Matiyaburj

I write all this in flux: What I had seen and what the mountain life is now. Since October, an invigorating Kullu ka Dussehra, a hillock fired up for rain, a whole village gutted like an inferno, up in the hills, silent elections, the changeover, half of another village gutted like an inferno, snowflakes, decay, resurgence…

This unnamed tunnel is the hole in the Dauladhar Mountains, like a bullet-hole in the body through which you drive your car.

So this tunnel is not beautiful. So it has to be ugly– the inside of the mountain’s mouth. The mouth is also man-made. So the tunnel is ugly. It’s torturous. The girl from the mountain finds it torturous. “I close my eyes when I cross it.”

But the tunnel is also beautiful. It’s wondrous because it’s man-made. Hence it’s beautiful. It has to be.

So the tunnel is beautiful and not-beautiful. This is not about points of views or perceptions. Not-beautiful and beautiful is the truth. The tunnel is man-made so it’s ugly, so it’s beautiful. Both are one and the same.

So why should I alone be emotional, partisan, when I realize that the tunnel is both?

But there are points of views, perceptions. When I was crossing this tunnel in this long, heavy and extra-cushioned super-deluxe private passenger bus, in the night after Dussehra, I alone was in pain and in awe. I felt sad that the tunnel is there. But it’s there and it must have been chiseled out of the mountain by men and women like me. It must have been hard: making this hole in this handsome but stubborn mountain. It must have been hard: working in the harsh and dangerous conditions, in heat and rain and snow, in poverty and helplessness.

But this was not an emotion arising out of the watching a drama or the reading of a poem. It was real. It was as if the heart had slipped off the unreal path and rejoined the River of Sorrow flowing below the History of Sad Times.

Yet all this was not normal: my sadness, this tunnel. I was in awe because the tunnel was over two kilometers long! It had seemed unending. I was gawking, finding it to be never-ending. Every single inch the bus moved, that every inch meant days of blasting and chiselling. My every moment of pain and awe was also the workers’ every moment of pain and awe. I wanted it all to stop, the tunnel to abruptly end, the workers’ work, already done, to end.

It did not. It went on and on.

I was pained also because most of my co-passengers were dozing while they were crossing this Victory of Human Will. They seemed indifferent; they seemed bored, because the tunnel was too long and suffocating and unnatural (even though they were inside this long, heavy and extra-cushioned super-deluxe private passenger bus with berth sleepers one-upon-the-other and also honeymooners) in all this overwhelming ‘naturalness’. Unlike me, they were not gawking. They were not acknowledging the beauty; they were only acknowledging the ugliness. But both are one and the same. The tunnel is not-beautiful and beautiful.

So inside the tunnel that night were two kinds of people: one who found the tunnel painful and the other who found it beautiful. So inside this one tunnel were present two total perceptions– the tunnel had accommodated both: light and darkness; love and disgust and, above all, life and death. But this other pair surfaced occasionally, like the making of the tunnel or the unmaking of the mountain itself. This pair was ever-present, like some days’ later, when inside a similar tunnel, inside a similar mountain across the common Beas gorge, five similar labourers maintaining it similarly just died. Their shaft had snapped off its cable and sunk into the blackness like a stone. Victory of Human Will had paid the impaled mountain its irregular rent, counting it off as the fixed cost of sustaining the tunnel victory, to move forward through the backward pushing rocks. The mountain had never pestered Victory of Human Will for rent; but he thrust the rent upon it anyway, supposing that rent was part of the tunnel’s being and, believing in the threat that the impaled mountain would, on and off, extract its fee in unbearable pain. So human will offered the mountain its own ilk, like a sacrifice, like the goat (braying in the Manu Temple’s coarse bloody yard, up on dirty Old Manali.), like those men, never acknowledging that to avert that catastrophe, it engineers that catastrophe.

The bus is out of the tunnel and the stars have descended on the mountain and there are none in the moonlit sky. I swear.

Who are you?

When dawn of an early winter hotly broke over the Kullu Valley and one-by-one sun-filled its vast arid brown apple orchards and its tumbling silvery gorge, wizened, burnt mountain men in tattered sweaters snaked down the hills in a loud rattling tractor to the cold, damp and glittering riverbed and began their daily ritual of hammering its submerged ashen rocks— splintering the smooth round stones into scruffy bits with constant ricocheting thuds!

