Blurb (1)
Kala cleaves through the labyrinth of time, with its paranoia tethered to its past and the present making it look like an untraceable arrhythmia.
And the dancing girl that keeps appearing in Shamshie’s dream allegorically refers to that as the metaphor that spins into her waking consciousness too.
This is the continuing lattice snared into a past and a present that are inseparable, where the entwined speaks of the repeated battles of the vanquished where wars were never won because battles cannot be won in a place where the sun’s rays are not allowed to pass lest it gets sullied in that path.
Blurb (2)
Kala does not intend to splay an already bludgeoned necrosis of a tumor but attempts to make the reader aware of the absurdity such conflicts bring where dominant identities are culturally internalized as a revered form of collective oneness and is always in collision with its subaltern part. Such compulsive, homogenized bargains will always be subjugated to this violent form of coercion across caste and religious lines and the politics of convenience will always be at loggerheads with the other extremes and transgress to become a subversive form of a ‘samjhouta’ (understanding) for survival.
In two and a half rivers, Anirudh Kala dives into the many untold stories that were hurled into the macrocosm of the Punjab problem. He penetrates into the tumultuous 1980s’ in the wake of the insurgency and nimbly weaves the narrative through the protagonist, a depressed doctor with the other central characters Shamsie and Bheem, a Dalit couple.
The story is set in the 1980s and the voice (of the narrator) takes us through the rugged journey as he intertwines the lives of these people with the chaos around it. The voice is compelling and yet feels detached as if to stay sane, with its pithy use of words and emotion. Kala brings out the gore of the region’s problem since the times of India’s bloody partition and shows us what such orchestrated madness looks like. Through this fictional narrative he lets you wobble in the lunacies of what such divisive politics bring and poignantly points at our discomfort of psychologically shying away from issues that we are not equipped to handle, especially traumatic memories we refuse to bring to surface.
Kala cuts through the Punjab with its casteist violence, secessionist movement supported by the Punjab diaspora, and the religious extremism, especially the burgeoning turmoil post the violence in 1984. The region as it stood embraced all that was inflicted on it, often paralyzed with all the uncertainty and the tumult that left all ordinary lives in a limbo. Kala does this by splitting this voice into two; one is marred by a certain ferocity facts bring with them yet the other is more nuanced and aloof enough to not impose itself into the trajectory of the same.
“Like I said, there were more dead bodies to come. Not just in the river, but also on the roads, in trains, at city crossings, even falling from the skies out of the planes, happily, drunk, dancing men and women in marriage procession would turn into dead bodies without a notice as would flocks of morning walkers in parks across the state.
Everybody called it the ‘Punjab Problem,’ as if it were a stubborn crossword puzzle refusing to be solved and not a ruthlessly violent terrorist insurgency. There were several versions of how it had started, but the common denominators included a turbaned ‘Dandy’ (who dressed in white and sported a rose to look like Nehru), ‘Durga’ (who, in the end was slain by the demons), and a fiery ‘Priest’ bristling with a long beard and automatic weapons. The Dandy had lost the Chief Ministership of P-3 after a bitterly fought fair and square election and wanted revenge. He fell crying at Durga’s feet, rose and all, and convinced her to put the Priest up as a counterweight to his bête noire, the new chief minister and was encouraged to kill some people ostensibly in the service of Sikh faith to gain currency. He came to love doing that. Particularly after followers of the faith who lived abroad applauded and sent hotshot journalists of international magazines for interviews and photographs, which made the priest famous. Supposed to be Durga’s man, but now puffed up, he rebelled, and started a war to get a country of his own, another land of the pure, this time for the Sikhs- the genie which refused to go back into the bottle, a Frankenstein gone rogue.’’
Kala tries to fathom the politics of this neurosis and indubitably observes the absurdity of violence such conflicts spur. The doctor, as it appears maintains a kind of stoicism that is so thoroughly put into practice that his life of absenteeism from himself costs him his own psychological health.
“The familiar cacophony of crickets at night had gone eerily quiet. The low clouds, the high waves, the electricity blackout, and the dead telephone had all shrunk my small world even further. Jeet, too, had not come for four days. Not that I cared about any of it. My only concern was that since the road in front of my house was under two feet of water and the car had a low ground clearance, my monthly trip to the city had been delayed. I had finished my medicines and had hardly slept for several days.
The ritual of going to the city every month to see my psychiatrist, buy groceries, and get the Fiat serviced and refilled was a necessary chore. I considered my visits to my psychiatrist as mundane a task as servicing my Fiat, without which, both the car and I, would stutter and stop.”
This chosen self-desertion had its own repercussions as it spilled across all that was happening around him and the psychiatrist treating him, Dr. Mustafa studiously sums this up.
“He asked about my sleep, whether my mood changed with the time of day and about my hallucinations. Since we were both doctors, we often lapsed into technical terms out of habit, although that is not the best practice. I told him about the gun shots I kept hearing at night ever since the dogs’ massacre night.”
“ I have stopped putting any diagnostic premium on these symptoms of gunfire sounds, ever since all of this started,’ said he, sweeping his hand in the general direction of the outside world, as if to explain what he meant by ‘all of this.’ I insisted that the gunfire sounds I heard were real and not hallucinations.
‘Reality is pretty psychotic these days,’ he said.
