The Heart of a Stranger

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The Heart of a Stranger Page 15

by André Naffis-Sahely


  This is how Muktinath would have justified his midnight odyssey.

  Muktinath still trusted his friend, Dorji. Apart from being close, the two of them were related by marriage. Dorji’s youngest daughter was married to Muktinath’s nephew, who lived in Dorji’s village.

  “Should I go and meet him in his house?” he asked himself, laughing into the dark, lonesome morning. He had re-entered Bhutan feeling a mixture of fear and desire. He scraped fear from the package and made up his mind to visit Dorji the following night.

  Muktinath had seen a cave at the base of Chhachay cliff. He would first go to his house, pick a handful of soil and walk down to the cave before dawn.

  He would stay inside the cave the whole day and sneak out at dusk. He knew it would be a Herculean feat; still, he decided to take the risk for the sake of his friendship with Dorji.

  “Will Dorji look the same? Will he recognize me? Will he embrace me? What if he forced me to stay in Bhutan? Or, what if he pointed a dagger at me?” he asked a series of questions, feeling the touch of his khukuri.

  He stripped some corn from the tall ears and shoved it into the pockets of his poncho.

  “This will be my memento,” he said to himself.

  He stood up and walked towards the bamboo dumps that stood as old as a hill at the north-western flank of the paddy field. He remembered a python that dwelt betwixt the huge rocks beneath the bamboo canopy.

  He also remembered how it used to hiss very loudly, alerting the people if there was an imminent danger in the village. He reminisced over how a flock of mynahs use to nestle in their nests at nights.

  The bamboo dumps stood there looking exactly as they had two decades earlier. Muktinath stood in silence and waited to see if there was any sign of movement. There wasn’t; nor the hiss of the ancient python, that used to be revered by the village folks.

  “The python may have migrated and flown to a foreign jungle looking for peace and love,” he whispered, consoling himself. He walked up towards the range which had once been part of his ancestral land. Fruits had begun to change colours. Just a few more months left before harvest. He walked around touching each tree, whispering to them that he had returned. Did the trees understand their lost master’s plight?

  He picked a large orange and peeled it in the chill, late October dawn. He was exhilarated. He picked two more oranges and shoved them into the pockets.

  “These are for my youngest daughter back in the camp,” he whispered. The orchard had an important story to tell. Dorji had given him three dozen saplings as a present. Muktinath had brought eight dozen from Suntalay, a village that boasted the highest quality mandarins. He had also raised a couple of dozen saplings in his own nursery. He laughed a euphoric, ephemeral and tearful laugh in the silence of the ripening darkness.

  “Who could have benefited from my harvests these last fifteen years?” he murmured, massaging and caressing a tree trunk.

  He thought seeing his orchard had been a Pyrrhic victory. His mind was weighed down by the thought of how much he had toiled, laboured and sacrificed to bring that orchard to its existing shape and form. Muktinath hadn’t committed any crimes. The entire orchard witnessed the tears streaming down his face.

  The age-old pear tree stood in the same spot where it had been when he’d been evicted fifteen years earlier. The pomegranate tree, however, was nowhere to be seen. It looked like it had been cut down. He remembered bringing it to his land as a foot-tall sapling from Sarpang thirty years ago. The damson tree that stood beside the banana grove wasn’t there, either.

  All of a sudden, Muktinath experienced a difficulty in breathing, accompanied by a slight pain in his chest. He staggered to his feet. He sat on the chill soil of his clandestine mission, took out the khukuri from its sheath, and, with its tip, dug out some soil from the forecourt. He clenched a handful of it and heaved a sigh of relief and satisfaction.

  Muktinath realized that his three-storied house had been dismantled. He could see a clay-walled hut beside the hummock of ruins. People could be heard snoring inside the hut. Piglets could be heard grunting and squealing in the pen a few meters away from where he sat. A few cows were tethered in a row of poles under a pen. A heifer could be seen roaming around. Its rope had probably snapped.

  Muktinath decided to take a risk. He pulled out his torch.