Puzzled, with the naked sun burning up my forehead, I watched them toil on the riverbed, leaning on the dharamshala’s balcony, waiting for some tea, in the chilling gusts, I watched them toil on the riverbed, and the puzzle vapourised.

I luxuriously lazed while they laboured undignified. The tourists luxuriously lazed while the locals laboured undignified.

Why?

Because the local is labouring for the tourist. It was so shameful that I had to withdraw inside. When I would see them again the next morning, doing the same thing, no pity would erupt, only pure, cleansing shame, without any chances of redemption. It could make you sweat.

Are you spineless?

The climb uphill strips my limbs with fatigue, with degrees of slant—45, 50, 60, 72…The head falls off, the legs fall off, the chest falls off. The only thing that keeps climbing is my spine, to Nicholas Roerich’s Himalayan museum, above Naggar.

The sun heats on my back and I climb. The yellow sun through the blackish pines is feeding the white tree of my spine. My spine becomes my mountain. My whole being, over 6000 feet up the sea, shrinks to the turns of my backbone. I become my spine. I heave. I rise. I am swelling, bursting at the seams. It’s exhilarating; it’s happiness and you don’t want to come down, ever.

You see the valley like a hawk—the uneven curls of the gorge and the rows of black slates on the little house roofs shining like slivery scales of river fish.

The mountain is scampering me up, even on the old Maruti Omni and in the evening’s bluish-orange translucence of the rising village path to Old Manali, I finally see the bent old woman. She is hauling up a hoe on her rickety shoulder, returning home. Jesus dragging his crucifix. Such a long, wooden, soiled, sharp, earth-slicing hoe, on the spine. To sweat is also to bleed, in the eternal mountain’s silent burden of being.

But why is this village so dark, so gloomy; is there no light, no electricity; why are the small, cheerful children scampering down the narrow, muddy path with empty plastic diesel cans, why do they have to fill the yellow, blue cans with water from the black, hard tubewell and carry up home the wobbly, heavy, cold water cans in their feeble white hands, the weight tilting their little frames? Who am I? What am I doing here? I offer help but the kids scatter.

Then I see her again, down the low mountain road in Kullu the next translucent evening, a LPG cylinder strapped to her spine. I can arc my head to only gaze, at the coolie being pushed by her luggage.

Hammer and sickle

The translucent interlocked brick-red hammer and sickle, dabbed carefully on a concrete bridge pillar half-sunk in the boulders of the deep but arid gorge, as traffic enters Manali, is meant to seen by all, and everyone does. The red mark is meant not to be ignored. It is like a cut, a bruise, a nick, a dent, corrosion, a brimming implosion, on the smooth knee of the hill station. The mark is not easily forgotten because it does not belong to the pine-high town. It is an anomaly, so our driver for the day, the local from Kullu, shrugs of the sign and the responsibility. He says he does not know.

But I lust at the sign. Because he too knows that this opium-and-snow-and-ecstasy mountain is marked, in red.

The Devtas

I see the Kullu ka Dussehra, on the vast ground under the sunny mountain’s shadow, with silent metal and wood deities sitting in their tarpaulin chariots and a swaying sea of fifty thousand people or more in all colours and contours, buying, selling, praying, singing, dancing, eating, living, making music, making merry, merging into each other, once more becoming God’s Own People.

The roadside tree in Noida is rising from a raised enclosure, round, bricked and filled with soil. The tree itself is small, with a bluish-grey trunk. Its long leaves are the usual dusty green, but jagged neem-like on the fringes. They wave with the occasional gusts; they flutter in silence as the Sunday traffic passes by in the hot afternoon.

The soil in the enclosure is turning black in the flying roadside dust and on this utterly dry bed of deep-grey granules stands a tiny plate of rusty brown iron. The plate has two walls at right angles. From above, it’s L-shaped. In the sun, the shadow of one side is falling on the other making the plate seem an iron sundial.

I recognised the iron plate from the sensation it gave me—the shiver of looking at or caressing or unwillingly, in my imagination, licking cold raw iron, the visual or physical contact aligning all the granules of iron in my hot and throbbing being into a sudden, similar metal plate. The plate shot up and pierced, from my imaginary touch, and punctured my consciousness from the fingers straight to the back of my reeling head, my head feeling as if it had just been knocked by a plate of iron. I looked at it again and long enough and it happened again. It was too much, like a sick indulgence. So my attention wavered and caught eye a tinier plant with two leaves rising beside the iron. Something happened in me, seeing the plant and the iron coexisting and mutely flourishing, also beautifully. And also because the new plant was looking frail and phosphorescent beside the unbendable and dwarfish iron so that one seemed to complete the other.

