‘What prize? No prize?’ says the king the next day. ‘This man achieved no feat. He was warmed by the candle flame in our palace.’
But the wise minister tells the king, ‘The candle flame gave him no warmth. He was sustained by his own gaze.’
The king stood corrected. The washerman was given the prize. Amina too walked out of her watershed with her first volume of poems. Its publication and that it was well-received had decisively set the course of her life.
Now the letters. They were not love letters. They were written to him during the Indo-Pakistan war of 1965. The second one was written to him immediately before the Indo-Pakistan war of 1971, when the Pakistan army was massacring Bengalis. Why in the world were they written to him who had never shown her the slightest interest in things political? Books, music, paintings were what they mostly talked about. Once when she told him on the phone she was reading history, he had said with regret, ‘Don’t waste your time.’
He believed in the eternal separation of the ‘world outside’ and his inner life. The flow of his inner life was undoubtedly beautiful, reflecting images of a very delicate beauty, much like a Chinese painting. And Amina … She was forever shooting off tangents into the ‘outside’. Should we have a war with India? Should the Bengalis be massacred in our name?
Twice she had tried to make contact and misaddressed her letters. Now as she walked towards his room, she was vaguely curious.
2
He was standing by his table to receive her. Suddenly she was very happy to see him, his familiar face, the same moronic smile.
They wondered about the coincidence that they had met again, without ever making the smallest effort. When she was in London, he was posted there and now in Delhi, of all places. They talked of Urdu poetry in India.
‘Are you coming to the mushaira tonight at the ambassador’s house?’ she asked.
He looked disconcerted. Now there was no escaping the question. Nabbed at last, thought Amina.
Then he said in his deliberate stammer, half-sentences, measured usually to communicate the depth of his feelings, the turbulence of his mind, ‘I’m not coming. I don’t know.’ Pause. ‘I feel like someone …’, pause, ‘who is there to look after something’, pause, ‘and’, pause, ‘it is not being looked after very well.’
Amina was beginning to feel exhausted. She looked at the room, the flowers, the photograph of the Founding Father on the wall. She knew how he felt, knew that despite his affected mannerisms, he was really feeling sick at heart. But there was a difference. The root of his anguish lay in his own choice. He was not frightened like Amina. She smiled sweetly and bade him goodbye. She had just seen the face of rampant angst.
On her way back in the taxi she murmured to herself, ‘Brother, now that was some misaddressed meeting!’
3
Ever since she had sought asylum in India, Amina had patiently resigned herself to the new reality that in her host country, every communal riot, every major derailment, every electricity failure was now her personal responsibility. This was not merely symptomatic of burgeoning megalomania; she was suffering the ultimate fate of all political refugees, insomuch as she too had fallen prey to the curse of averted disaster, the maledictions of deferred imprisonment and thwarted interrogations. Political refugees all over the world suffer this malady as they shoulder the burden of all the sins of the host country. It is no use trying to reason with oneself that, after all, refuge was sought to avoid personal persecution, imprisonment, perhaps even physical torture during interrogation and this act is in no way a declaration to the world that the host country is a virtual paradise on earth. Self-righteous postures cannot assuage his suffering. It only adds to his guilt, the humiliation of a defensive argument.
In the host country no one looks down on the political refugee. People sympathize with him and bring him baskets of fruit and bouquets. He will now live like a chronic invalid. One can really enjoy it for a while. But the question is, what would one say? Hospitality is only confounding his predicament further. He knows he is in a position where he can neither be natural nor honest. Because for the political refugee, the honest thing to do is really to write odes in praise of the host country which would embarrass all concerned beyond recourse and make him look like a perfect ass.
Then what is he to do? He feels (a little bird tells him) that his only chance of redemption lies in picking faults with the host country; only that would be the irrefutable proof of his still intact integrity. He would thus show the world that he is still his old critical self. More often than not, the ploy works beautifully. It saves his position in the eyes of the people, and that, God knows, is more than half the story of all our lives.
Amina wrote a number of passionate poems, exposing the gaping flaws in a democratic system that still allowed for horrifying poverty. She read them to a select gathering of Indian writers. The Indian intelligentsia, which has rarely known persecution since the last half-century, which is free to choose between the right and the left, between east and west, or north and south, is always thrilled by chastisement. They warmly smiled at her. One of them remarked, ‘It is a very sincere attempt.’
These words at once revealed to Amina that she had just posted another misaddressed letter.
It takes some time, but you come to know that when you are saying all the right things for the wrong reasons, you are only playing to the gallery of your own doubts and misgivings.
Amina’s misaddressed letters had tried to tell her just that.
4
Months passed into years before they would buy crockery in Delhi. Buying anything here appeared to them as a gross waste of money since it was to be left behind when they went back.
When the last teacup given them as a gift by friends got broken by accident, they had no choice but to buy a tea set.
When they went to buy the tea set, it became acutely clear to Murad that they had still not gone back. No one around them could understand why purchasing cups was causing such anguish to this couple in exile.