  “I must get a proper view of my house, even though it’s in ruins, and the hut, as well.” He flashed the torch around the house. A dog sprinted towards him barking in an unusual tone. He recognized it. It was his dog — Bhaloo Kukoor.

  “Bhaloo, are you still alive? I was on a quest to find you, too,” he told him. Bhaloo had grown old and much of his fur had fallen out. His tail resembled a scabied snake. The dog wagged its tail and sat beside its master. It listened to the story of its master, shedding blissful tears.

  “Bhaloo, can I get some water to drink?” he asked the dog. Bhaloo clutched one of the hands of its master between the jaws and led him to the faucet. Muktinath drank the euphoric elixir of life at the sound of the rooster’s first cock-a-doodle-doo.

  Would the villagers recognize Muktinath if they happened upon him? Though feeling unwell, Muktinath was happy beside his dog. Although old and decrepit, the faithful beast could still recognize its old master.

  “I’m pleased with you, Bhaloo. You recognized me and gave what comfort you could. I wonder if anyone from the village would extend a similar helping hand,” he said, expressing a sense of satisfaction. He patted the dog on its head. The dog responded with a torrent of tears rolling down its cheeks.

  “I will soon leave this place,” he said, “and I ask you to keep guarding my land, the way you have done until now.”

  Bhaloo nodded his head and licked his master’s legs.

  Muktinath’s body had frozen when the door of the house was pushed open. The time was 5:30 A.M. A middle-aged woman had stepped out into the dust-laden patio, looking shabbily dressed. Her hair hung from her pumpkin-shaped head like a bunch of wilting catkins and a long uncared-for and mangy robe was flung from an elasticated waistband. She stood still for a while. From the way she looked at the ghastly scene on the porch, it was clear she’d been born with a squint. She approached the corpse. “Ajai! Ani Gaachi Mo? Oh! What’s this?” she shrieked at the top of her voice.

  Her children rushed out like startled squirrels. She spoke to the children in a language that the Lhotsampas found difficult to understand.

  Soon, the forecourt was flooded by the villagers. Muktinath’s body lay as still as a willow bough. Bhaloo Kukoor kept watch over his dead master, shedding tears profusely. He licked his master’s dead face and looked at the throng. The rivulets of tears showed that he wanted to convey a message to the crowd. Yet what genius could ever understand an animal’s tears?

  A man in a Buddhist robe tried to chase the dog away. It didn’t move an inch; instead, it bared its teeth at him — a warning, probably. He licked his dead master’s face a second time. Penjor, the headman of the village, asked if anyone in the crowd could identify the body. Nobody answered. However, the look on people’s faces made it clear that many of them recognized the dead person. Their lips moved in an attempt to disclose the body’s identity to the newly settled non-Lhotsampas, but in the end they feigned ignorance.

  Novin Thapa, the deceased’s closest neighbour, almost fainted when he came across the scene. His blistered legs, blood-clotted nose and the ears of corn said much about how far he had walked and how he’d died.

  He remembered how the two of them had grown up together and lived alongside one another for more than five decades before the innocent Muktinath had been evicted. Novin Thapa looked at Muktinath’s hands, which were still clutching a handful of soil, while a pair of oranges had tumbled out of his pockets and onto the ground.

  “You won in the end, Muktinath,” Novin Thapa muttered. “You used to tell me that one day you would be buried in your own soil — and, you won the bet. You’re a winner. Today, I’m ali
ve and standing on top of my land, but I don’t know where I’ll die. You’re lucky — you don’t know you’re being buried in your own soil,” he muttered in a whisper, still looking at Muktinath’s pale corpse.

  Poor Muktinath lay asleep on his own soil … finally at peace, for ever. Bhaloo Kukoor sobbed by his side.

  “What a lucky man! He looks so happy,” Novin Thapa mumbled.