Imagine if some other patient had come to me for the first time today, and said he felt anxious, had palpitations, and worried that he might die whenever he goes out. Earlier, I would have diagnosed him with Panic Disorder and Agoraphobia, prescribed him medication and reassured him. I would have told him he could not die out of the blue, when he had no physical illness… Now, I cannot do it. Panic Disorder would sound so much of a fraud, because these days perfectly healthy people go out for a walk in a park and die. Totally out of the blue! Without having any illness!… Before this, if a patient said that he feared he would be taken away by the police, I would tell him that he was paranoid. That there was no reason to worry since he had done nothing wrong. Now I cannot do that, because the police is in fact taking away people, even those who have done no wrong. So, tell me what do I tell him?’
One cannot miss the mercurial projections and the myopic limitations of the psychiatric terms doctors are often forced to use since it cannot be stretched to accommodate or convenience an explanation of all that is inexplicable yet brutal enough to go on!
Kala does not intend to splay an already bludgeoned necrosis of this tumor but attempts to make the reader aware of the absurdity such conflicts bring where dominant identities are culturally internalized as a revered form of collective oneness and is always in collision with its subaltern part. Such compulsive, homogenized bargains will always be subjugated to this violent form of coercion across caste and religious lines and the politics of convenience will always be at loggerheads with the other extremes and transgress to become a subversive form of a ‘samjhouta’ (understanding) for survival.
Such disoriented meanings are laid bare in the narrative and one can’t miss the sneer when the voice talks about the inherent contradictions in the word ‘Punjab’ itself. The contention between the many states clamoring for its own mouthful explains this.
“The original Punjab (let us call it P-1) was divided in 1947 at the time of the Partition of India. Pakistan got the bigger chunk and the rest, say P-2, became the Indian Punjab. This, as historians would tell us, also contained the future states of Haryana and Himachal Pradesh. Shimla was the capital till 1960, while a new capital for P-2 designed by a French architect was being built. The location of that capital was based on pragmatic considerations that it would be roughly central for all the areas in P-2, which extended from the HImalayas in the north to the dusty plains bordering Delhi in the south.
However, barely six years after the P-2 government had moved into its new capital, Chandigarh, it was time for another split.
The second split was self-inflicted. Some Sikh leaders wanted a state of their own. Since they could not have asked for a religion-based state in a secular country, they used the pretext of language. They projected themselves as leaders of all Punjabis, which they were not. Nor were they leaders of all Sikhs for that matter. But stridently vociferous they certainly were. There were protests and hunger strikes. They stopped trains, burnt buses, and held seminars in the gleaming conference rooms of their new capital with maps of P-2 and pointed at the hills in the north and the area around Delhi in the south, and asked, ‘Why are those people with us? They do not speak Punjabi, do they?’…
The leftover rump (let us call it P-3), the current Punjab at the time of this story, had its capital not just outside the boundaries of P-3, but also under another government. A capital in exile became the seat of a government in exile of P-3.”
It is as if such a contradiction was needed to call itself just that! The quiet streak of river that flowed behind the doctor’s house was marred with its violent memory as it too disgorged its own plunder, revealing through the ages the subconscious rift that inevitably grows out of such anomalies. This is evinced even from the lives of Shamsie and Bheem. Because when we look at their lives we see that despite always finding themselves in the midst of all that hopelessness they openly start embracing the absurdity of “their lives’ meaning” thrown at them, meanings that emerged out of the sheer inanity “of the social order” in which they were born. Even with all that orphaned support they openly and honestly accepted this confrontation with life and time and again asserted to push their own meaning, even though it often looked like it was mostly borrowed.
“ It took a month for their teenage minds to be able to temper Bheem’s self-flagellation. It took even longer for him to go back to school on the highway, which was now a senior school. The following summer, Comrade Ram too died of skin cancer, which doctors said was because of the tanning chemicals he worked with. Bheem left school and, like all the other boys from the Vehra, started working as a farm labourer, until Shamsie suggested the two go away to Bombay. He had agreed right away, just so he would not have to be alone.”
“The sling bag was gifted to him at a conference of farm workers, where he had sung a few songs. The bag had travelled with him to half the rural hinterland of the state, and since it had a sickle and a hammer printed in red, the boys playing gulli-danda in the village lanes started calling him Comrade Bheem. Bheem himself cared nothing about politics. All he knew was he felt exhilarated while singing songs written by Udasi and Lal Singh. The fact that these poets were Dalits were incidental to him. He sang those songs, because they were songs about him and all that he remembered.”
Even after they were forced to leave Bombay and come back and live in the village, a pedantic moral tape was stuck to them, dangling like the cultural compass that necessitated their moves and colored every whim of this urban necrosis that began to openly eat away through this tumor now. And as all of these characters navigated their way through this we encounter the little wins and the losses and how such frigid hardiness would eventually cost Bheem his life.
Kala cleaves through the labyrinth of time, with its paranoia tethered to its past and the present making it look like an untraceable arrhythmia.
And the dancing girl that keeps appearing in Shamshie’s dream allegorically refers to that as the metaphor that spins into her waking consciousness too.
This is the continuing lattice snared into a past and a present that are inseparable, where the entwined speaks of the repeated battles of the vanquished where wars were never won because battles cannot be won in a place where the sun’s rays are not allowed to pass lest it gets sullied in that path.
These are not simple myths one is traversing through as these dreams and the fear mingled with them act like the syncope of the awake which one cannot fathom or explain. This is the struggle of wanting to be unclasped from that fist that one cannot let go off, not even in dreams, even when time keeps re-inventing itself.
Kala is a master craftsman here who knows his weave and how to pause at every interlude.
END
Varsha Dutta Pujari is a neuropsychologist & a poet; she lives in Mumbai.