One part of the unlikely pair was once flattened and angled when red hot under an unknown ironsmith’s blows and the other was nourished from the seed itself with the warm caresses of wind and rain. Yet they were together, side by side, equally in existence, as if the pair made up the being of this forming metropolis.

Six months have passed and being in Noida, at the same market and remembering suddenly that it was there, I looked for it and seeing the tree, I lumbered towards it, in the evening darkness, palpitating funnily this time. And I found it taller, more mature, in the cool dark, far away, indifferent to my gaze unlike that blazing afternoon. It was all too dark really. Then, disappointed I looked down and there it was, still standing, the iron plate. But even this looked longer, like growing up like the complementary green and tender two-leaf plant beside it. But there was no plant beside it. Only the deep brown iron in the scraped off top soil of the barren, save the tree, enclosure.

The sky is ashen and the ashen road is sunny. A yellow-helmeted man is atop one of the many Roman Metro pillars, atop one of the similar scaled cylindrical concretes, atop an edifice of the 21 st century where the roof is a super-fast suburban train: Delhi, like Rome, cannot be built in a day. You have to wish for it. Like the pizza delivery boy, easing himself and yawning besides the ashen road, his boxed hot delivery, waiting in the old ash and red scooter, during the rider’s warm piss, becoming roadside food. You have to wish for it. Or is he just returning, having delivered?
ABCD: It’s a mall of billboards, Noida’s biggest four-sided ad space; unmissable, the companies would have thought. Away, near, the tall apartment blocks, rising up on home loans—the city’s middle-class encroachments.

Man was born and he wanted to make something of himself. His brain was not unlike the other creatures born before him. But he had a thing is his heart: he wanted to make something of himself. (Still, today, many millennia later, I cannot think up myself. I just am, whatever it is, nothing more, nothing less; I am this; I am that. It’s not possible. Still.): DCBA. BDAC: The National Science Centre, one carton atop another, one container atop another, veering away into the sky, and the old tomb dome. The distant past and the near past, divided by a modern two-lane road. Its noon.

A: When leaders die, they do leave behind voids, unmissable voids, patches of green land on the ashen roadsides, to be forcefully kept vacant for as long as the State can hold on, where, for now, nothing can grow except regularly manicured grass. The park is for the dead whom the State says was and is still above the ordinary, the ordinary in their lives as well as their deaths. The park is for the dead leader—burned and powdered away—the leader who might have been humble or haughty, but was powerful bothways. The park is for his ghost in our minds, nourished by the State since schooldays and annual functions, and the ghost happily strolls in his foliage-rich neat park every moisture-laden night.

D: The State is not the Society’s mind. The State has its own mind and the Society has its own. When the State thinks, the Society’s mind breaks down. When the Society thinks, the State breaks down. It happens once in a century because the State has prisons.

B: The idea is not to make arrogant buildings.

C: Modern white-body streetlights leaning onto the Gurgaon highway, but never falling into it. Car, car.

In the January cold of Eastern UP, on blackened bare feet, eight year old Santosh Kumar Prajapati is squatting, moving on the sticky blue plastic covered floor of the rocking rushing Kalka Mail’s sleeper compartment, with a yellow miniature broomstick brushing the easy smooth plastic and gathering the sitting passengers’ litter—peanut peelings, plastic tea cups, soiled tea bags and simply dirt—from below the long blue seats, between scurrying legs and empty shoes and empty sandals (some overturned; some lifted with hands: after one passenger remarks that these people or ’sweepers’ are cunning and brush away with the shoes.)

Santosh is good to look at. He is cleaner. He is clear about the world and his family. Santosh lives near Kanpur, in a thatched hut, a “jhopri”. His father paints clay idols, but only during the festival season when idols are made and worshiped and forgotten till the next season. His mother cooks daal and chawal. (Looking at Santosh’s condition, we feel she should work.) He also has a younger brother who also does not do anything. He has never been to school but he can read. The boy takes out a popular Hindi film magazine from a pocket of his long nicker and points to the story titles on the thin cover. Reading is a thing he seems to like. He is taught to read in the evening, with other children, by some people of the village. (A formal school is untenable for him: this is clear to Santosh. It will hit his livelihood, his responsibilities, his share in the fragile household.)