  REVOLUTIONS, COUNTER-REVOLUTIONS AND PERSECUTIONS

  GOING BY NEWTON’S THIRD LAW, it is little wonder that the Age of Nations would produce the internationalist socialist movement, and it is even less surprising that the cosmopolitan component of that progressive ideology would attract the spleen of patriots and jingoists everywhere. On 11th July 1917, executives of the Phelps Dodge corporation, which ran the copper mines and border town of Bisbee, Arizona, like a medieval fief, colluded with Harry Wheeler, the local sheriff, to deport over 1,000 miners who had been on a peaceful week-long strike for better working conditions. Many of the strikers belonged to the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Bolshevik-inspired paranoia was in the air and, facing a sharp drop in copper prices, Phelps Dodge executives decided to break the strike by any means necessary. Their plan was ruthlessly ambitious: roughly an eighth of Bisbee’s population was to be exiled in a single morning. In order to arrange this mammoth expulsion, the sheriff deputized 2,000 local gunmen from the surrounding areas of Cochise County, gave them white armbands and weapons and unleashed them on the unsuspecting miners. The El Paso and Southwestern Railroad provided a dozen cattle cars for the operation, and, following six hours of mayhem, from early morning to noon, 1,186 men, women and children were loaded onto trains under armed guard and sent to Hermanas, New Mexico, 200 miles to the east.

  To suppress all news of the deportation, Bisbee was placed under a communications lockdown: the telegraph office was seized by the sheriff’s thugs, who also erected checkpoints on all roads leading in or out. Although lists of names had been handed out to the posse, many of the deportees didn’t belong to the IWW. Some were innocent bystanders, others were business-owners who sympathized with the miners. Although Harry Wheeler and a dozen of his Phelps Dodge paymasters were later indicted on kidnapping charges by the federal government, the Supreme Court ultimately decided Washington had no right to interfere and referred the matter back to the state of Arizona in the ruling United States v. Wheeler (1920), since kidnapping wasn’t a federal crime at the time. When questioned by Arizona’s Attorney General as to the legality of his actions, Sheriff Wheeler replied that it had nothing to do with the law, but rather with whether the striking miners were “American, or not”. As Wheeler told the Attorney General: “I would repeat the operation any time I find my own people endangered by a mob composed of eighty per cent aliens and enemies of my government.”

  None of those involved in the Bisbee deportation of 1917 were ever imprisoned for their actions, and Phelps Dodge’s rule over Bisbee actually tightened. Deportees who returned were denied work, while the unions were effectively shut out of mining operations. Further underscoring the company’s influence, all talk of the deportation was squashed until the 1980s, when most mining operations ceased. Fortunately, however, a poem survives. It was published in the IWW’s One Big Union Monthly in August 1919: “We are waiting, brother, waiting / Tho’ the night be dark and long” the poem begins, before detailing the experience of that terrible day:

  We were herded into cars

  And it seemed our lungs were bursting

  With the odor of the Yards.

  Floors were inches deep in refuse

  Left there from the Western herds.

  Good enough for miners. Damn them.

  May they soon be food for birds.

  The poem was unsigned; the only indication to the author’s identity was his union card number, 512210.

  A mere two years following the deportation, the same violent hysteria led to Emma Goldman’s expatriation to Russia aboard the USS Buford on 21st December, 1919. Like the Bisbee strikers, Goldman had dared to question the validity of the American Dream, and, despite her thirty-four years in the US, her belief that the Dream was nothing more than a pyramid scheme, made it clear that she was still a foreigner. The supposed foreignness of Goldman’s political beliefs therefore came to justify, in the eyes of American conservatives, her denaturalization and exile. Indeed, although American nativists denounced progressives and proponents of social and economic reform as dangerous foreigners out to destroy America’s uniqueness, it was overwhelmingly clear to observers like Goldman that, by so doing, America was becoming as tyrannical as the rest of the world:

  I looked at my watch. It was 4:20 A.M. on the day of our Lord, December 21, 1919. On the deck above us I could hear the men tramping up and down in the wintry blast. I felt dizzy, visioning a transport of politicals doomed to Siberia, the étape of former Russian days. Russia of the past rose before me and I saw the revolutionary martyrs being driven into exile. But no, it was New York, it was America, the land of liberty! Through the port-hole I could see the great city receding into the distance, its sky-line of buildings traceable by their rearing heads. It was my beloved city, the metropolis of the New World. It was America, indeed, America repeating the terrible scenes of tsarist Russia! I glanced up — the Statue of Liberty!

