At day break, the pahadi landscape is dotted with red turrets of devi mandirs, sparrows and monkeys, softened white pebble beds and streams, as the bus winds up hills to Dharamshala. The bus to Naddi, is all orange inside. The driver has light eyes and sharp Afghan features, and waits long enough to fill the little bus to the brim before taking off. Among towering boys and homely women, a little schoolgirl climbs in. It is tragic that she has to go to school in a bus filled with holidaying tourists. She has navy blue ribbons in her double braided hair and a look of breathless anxiety on her face. She is tossed and shuffled around near the engine seat of the driver, by huge women in matching knitted sweaters and thick spectacles. She coyly gives in, making place for all the big people around her. She steadily and passively scans every being on the bus, till she has to get off at her stop. I realize that the big women around her, are her teachers, who also get off and make their way to the local school where the bell is just about to ring. As I see winding uphill pathways, I am reminded of Kiarostami’s landscape in ‘Where is my friend’s home?’. Now and then the hills peep out and register their greetings.
Three streets and a junction make up Mcleodganj, the buzz town near Dharamshala. The place does not claim any paths to enlightenment. It seems to have very plainly and readily accepted its role as a hustle zone for spiritual wanderers, searchers and tourists. Its economy is from the traveler. The cafes, food joints, cake shops, and souvenir stalls lining the streets, with wrinkled Tibetan faces, wanderlust hipsters, and maroon clad monks and nuns, turn Little Lhasa into a colorful feluda of textures.
Dalai Lama seems to like yellow windows. The Tantric Buddhas around me effuse with colourful energy, emotion and colour. They are at the same time grotesque and enticing. Twenty one Green Taras stare at you like seductresses beyond your power. The intricate lines from the wall paintings have a life of their own, as a bunch of high school children on excursion, fill the space with their giggles and happy chatter.
The shingles on the roofs of the houses, here, shine and glimmer in the sun, just like the snow peaks in the light of dusk. The flat slabs lie on top of each other ever so re-assuringly and with a confidence that they won’t slide down. They are now a cheerful grey, now a greenish blue, now a dull hue , just like the moods of a day. The Bhagsunag waterfall is a little more than a trickle. The rocks are spotted with maroon, as monks have a little time out in the name of a water ritual.
That evening there is a candle light march, as the monks set out in circles around the main square, in protest of the arrest of fellow Tibetan monks. It is a moment of mixed feelings. One can’t help but feel a certain sense of helplessness and uncertainty, a sad sense of calm in their faces. Suddenly their place in the big scheme of things makes this scene seem a vain moment. They seem too tiny, too fragile, too transient before the mountains looming large all around them. The timelessness of the landscape seems to mute and evaporate the tangible voices of the valley.
Meanwhile, the US president Barrack Obama claims the death of the most powerful threat to the world, Osama, and thereby, turns the world into a spectator of yet another ridiculous unrealistically real event. The glimpses I catch of the ‘world’, now and then, on television screens, in cafes and antique handicraft shops, put my mind in a haze of confusion. So many different worlds existing side by side, parallel, tangentially, intersecting only at moments like these, yet never really part of each other, the conundrum that so many clashing realms could produce, makes me want to retreat into my shell, close my doors certain worlds, and open certain select windows. But one cannot sit in a one windowed closet for long. The breeze has to cross through, and doors have all to be opened before long. Otherwise, the sound of the silence inside can turn more lethal than noise itself.
There is a certain morose joy in the way the people wrap up their shops at sundown. The hustle of the day slowly dies to a deafening silence of abandonment. Few cafes are still abuzz with picture perfect characters , who seem to have been sitting in the same chair reading the same page of the same book since morning, having become subjects of many trigger happy tourist with cameras.
I am an outsider to this place, and I make no attempts at appropriation. I cannot turn the monks into subjects of characterization. They seem to represent a unified whole, embodying a unanimous sentiment and voice. I promise many of the shopkeepers, that I would return the tomorrow, but, then I will never really find my way back to them tomorrow.
Under my new found mango umbrella, I find a new found embrace, a warm hug on a chilly day. By the third day the auto drivers, the bus drivers, the café owners have turned into known faces and names. Waiting at the bus stop for the Naddi bus, I see an old Tibetan woman with her grandson. The boy has a green toy truck in his hands and the grandmother seems lost in him, carrying him around her shoulders and waving at the grandfather who is waiting at the bus stop. I decide to get myself a Tibetan dress stitched, the next time I come here.
