Melting Heart
Original (Assamese) : Juri BaruahTranslated by Mahesh Deka
While I was thus busy gazing at
various articles in the room, Rahmat Ali kept his eyes fixed on the distant
horizon through the open window. He maintained a deadpan face and remained
silent.
And I too had nothing to ask.
I was biting into the crisp laddoo
and the crunching sound shattered the stillness of the room. It shattered not
just the stillness of the room but provided a pretext for a number of unasked
questions. Phantoms of dormant fear come rushing into the room from the world
outside.
“I’ve sold the TV. How long can one
keep watching all that muck? My sons keep asking me to come over to Guwahati.
But, the spirit isn’t willing. The room you’re sitting in is in India. The
other room is in Bangladesh,” Rahmat Ali said with a wry smile. Was it possible
that even a smile can be so sad? Or so challenging? It seemed even capable of
cocking a snook at all that treachery.
The sticky jaggery from the laddoos
got stuck on my fingertips. Rahmat Ali’s eyes were still fixed on the barbed
wire fencing seen in the distance through the open window.
“Your house with its compound looks
as if it has been there for ages,” I was on the verge of saying but held
myself.
Who knows, Rahmat Ali might get
irritated and blurt in anger – “Aren’t we original inhabitants of this
country”?
No, Rahmat Ali will not ask any such
question. There is still time for that. Everybody is asking questions – the
common man is asking questions to the grass-root level leaders, the grass-root
level functionaries are in turn posing questions to the top leaders and the
top-level leaders are hurling questions at ‘chaiwala’. Doesn’t Rahmat Ali want
to question anybody? About the barbed wire fences, about the commotion, about
the songs of Bhupen Hazarika, or about the tea and the rasgollah consumed after
a meeting of the local branch of Sahitya Sabha? Doesn’t Rahmat Ali want to ask
a single question to anybody?
Rahmat Ali just tells me one
sentence before I am about to leave – “If you have any problem regarding food
in the guest house, come to our place without any hesitation.”
After that, I have never got in
touch with Rahmat Ali again till date. Maybe, he too has forgotten me. Maybe,
by now, his house has already been uprooted from the newly demarcated
boundaries. Does his new house still boast of the black and white photograph of
Bhupen Hazarika? Does his new house still boast of the map of Assam which his
mother had stitched (chain stitch) and which used to hang near the photo of
Mecca? Does his new drawing room boast of a window from where one can view the
barbed wire fences of the border? His memories might have got frozen.
Maybe he can’t face the prospect of reviving those memories and has, therefore,
kept a TV in his drawing-room so that the jarring contents of today’s TV can
help those dormant memories remain undisturbed. Surfing
channels with the help of the TV remote, he can only hear commotion…Journalists
repeating meaningless sentences at the top of their voices…Torchlight
processions, blobs of fire advancing haltingly on top of bamboo torches. Behind
those long processions one can hear muffled voices, sounding like the hissing
of snakes… Refugees, Miyans, Muslims of East Bengal origin.
I too had switched off the TV. Even
after that, the erratic blobs of fire from the torches raged on for a long
time, enveloped by a babble of incoherent words, and the trail of smoke kept
advancing ceaselessly towards the distant horizon.
Fire, by nature, is inherently
inconsistent and erratic but its light serves as a beacon. The reach of light
is immense and unwavering. Man has been imparting this lesson to each other down ages
and fire has been the only tool that helps an errant individual to come out of
the path into which he has strayed and look at himself critically in its stark,
unforgiving light. Even after grasping the inherent characteristics of fire,
Men haven’t learnt a lesson from it – that beyond its irregular outlines, with
flames leaping every which way, a fire always burns with an essential
consistency. What keeps changing is the amount of heat it emits.
This is what I wanted to tell to
Rahmat Ali that day all those years ago. I had a feeling that I failed to
explain even this simple truth to him that day as I accepted the jug of water
he offered me to wash away the stickiness of the muri laddoo from my hands.
That was how I consoled myself that night while sitting in the huge room of the
guest house, as the matchstick I struck with shivering hands was extinguished
by a gust of wind blowing through the room’s long window.
A few people had come out of the
serpentine queue to go back where they came from – they were totally at sea
about this whole thing called ‘Legacy Data’. They were all heading towards
Rahmat Ali’s house. Rahmat Ali heard them out. He also tried giving some
solutions but refrained from becoming their saviour. He was certain that nobody
in this country would accept these women as one of their own. They had left
their fathers’ home ages ago. The documents of their paternal home will not
come to their rescue. Does a woman have any legacy data in her husband’s house?