  The sad fates of Nicola Sacco (1891–1927) and Bartolomeo Vanzetti (1888–1927), two working-class immigrant anarchists who were wrongfully convicted of violent armed robbery due to their unpopular political beliefs, were eulogized by the Filipino-American writer and labour activist Carlos Bulosan (1913–56) in his poem “American History”, which fashions the final scene of both men’s lives into a haunting portrait as Vanzetti, “the dreamy fish-peddler”, and Sacco,” the good shoemaker”, dream of a “future […] that never was”:

  in spheres of tragic light, dreaming of the world that never was, as each tragic moment passed in streams of vivid light, to radiate a harmony of thought and action that never came to pass.

  Oppression at home usually paled in comparison to oppression abroad, and the stories and novels of the Syro-Libyan Alessandro Spina, né Basili Shafik Khouzam (1927–2013), are fuelled by the intensity of the horrors of the Italian colonial experience in Libya. In 1939, when Spina was twelve, Italy officially annexed Libya, by which time Italian settlers constituted 12 per cent of the population and over a third of the inhabitants of Tripoli and Benghazi, the epicentres of Italian power. Nevertheless, what had been expected to be an easy conquest in 1911 had instead turned into a twenty-year insurgency that was quelled only when the Fascists took power in Rome and Mussolini, in a quest to solve Italy’s emigration problem, dispatched one of his most ruthless generals, the hated Rodolfo Graziani (1882–1955), to bring the quarta sponda to heel and “make room” for colonists. Genocide ensued: a third of Libya’s population was killed; tens of thousands were interned in concentration camps; a 300-kilometre barbed-wire fence was erected on the Egyptian border to block rebels from receiving supplies and reinforcements; and the leader of the resistance, a venerable Koranic teacher named Omar Mukhtar (1858–1931), was hunted down and summarily hanged.

  Alessandro Spina’s “The Fort at Régima” is set in the mid-1930s, when an Italian officer, Captain Valentini, is ordered south of Benghazi to take command of a garrison stationed in an old Ottoman fortress that “recalled the castles the knights had built in Greece during the Fourth Crusade”. Valentini is glad to leave Benghazi and its tiresome military parades behind, but as he’s driven to his new posting, his mind is suddenly flooded with the names of famous Crusaders who had “conquered Constantinople, made and unmade emperors, and had carved the vast empire into feuds; they had scrambled hither and thither throughout the lengths of the Empire vainly trying to sustain an order, which, lacking any roots in that country, was ultimately fated to die”. Employing only a few hundred words, Spina slices across seven hundred years, showing the inanity of the concept of conquest as well as the existential vacuum it ine
vitably leaves in its wake: “As the Captain bounced around in his armoured car, it struck him that repeating the same sequence of events so many centuries later was both cruel and unbearable.”

  As the Peruvian journalist José Carlos Mariátegui (1894–1930) noted, while Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) was known as one of the chief engineers of the Soviet takeover of Russia, he was above all “a man of the cosmopolis” and that, as such, his exile from Russia had been inevitable: “The Russian revolution is in a period of national organization”, Mariátegui noted,

  It is not a matter, at the moment, of establishing socialism internationally, but of realizing it in a nation that, while being a territory populated by 130 million inhabitants that overflows onto two continents, does not yet constitute a geographical and historical unit. It is logical that, in this stage, the Russian revolution is represented by men who more deeply sense its national character and problems. Stalin, a pure Slav, is one of these men. He belongs to a phalanx of revolutionaries who always remained rooted in the Russian soil, while Trotsky, Radek and Rakovsky belong to a phalanx that passed the larger part of their lives in exile. They were apprenticed as international revolutionaries in exile, an apprenticeship that has given the Russian revolution its universalist language and its ecumenical vision. For now, alone with its problems, Russia prefers more simply and purely Russian men.

 

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