“Vomited out of their native soil years ago in carnage, and dumped hundreds of miles away, they had no anger left. Their only passion was memory… damned to a hell of longing.”
-Amitav Ghosh, ‘The Circle of Reason’
And this memory was a legacy passed from generation to generation, like a sacred family heirloom - not actively or vociferously, but silently, till the pain and longing was almost something congenital that one felt deep inside ones flesh and blood.
Thus, I found myself – fascinated and enchanted by the Partition even as a child; surrounded by my Great grandparents and grandparents who had lived through history; understanding childishly, its import, but not its impact. As a ten year old, Partition was a bedtime story I tried to extract from my Great grandmother at all times of the day - “Tell me the story of Partition”, I begged and pleaded till my persistence bulldozed over her reticence. With a child’s innocent, yet myopic insensitivity, I resurrected a myriad demons for her everyday – ghosts of the past that she had painstakingly laid to rest. The tales of gory escape, mere adventure for me, were a throbbing part of her daily existence; more unnatural, more alive for the silence it was wrapped in, lived and relived through the images of a homeland lost.
Stories of leaving a child behind as two parents could not carry five children in their arms to safety, and then retracing their path back through the depraved, deathly streets to find the child again, as a mother’s conscience and heart would not let her leave her child behind. Stories of overnight penury, being stripped and deprived of all possessions that you’d taken a lifetime to gain – of life as refugees, of honour and pride. Stories of hope and resilience and starting anew. Movingly romantic narratives of budding love in Chandni Chowk, hurried, sidelong, forbidden glances in that crowded, bustling market and then my grandparents’ wedding.
“There are no full stops in India”, says a character in Mark Tully’s 1991 collection of contemporary Indian parables. In a land better known for continuities and commas, partition and secession were not simply laid to rest in 1947. They continue in the bloodline, a trauma waiting to find utterance, bewildering the subsequent generations who have never been through it, but feel an unease, and an inability to react passively to even the word ‘Partition”. Growing up with it as a part of one’s consciousness, not simply saying that we “know people” who have been through it, but that these very people happen to be ones closest friends and relatives who had to leave everything behind, struggle, undergo unimaginable hardships, witness bestial, inhuman brutality and bloodshed, and still find temperance to build anew, leaves an indelible mark on the new generations.
Are we more fanatical, more vitriolic for all this? Is it simply a part of the charmed past, that we can detach from our persona and existence at our will or is it so intrinsic that we still go through with a sense of loss that finds expression sometimes in extreme animosity and anti-Pakistan sentiment, and then sometimes gets tinged with curiosity and a longing to discover ones roots."
If you’d walk by the road you’d see,
The broken-glassed, barred windows,
The irons on a padlocked door
Once sentinels of proud, shining metal
-now a crumbling, flaky rust.
If you look ‘neath the mien
Of sorry dilapidation
As you walk upon my dusty paths
Flanked by clods of earth
You might raise the dust
And see the specks swirl into shape
And form a dancing mirage
Of my erstwhile magnificence
Those lumps of parched earth
Might sprout rows of flowers
The blind windows that lie in wait
Might just again see
A push on the padlocked door
Might break the rusting hinges
Protesting, squeaking it might open
To welcome you within
Long has been the wait
Since they left us here
And wait we did – for year upon unending year
Till the weeds now seem like friends
And we see them grow in a pattern
In the rose bush flower bed
The parched earth of my compounds
Waited long for the gardener
It smiled temptingly at nebulous clouds
Too far away to perceive its glance
And then it forgot what it felt
To be soft, nurtured and fertile
It took its arid state as a given
And basked in its long wide cracks
And you now wander into my grounds
You see me lie wasted
Would you strike away the cobwebs
And dust the decay away?
Would you tend to my lawns
And see me thrive under your care
Or would you leave like the others
Daunted by my countenance?
(This one was inspired by a painting I had a glimpse of - don't remember the finer details, but just filling in the gaps of what I saw there, was so despondent, so touching, that it had to be put down in words)..
Every mouthful of sweetness
Leaves a bitter after taste
Every Eden has a Serpent
Every ocean a Siren
Temptations that waylay you
To ease the path of life
And then weigh your feet with chains
Of moral righteousness
They term every pleasure illicit
And darken each moment exquisite
With heavy clouds of guilt.
Every sensual indulgence
Has a shameful afterglow
We shackle with sanctimony
The very gifts of life
Till it’s a mortal sin
To even feel alive
A soothing zephyr flits around,
Untamed and free, no burdens weigh it down
It skips and skirts the flowers, the trees
Till finally its time for the evening to bow
And with its heavy ware of memories
Crouches in dusk
“No time for the youth to flit and fly,
Sleep off, zephyr”,
The ageless wind sighs
It moans wistfully and caresses the leaves
Stirs sepia silences, whispers sweet nothings
Runs a finger through forgotten strings
Discordant notes echo through the stillness,
Strike against empty walls of the heart
Reverberate, resonate, retrieve
-from remote recesses,
Forgotten losses, forgiven pains
Desires pined for, guilty gains
About me -
The fluctuations of my public speaking career.
-P.D.
The inception
Some people are born public speakers.
Some attain the art of public speaking.
And some have public speaking thrust upon them.
If I were to apply the Shakespearian thought to my life, the last certainly applies.
The ‘thrustees’ being my ever-encouraging parents’ vested interest in preserving their ear drums.