“My husband belongs to this nation. Will this country not be mine?” Even after
hearing this, Rahmat Ali did not make any comment. Though he remained silent,
he knew it very well that the country does not protect the interests of the
labourer but only stands for the rights of the ruler. These people consider
every place where they settle for the time being, to be their country. They
have been living in the char areas throughout their lives and do not have any
idea about the concept of a nation or how big can a nation be. On noticing me
waiting in front of the gate, Rahmat Ali beckoned me in with a nod of his head.
I saw a lot of women in dirty, dust-encrusted saris just vanishing without a
trace down the dusty road their identity becoming one with the dust on the
road.
These toil-hardened laborious women get shattered at the very thought –
“Husbands are from this country, wives are not”.
That day Rahmat Ali mentioned
Mankachar. Talked about Mir Jumla’s kala-azar. The burial site of Mir Jumla is
famous in Mankachar as Mir Jumla’s tomb.
Names of only two types of men
survive within the annals of history –the hero and the villain. Just as history
remembers Mir Jumla as a villain, do people living in distant parts remember
Mankachar too? This thought repeatedly comes to Rahmat Ali’s mind. Every day he
looks at the wall where the map of Assam, which his mother had infused life
into with her beautiful chain stitch, hangs like an enchanted charm protecting
the memory of bygone days.
I too had continued looking for fire
–for the fire of torches on an oarsman’s hands as he tries to steer his boat
away from the traps of treacherous pools of still water; or the sparkling
crimson flames of burning kohua grass floating up into one’s vision from some
drifting sand-bar in the river; or the fire that gets extinguished within the
malnourished bosom of a toiling woman labourer whose eyes burn with the
ferocity of the fire seen in the leaping flames under the pan in the oven.
In Rahmat Ali’s eyes, however, I
don’t see any trace of the fire I was looking for. His eyes are cool and placid
like the flowers on a winter morning catching the first rays of winter sun
piercing feebly through the thick veil of fog hanging over the river.
“The day I was born, this whole area
was under flood. The day my eldest son was born, a curfew was clamped. On top
of it, many stories of Partition were spreading through word of mouth. My
grandma too had a few stories of her own, passed on to us as part of family
saga. Our father also narrated a few, as warnings to us, for the sake of our
security. Rahmat Ali would then pause for a while and would look back on those
days, now part of the not-too-distant past. Days are not just the history of
heroes and villains. Those days are replete with so many untold stories
remaining hidden within their folds. History always disregards the untold,
ignoring them with disdain as unfit for record. Everyone of those living on the
chars– those transient sand-bars on the river– their futile travels back and
forth, carrying their IDs carefully wrapped in plastic bags, have succeeded
only in raising clouds of dust on the dusty trails; transient testimony to
their predicament.
“During my father’s funeral
procession, I suddenly realised that so many questions had remained unasked
while he was still alive. During that time, the borders were open. The chars
too were fleeting, frequently shifting locations. The government of the time
also hardly attached any significance to the fact the line of demarcation
between the two countries lay between the ever-shifting chars, those
innumerable sand-bars whose locations within the river keep changing from year
to year, sometimes even from day to day. The people who had settled on those
chars were also blissfully unaware of this. In some char areas, both the dates,
October 2, the birthday of Gandhiji and March 17, the birthday of Shekh Mujibur
Rahman, are observed with equal solemnity. People talk admiringly about both
Gandhi and Sheikh Mujibur. Some of those chars would one day get submerged
within the river only to resurface sometime later in another location close by.
Rahmat Ali looked sharply towards
me. I got a jolt. His gaze was sharp and clear. It was no longer hesitant or
apologetic like his smile. It was intense, much more intense than before.
“Even during those days, the Country
wanted to know and posed a question to our father – ‘Tell us, which side you
want to make yours.’ Huge stretches of our land had already become a part of
Bangladesh. My father, while looking wistfully at lost land, had told us one
day – ‘We stayed with Gandhi. Gandhi never bothered about anybody’s religion.’”
That evening, Rahmat Ali was not
emotional at all. As he was reliving his past and narrating it in his matter of
fact tone, his words were raising visions of the future in my mind. In an
effort to convince himself he was muttering, more to himself than to anyone
else,–“But, everybody is not Gandhi. They can’t be. Who cares for Gandhi today,
anyway? When the people here started developing a change of heart, nobody knew
what spiked fences were. The huge floodlights had not got the better of night’s
darkness. People never wanted Bengali-medium schools; they rooted only for
Assamese-medium.”
Rahmat Ali did not want to hear any
concluding comment from me. He got up from the reclining chair on the verandah.