Naddi is like the little village from Majidi’s ‘The Color of Paradise’ . The hills look lofty from here. They beckon ever more strongly. Sipping on hot chai, I serenade the peaks, scale the slopes with my eyes and in two hours, mentally scour the whole range. Sitting on the road side curb, watching people turn into vanishing dots, an sense of power assumes you, the high point providing me a panoptical position.
On a lazy afternoon , lying under tall cedars and pine trees, I drift into a reveries and float with an ‘unbearable lightness of being’. The afternoon is unreal. Time seems to have gone amiss. Yellow petals ring with unsung notes of silent hills.
The lightness will soon need an anchor.
Sooner or later, there will always be a bus waiting to take you away.
Tangerine,
Can you hear the tambourine,
As you flame up the night,
When sea waves crash across
Memories in sand?
This is it, it's going to be gone soon.
I know.
What do we do?
Enjoy it.
Like green meadows
You run into wilderness,
Your red burns the forest,
Singeing dry leaves,
And crumpled letters,
Beneath our feet.
Last night you were
The blue moon,
The ocean swelled in your eyes,
And teased the sand
Sticking to your brow,
Don’t stir, lest you wake,
The waves are at your behest.
When you stood on that far edge
Of the breaking line
Between dusk and dawn
What colour were your hands,
As you bent into the ocean
Caressed the waves,
And turned the sea into purple desire..
Through your hair
Let me run my fingers
On my hands,
Let me get some colour,
I will meet you once upon a dream,
Memories seem too old today,
You are not a concept,
Tangerine.
that other night , which stole her seconds away.
Tick tick went the watch on her wrist.
But time wouldn’t budge.
Where had it gone?
The staleness of stagnation, she could sniff.
The hopeless drifter was
caught in the doldrums.
No wind to drift away into.
The sun came once that night,
to knock the pink dew off the moon’s cheeks.
And down it fell.
Like crumbling paper after
a hundred and seven kites got stuck
on the lone tamarind tree on that crater.
As the sun blew ,
crepe paper floated , flew, and settled down,
like a myriad magic carpets,
on the roadside curb,
on the edges of vulnerable minds,
and on a footpath that now crunched
with the sound of the crumpled pink,
torn hearts and worn out soles.
She walks.
She always does.
Along this vulnerable edge,
balancing on the yellow and black curb stones,
hands unconsciously reaching out,
fingers stretching out
like antennae trying desperately
to catch a signal,
hovering in the air, so clear and elusive.
A lost footing.
A crunch onto the crisp carpet,
her toes are now tickled by torn edges,
teased by the grass blades .
Hagard old brown petals ,
shorn of their rouge and youth,
cut into her skin,
like old empty vestiges of Broadway divas,
now orphaned and hurting.
The soles come off ,
bare foot, she trots,
crunching and stepping over
every oncoming hope of salvage.
The pink will destroy her.
Consume her.
Expurgate her.
her fingers now bleed pink.
As she touches the dew drop on her eyelid,
the sky splashes into rose and ice candy
The sun sets in her eyes,
a Monet storm raging through them.
And she hums, strumming a long lost tune ,
Across the two hundred miles of kite strings
that lie in between her and a few lonely kites ,
crumbling by the day, fading in pink,
Left behind ,
because they wouldn’t let go of the tamarind tree,
So easily .
Sitting on the sideline
Yellow stripes on mind,
Tarmac and gravel
Crunch under my hand,
There is no time that can measure me now,
Into the wild,
I go.
Each step I take
I get higher on land,
Each bow I break,
Sinks me deeper in sand,
Tangled in branches
In rapids I row
Humming birds and red shoes
See me go by
Into the wild
I go.
As I woke up early Friday morning, I was engulfed by an anxious anticipation; an anticipation of something I had decided last night just before going to bed. That I would go to Jantar Mantar the next day. Considering how crowds can turn intimidating and lose their sanity in a matter of seconds, the act of going to the heart of it, did not sink in till I was actually on the way, on the Friday afternoon, when next to me came and sat an old man, who had brought along with him three young impressionable boys, who seemed to be from a small UP town. As one of the young boys asked the bus conductor to tell them when the stop to Jantar Mantar arrived, I felt re-assured. I was not alone. Slowly, as people climbed into the bus, stop after stop, I liked to think that all of them were co travelers to the same destination. For me, all roads, on that Friday afternoon, led to Jantar mantar.
‘Hamare Uncle ji humein le jaa rahe hain, udhar muft mein paani dilayenge .Kyun uncle ji!’, they said.
‘Ye Sheila dixit ka ghar hai’, they said.