Instead of the usual six cups that came with a tea set, Murad bought twelve cups. He convinced Amina that it was essential to buy extra cups so that if one cup was broken, the tea set might not look incomplete. But the real reason for his buying extra cups was that he never wanted to enter the shop again.
When a friend presented them with a packet of seeds, Murad was both amused and irritated. He felt that it was extraordinarily presumptuous of their friend to present them with something that needed time to grow and might bear flowers.
He hid the packet away in a drawer of the kitchen table. If they were to remain there for those months, during which the seedlings could sprout and grow and bear flowers, what could they do with the flower pots when they went back? They could not possibly carry flower pots to another country. They would have to be left behind or just given away. Both of them had become averse to the idea of leaving things behind.
The aversion was obviously rooted in their abandoning all their possessions when they escaped from their country with roughly scribbled notes to relatives instructing them to dispose of their belongings as best they could.
After some years, there was an uprising in their country. Murad kept his calm and spoke dispassionately to their friends about the expected success or failure of the uprising. It was during those days that he purchased some flower pots. He found the forgotten packet of seeds in one of the drawers of the kitchen board and planted them, assiduously. He took a long time filling every pot with earth, planting the seed and mixing fertilizer with earth to fill the flower pot. When all the seeds were planted, he placed them in a neat row. All he could do next was to go round them seven times (which he did not) to wind up the ritual.
The ritual of seed planting was unintentionally devised by Murad to ward off the evil of hope.
5
Ever since they had set foot in their country of exile, Murad had hated nothing more than hope, no matter how he vexed eloquent in its prais
e. Hope always filled him with such shame that he regretted ever getting himself in a situation where hope and hopelessness became indispensable parts of everyday life. He was convinced that if hope left him alone, his life could be far better.
In normal conditions, hope, the shame and curse of all mortals, remained reasonably diffused, spreading itself thinly on such objectives as catching a bus or obtaining an advertisement for their journal. But now all hope converged on a single point, straining for the overthrow of the military regime in their country. Consequently if he missed a bus, it irritated him to no end because he had ceased to even consider the possibility that a bus could be missed, and therefore when he left his house for the bus stop, he never hoped to catch the bus but rather hoped to buy the newspaper.
Murad needed no one to tell him that to hope was the worst possible state to be in. The opposite of hope is despair, to which he never gave a thought, perhaps because his soul had always known it. But it is wrongly assumed that a despairing soul knows no hope, which again torments only the despairing soul. An incurable optimist is never tormented by hope. For him, failure is a plaything, a magic ball that he throws up in the air with a silent ‘hurrah!’ and no matter where it falls, it is again in his hands because it is a magic ball, and he is ready to throw it up once more, himself always lightly floating several feet above ground.
Murad had never failed in achieving his objectives so that he knew nothing about failure. He began his life in utter poverty where hope flapped its wings and circled overhead like vultures above the marshland by the river where carcasses of dead animals lay rotting.
Murad’s hatred for hope was similar to his hatred for Amina.
How to be rid of hope: that was the question. It was not naivety but need that gave rise to hope. He thought that it would be best if he changed the nature of hope. One never hopes for the best (what a lark that is). One always hopes only for just a little. But Murad set his heart on hoping for the worst (that still did not stop him from secretly preparing for something that should be a little better than the worst).
But the secret preparations were in vain. The uprising was crushed. A village was bombarded. Nearly one thousand people died. Many more thousands were imprisoned.
Murad went on a spree of purchasing flower pots and planting seedlings. Meantime the first-sown seeds were already sprouting. In a matter of months, their tiny flat was full of plants. He had grown too attached to them so that the very thought of leaving them behind or giving them away would break his heart. Murad looked at his plants as his secret battlefield to combat hope. Yet it was only one morning as he was hoeing the pots, picking out earth worms, that he had thought, if one uprising is crushed, can another be far behind?
6
The word ‘uprising’ always reminded Murad of a minuscule uprising in a village that did not fail and another uprising in his own body that did.
In Colarchi, a small village in Pakistan, the landowner was not only rich but also a local intellectual. He was a pal of the local assistant commissioner and their evenings were spent drinking whisky and reciting poetry to each other. The assistant commissioner was grateful to him for both, because where else in that God-forsaken village could he find whisky and poetry at the same time and in the same place?
As a direct result of this friendship, the landowner was convinced that if the haris, the peasants, demanded half the crop (as they were legally entitled) he would have no difficulty in getting them all locked up in a jiffy. The haris were demanding the full half-crop. The landlord threatened to sack them all and eject them and their families from his lands. As the crops ripened for harvest, the dispute remained unresolved.
When the harvesting was done, the landlord went to the assistant commissioner. “‘B” has turned their heads,’ said the landlord. ‘He tells us one thing and tells them another. To us he says, “Yaar, I’m only talking.” To them he says, “Go, go, get the full half-crop.” Let us call their bluff. Lock them up.’
The haris were arrested and sent to the lock-up.
It so happened that Colarchi was a stronghold of Murad’s revolutionary group. (Here ‘stronghold’ means the strength of seven peasants or less.) One of their comrades came rushing to the cell. The cell rushed back to the village and asked the womenfolk to guard the harvest.