The dents left by the contours of his body were still visible, pressed on the
chair’s cushion. They reminded me somehow of the illusory sense of falling flat
on one’s face that comes to the mind whenever one sees his own shadow lying
headlong over the ground. The rest of the story has been narrated in history,
we try to define that part as regional, controversial and border-related and
justify holding on to our torches. Generation after generation has witnessed
how the fire has turned into smoke and got blended with the air and they have
woven a myth around that black smoke, calling it symbolic of the anger, the
resentment and the voices of revolt. Rahmat Ali did not remind me of all these.
Rahmat Ali, after all, is not a story that he would keep justifying his
existence on the basis of words and events.
Even after that Mankachar could not
escape the tyranny of the border. The Meghalaya border moved Mankachar even
further away from Assam. “Mankachar inched closer to a foreign land, got
alienated from its own people”. These words of Rahmat Ali kept ringing in my
ears ever afterwards.
Time is changing the context of
these issues according to its own needs. Even after that, I failed to find
words with which I could assure Rahmat Ali. Explanation can only give
self-satisfaction to a person. There is nothing like wrong or right about an
explanation. It only gives, relatively speaking, a sense of justification for
the stand one takes at a given point of time. Rahmat Ali is just a witness to
this series of explanations, not an enabler who would hand out solutions.
As the fire engulfed one after the
other, this town with its arrogance, and its alleys and bye-lanes suffering
from a sense of inferiority on getting detached from the town’s central
architectural splendour, it seemed that this town too was emphasising in its
own way the same border issues all over again. The same
issues that Rahmat Ali had raised all those years ago. As I was taking
photographs of the faces lit up by the torchlight procession, I remembered
Rahmat Ali once more.
“Is Rahmat Ali still pressing the TV
remote or not!” Prabhat blurted out somewhat dramatically, while poking the
fire in front of us. Prabhat was not a witness to the time that Rahmat Ali, with
his body leaning against the barbed-wire fence, had to go through. Nobody,
neither I nor Prabhat nor anybody else for that matter, has the patience of a
Rahmat Ali to keep listening to repeated narrations of events from the past
while following at the same time the present course of events. Maybe that is
the reason we are deluding ourselves with the presumption that the heat from
the burning fire is the precursor of the events which will unfold in the
future.
After deluding myself like this, I
wanted to meet Rahmat Ali one more time. If I meet
Rahmat Ali again, would he still offer me muri laddoos, I wondered. Rahmat Ali
had told me about people who were staying in a ‘nation’ but were still
‘nation-less’. Rahmat Ali was a practical person. He was not among those heroes
who changed colours like a chameleon – patriots at times and advocates of
religious bigotry in the name of patriotism at others.
Prabhat was totally engrossed in the
work of splitting the bamboos and making thin strips out of them. Whenever
necessary, he scraped and trimmed the ragged edges to smoothen the strips. The
trimmer the strips, the better they grip the soil. After tying a black flag to
one of the bamboo strips, Prabhat says – “This is what will keep flying from
now, is that understood?”
Like Prabhat, I too was not a
witness to the moment when events had first started unfolding nor did any of us
wait till the end. Though we had read poems on ‘patriotism’, in Grade VI none
of us understood its inherent meaning. Our Assamese teacher appeared more
comfortable spending time in the office of a Regional Party than explaining to
us what ‘patriotism’ really meant. Sometimes, he would tell us about the just
concluded Agitation which had continued for a long time. Sometimes he would
talk about the human chain. Apart from these, I and Prabhat never heard our
teacher talking about the country or its people. Once, while urinating on the
wall of his huge building that he had built in his capacity as a high school
teacher, I and Prabhat got caught virtually red-handed. He had switched on the
light of his balcony and had shouted – “Who are there?”
Prabhat suddenly got bit by the
journalism bug. He immediately replied, “We are journalists”.
“Oh, Okay. It’s alright.”
After zipping up his trousers,
Prabhat looked at me and said, “It is these rascals who had formed those human
chains”!
The stain which our urine left
behind on our teacher’s wall that night reminded us about many other stains.
Maybe, Prabhat too is reminiscing today like me and recalling those incidents.
I thought of Rahmat Ali too. A lot of events which are best forgotten also came
to my mind, events which Prabhat’s widowed sister keeps close to her chest at
all times and regurgitates once in a while when she sits in her backyard going
through the motions of cleaning the blackened utensils. She would then recall
how her husband had become a martyr on the cause of the organisation.
Prabhat threw the bamboo scrapings into the fire. But how long could the thin scrapings last before the fire consumed them?
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