‘Kiska ghar hai?.. padho…Hanumantaaya… haan wohi.. MLA honge.. idhar sare bade ministers rehte hain’, they said.
‘India Gate’, they said, as they gave each other contented smiles.
Everything outside seemed very normal. My whimsical expectation of seeing signs of protests and marches, or slogans, were dampened; the city was carrying about its normal business, like a quintessential professional. My voyeuristic impulse as a spectator of a possible spectacle was thrashed. As I hopped off the bus at the red signal on Janpath, I stole curious glances around me at possible fellows. Apart from the very mild traffic congestion that seemed plausible on any average working day, there were no jarring signs of security personnel with intimidating rifles, or volatile clusters of people . I took the left at the red light, that would lead me to Anna Hazareji , now on his fourth day of an indefinite fast for the cause of India Against Corruption.
I saw middle aged women, mothers and aunties, in sneakers and caps, with bottles of Bisleri , strolling back and forth on the road. Slowly there were parked cars, and groups of people , trickling into the Hazare vortex . A yellow Delhi police barricade marked the site of entry into the place of protest, right opposite Jantar Mantar, which seemed dead and redundant in such a volatile context. I entered and was overwhelmed.
Here was a sea of people. An ocean. Yet a very sane ocean. Without any streaks of violent vandalistic vendetta , the people who had come to see Anna Hazare, the ex-army official now, a social activist, on his sangharsh , knew the depth of the cause they had come for. Many of them, I am sure, would have had to deal with corruption at close quarters, at several points in their lives, and carried an earnest cause for concern. Many others, like me, college students, and young blood, who were equally earnestly invested in the cause through their conscience and a baggage free a-historical perspective of this nationwide movement. A movement which they wanted to embrace into their own personal histories and re-enforce their own voice as citizens of a very vulnerably amusing nation.
Anna tum sangharsh karo, hum tumhaare sath hain!
Cried the ocean in lilting waves.
I suddenly felt the urge to want to be taller than the rest, having no idea which way I was going, I simply nudged my way in. Sliding myself through the ocean, overcoming one person at a time, at times, feeling myself surrounded by good humored middle aged men, telling me ‘Is taraf aao beti, aap andar jake baith jao, bohot bheed hai’ , at times, finding myself cordoned off at points of no return, where I was absolutely at a loss as to which was the way to get myself to the heart of Anna’s audience, I somehow, ended up in the area, where people were sitting since morning, listening, chanting songs, cheering, encoring to ‘bharat mata ki jai’ and ‘vande mataram’ , and ‘jo bole so nihaal’ .I was finally a part of the nation come together. I could see I was among bank employees, government clerks, NGO workers in crisp cotton sarees and round red bindis, engineers and software professionals with their Iphones and Facebook constantly archiving the moment to virtual memory, home makers and their 12 year old daughters in pink hair clips, impressionable and warm blooded college students , and hundreds of small town boys, like the ones I met in the bus, all had come here, many , not knowing their place in this scheme of events, yet, wanting to be part of it , wanting to sign on a page of history , their presence and solidarity.
As I recovered from the thrust into this overwhelming event that engulfed me, I noticed how, there was this unstated assumed role that everybody had taken upon themselves, and an amusing traffic pattern of the people, had emerged, as a constant flux of floating visitors moved in front of the makeshift dais, where Anna ji sat, to get his ‘darshan’. The more static audience sat in front. Rimmed on the periphery by more standing people, and finally edged by a thick line of fire of media and television crew, with their cameras aimed to shoot, and their reporters, like dispatched satellites, speaking from dispersed corners of the crowd, seemed like lost lonely men and women, speaking to everybody yet nobody, and constantly on guard to measure the pulse of event. If you saw reporters shift base, automatically, a cluster of people would turn their heads that way. If one spotted a lady reporter with heavy make-up, touching up her face for the ‘citizen journalist byte’ of the day, naturally, for few moments, Anna’s cause would take the backseat, and the amusing glamour of the TV performance would hold sway. The crowd responded like mercury to its surrounding. It was this mercurial power of people, that had, over the past few days, taken up the simple yet strong rooted cause of India against corruption, and proliferated it into a national mitosis.
