them amongst 'us'. We are seeing them destroying
what we had so lovingly built.
I am thinking, may be this silence has a history; may be many silences have
begotten this silence. May be we needed to verbalize more about the kind of
civil society we desire, need, have or have managed to form.
I am thinking, we here in India (or Pakistan or Bangla Desh, etc) do not
have words for and cannot give voice to 'our own' sorrows and joys. We have
perfected the art of writing obituaries - deaths of leaders. We have not
celebrated our births. We neglect our day to day, the quotidian, the
vulgiare or the mundane. We are engaged - academically - with
extra-ordinaries, both the good and the bad kinds. It is the ordinary that
we must get (back) amidst us. (Let us notice the disappearance of the humour
genre from novel and cinema, amongst other things).
I am thinking, but cannot yet speak.
I am thinking but cannot yet write down something that would make a lot of
sense.
Hey, has the cat got your tongue? No it has turned to ashes. It will fly
soon, rising from the ashes like a phoenix. Can the cat get the phoenix?