The landowner had hired local bandits to carry the harvest to his personal godown. The peasants would have been reduced to a mushy pulp, oozing red liquid, by these bandits, because they were truly ferocious. But when the bandits reached Dera and saw women guarding the harvest, they ran back as fast as if they had seen the very demons of hell.
Their loose pants of nine yards flapping in the wind, they folded their hands: ‘Raise a hand against other people’s women! No, Baba, no! This cannot be,’ said the bandits.
The landowner had overlooked what one of the bandits was now telling him in no uncertain words: ‘We may be bandits, but we are not, what you call … buggers. We have our own mothers, sisters, daughters. In every trade there is a code of conduct. What if someone attacks our women while we are away? What would happen to our banditry then?’
Getting the peasants arrested was a mistake.
Meanwhile, a camel caravan was proceeding under the bright starry sky, softly tinkling its bells, on the soft, cool sandy dunes of Colarchi. It carried the full half-crop to the next village (where the cell was located), and before dawn was distributed among the peasants’ mothers, sisters, daughters.
7
The second uprising occurred when behind the huge haystack, under that bright starry sky, the hariani smiled. When she smiled she lowered her gaze. The next moment, all Murad could see superimposed on the lowered gaze was the photograph of her husband, the group leader! The Comrade! And he couldn’t do it. Not for his life. He could not cuckold the Comrade now panting and running on the sandy dunes with the camels. Half of the mind says, fool, if you don’t … someone else will. But it fails to rise. What rises in its place is a huge admonishing finger and a booming voice that says, your brother’s honour, etc. The voice of his father, or grandfather or great-grandfather, or all of them rolled into one. Fraternity seeps into the legs and melts the kneecaps. Camaraderie asserts itself through impotence! The hariani smiles with contempt. An unforgettable smile …
English version by the author
JAMILA HASHMI
Exile
Sita of the Indian epic the Ramayana followed her husband Rama into exile, then was abducted by the demon-king Ravana in whose kingdom she chose exile in a grove rather than marrying him and enjoying the privileges of being queen. When Rama eventually rescued her and brought her back to his kingdom, she was forced into exile because the people of their kingdom impugned her chastity as she had lived away so long. (Translator’s note)
The birds fly, beating their wings faster and faster and the sun has turned yellow and descended to the steps of the large lake of Uchal. The setting rays turn the colour of the gurdvara spikes a gold-tinged white. And on the other side of the large common, the Dusehra fair is beginning to disperse. Now, in a little while, the effigies of the demon Ravana will be set alight. People will create a clamour as they run about, afraid, and in the blue twilight the embers will look like descending sparklers. The flames will rise for a long time and the faces of the people round about will look fearsome in the firelight, as if each one is a disguised Ravana seeking Sita to gloat over her isolation and her second exile.
Exile is such a hard thing. But nothing is in anyone’s power. Who accepts suffering from choice? Bhai used to say, ‘Bibi, why are you always dreaming? This love that you enjoy, this gaiety all around you, they will slowly lessen. Time reduces everything. But the deterioration comes so slowly that we get used to it.’ Where is my brother today? This breeze that travels with me, carrying the smell of my birthplace, if it knew where he was too, I’d tell it, ‘Ask him, will you, why this pain won’t lessen? Even after hauling their burden for years across arduous paths, why do people still dr
eam? Why do they yearn for peace and why do they love the light?’
Why was Sita’s only prayer in exile to be reunited with Ramchandra? Doesn’t misfortune harden people enough to abandon the hope of good times? After all, why can’t we love darkness? Why?
The naak tree has been flowering since the year Munni was born. The seasons change and its branches are smothered in blossom and the tree bows with the weight of its flowers. The union of the tree and the soil grows deeper. Its roots stretch further into the ground – no one can sever that relationship.
Munni has grown up now. How soundlessly the footsteps of time have passed me by. Today Bari Ma said to Gurpal, ‘Kaka, take my bahu and the children to the Dusehra fair. She hasn’t left the village for years.’
Gurpal said sharply, ‘Mother, when did you ever ask me to take them? It’s not my fault she hasn’t been anywhere for years.’
Who can be to blame? When someone calls me bahu, daughter-in-law, I feel they’re abusing me. I’ve been hearing it for years. Since that night when Gurpal jostled me into the courtyard and spoke to Bari Ma as she sat on her stool.
‘Look, Mother, I’ve brought you a bahu. Winsome and pretty. She’s the best of today’s haul.’ And Ma approached me, raising the lamp flame. My eyes protruded from hunger and fear. The barefoot trudge, miles long, had left me without the strength to raise a finger. I slumped in a heap at her feet. The cow and buffaloes tethered in the courtyard abandoned their fodder and stood staring at me. Bari Ma looked me up and down several times and said, ‘If Gurpal did a decent day’s work, I wouldn’t be in this state today. Look at me, I’m almost blind from fanning the fire. And all the maids have stopped calling because our harvest wasn’t in on time. Tell me how I’m supposed to handle the burden of this house. If only you’d start farming – I’d be so delighted.’
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