I saw Anna Hazare, medium built, lean, in a white muslin cotton kurta pyjama, and pleasantly calm and smiling, but without his trademark Gandhi topi. He was standing at one corner of the dais, hands clasped at the back, looking curious and pleased. A black clad street play group had just infused thunderous encores and a man with a pony tail, with a saffron kurta, was playing the electric guitar and singing Bollywood bhajans! Now and then, the slogans turned sinister, as groups would shout ‘Bhrashtachariyon ko phaansi do’ or ‘Sonia Gandhi nikammi hai’ ; those few odd moments which made me cringe and want to mute the crowd rather than see the apparently sane crowd suddenly lose its temperament in a weak moment. On the fringes of the concentrated crowd, were the mobile and vibrant moving clusters of independent slogans and flag wavers, common men turned into performers, their shirts turning into canvases for signatures and an odd family now and then posing as a family banner for people to click their picture! Anisha had joined me by then, and I felt no longer a lone crusader.
What was conspicuous to us two wide eyed JNUites was the stark absence of a JNU voice in this whole issue. On campus, JNU was sleeping, JNU was watching Saas bahu serials on Colors tv, JNU was playing cricket on the field, JNU was feeding dogs, JNU was sipping chai with an eerie nonchalance , and Anna Hazare was conspicuously absent in the voice of JNU. The question still haunts me. My reasoning led me to wonder if JNU found this issue too banal, too grass root level, too ‘non-intellectual’ to be dappled in? Why were there no posters, no leaflets, no talks on this issue? Why did the parties not find any enterprise in this cause? I missed the JNU voice at Jantar Mantar that day, and I wish, we were more in number for that sake. But I was content, Anisha was with me. After having tried several ‘view’ points from which we could see Anna ji, we were tired of peering above a million necks and standing tip toed. So I took a Kulfi-falooda break. Kulfi, with slimy worm like falooda turned pink by Rooafza ; topped by a sprinkling of guilt ridden conscience of eating in the vicinity of fasting satyagrahis!
It was time to march. Anna was giving his press conference, and things seemed to be looking up. The deadlock with the government seemed to be opening up in his favor. My job seemed to be done. I had given him my salaam, on behalf of all my folks back home, and now with a candle in hand, I decided to take the walk all the way to India Gate. But little did I know that half the crowd there had decided to do the same. So I found myself walking at brisk pace, with a sea of people that swarmed the roads, firmly yet very peacefully. Their pace was elusive. At times I was either too fast, or at times too slow.
What was appreciable was the nature of the march. They chanted slogans, encored, but all in goodwill. The roads seemed to make way for the sea. The cars stopped. The traffic police cheered and let the sea march. The security guards were there, not to restrict but to allow these people to exercise their freedom of expression. The police facilitated by rerouting traffic. It was a wonderful moment of collective jubilation of the wonder of the democracy that we are. The state did not, for once, curb and disrupt the flow. The state seemed to be listening.
with the others. Somebody had pointed out ‘Why do people light candles? Be it mourning or jubilation?’ I would like to think that it is the power and hope of light, in its more primal, innocent form, a small flame, that turns the space and therefore the idea it inhabits, sacrosanct.
As we took our place under a crescent moon , the monument seemed to benevolently accommodate its fiery and energetic people doing seemingly funny things in its shelter, all in the cause of an ‘idea’ of the ‘people’ , everything revolving within man’s sphere, watching him embracing the space around him to help him inscribe his own history, in hope of a solace that he will feel remembered as part of it, forever trying to give himself an irrational hope of the impossibility of death and evanescence.
It was time for coffee. The old man who came with his flaming kettle, asked for the plate and spoon we had been clanking the night with. He seemed happy. He had earned plate to eat from that night , like many others, who would find more spoons, dented steel plates and half burnt candles that they could take home and light. The sea had stormed the India Gate grounds and gone. Families with their 8 year olds trickled back to normal pace, the moongphali chana wala got back to his place, children started crying for balloons, and the family cameras and camera phones where back to clicking memoirs of the monument of the capital. It was calm again and the heat of the evening made way for a cooling breeze. Anisha and me had a subtle smile of self pride written on our faces. ‘The deadlock is over, Anna is to end the fast tomorrow at 10 am’ we heard from the news.
We were in a flux of the 21st century awakening, or so I would like to think. The corruption that had been seeping into the system, and corroding the foundations of the Indian machinery, seemed to be finally on everybody’s mind. It is just the beginning. But it is evident. People have become aware, and have taken the effort to express this awareness as a whole. And I have hope that this active awareness, instrumentalises and proliferates in the social conscience as a way of life.
I went home, having participated in my first peaceful and victorious protest , and a utopian vision of a 21st century Dandi march that had just taken place on the real and the virtual roads of the country, and in my city. I heart this country.
s r a j a n a k a i k i n i .n e w d e l h i, a p r i l 9th 2011