Every morning, at 11 am, with other boys, bare-feet Santosh climbs the Jodhpur Express with his broomstick, squats and begins to clean the compartments of their litter (that is always there) in a physical posture that sons of rich men take while wicket keeping in 20 over public school cricket matches under the bright sun and mimic the international players with their shouts. The “superfast” train moves west; with the sway, Santosh also drags himself west, pushing forward himself and the litter he is gathering (halting only to gesture for remunerations from the sitting passengers who and whose predecessors had created the litter and will continue to create since there will be boys like Santosh to clean it up. He does not speak; he only gestures; his presence, that degrading posture, changes the environment; there is shame in the air, a pity for deprivation but the reserved seats help overcome it; many even deny the remuneration (like the feeling, ‘I didn’t ask him to clean the litter!’)

From 10 to 12 passengers (with second-class tickets), he will get back five to six rupees, or maybe just one rupee: the compensation always has to be unequal to the amount of labour applied. Otherwise, what will be the difference between them and Santosh? The status quo remains; it’s chauvinism. The “second-class” rich among the poor want to remain “second-class” rich among the poor. Oppression in classes not much different is felt as victory. (That’s why Santosh is not allowed to clean up the air-conditioned compartments: the classes are too separated).

Some hours later, after cleaning several sleeper compartments (since all are interconnected and the general compartments are separated: “second-class” from “third class”), after picking out from the litter things still usable and after pushing the unusable off the train, he climbs down and switches direction, taking a train rushing east, towards his home, and repeats the arduous work.

Santosh makes 50 to 100 rupees for six to seven hours of pure, degrading physical labour. The boy has no employer; no risks are covered; he is answerable to no one while he works. But Santosh must earn. And this way only.

(The journalist still hangs on to the Indian government law that bans child labour in the nation. All these years it was there; more gruesome, more exploitative. The journalist never saw it. It was not a story that time. Now the government has given him or her a prism to see the oppression in all its colours. Now he likes it. It feels good; feels just like…a story?

The government has given the journalist an understanding of what it means when a child has to earn his livelihood when his or her own kids are going to school. The understanding is a hit, a critical hit: for journalists are journalists.

But stop. Think like a journalist. Consider Santosh’s case carefully. He comes under the ban’s purview. That means his employer can be punished for hiring him. That means Santosh has to be liberated, one of the passengers said. But stop. From whom? It may be recalled that he has no employer. A loophole! A story. The government should go into the intricacies of the act, if required amend it according to the ground realities, a legal expert said. Maybe fine the parents for allowing a child under 14 to work.

In India, like many other countries subservient to their own creations, like first imagining gods and demons and then spending a lifetime bowing to and fearing them, the government has been given the job of reshaping the society. Think of a sub set reshaping a set. The set exists not because there is a sub set.

The government exists because there is a society. In reality, a society reshapes a government. That is the truth. The rest is like the gods and the demons. (When a government turns on its head, the society doesn’t. But when a society turns on its head, the government also turns on its head.)

A fire burnt to ashes nearly 28 thatched hutments in the southern corner of Colony No. 5 on June 3. Inside a burning hutment, an eight-year-old boy got trapped and died. The district administration announced to give his mother and his father Rs 50,000 as ‘compensation’ (or sympathy). An administration is not designed to offer empathy.

When the UT officials came to ascertain the losses, men, who didn’t have anything anymore, spelt out the monetary losses: Rs 20,000 to Rs 25,000. That’s all. A house, a life’s savings and belongings, all burnt, but worth Rs 25,000 only, a lost future less than the price of a second-hand motorcycle, a Blackberry mobile or a month’s BPO salary. That’s all.

As they wrote down the amount and took the signatures, the officials seemed apprehensive. They found the amounts too high. They know what the administration will give. They were chuckling inside and said, “Let them write what they feel like. At least this will give them a peace of mind”. The others agreed.

The men and the women sat on the burnt black ashen floor of what was yesterday a home in the city. They were proud people; bring up a life with their own labour, without any government help, piece by piece building a future made of routine and payments and small comforts. Burnt. In five minutes, by the fire riding the wind. No one knows where it came from but they know where it has left behind.

A daily wager, who carries bricks and mortar on his head on construction sites, and now carrying his child, said what he was wearing was all he had now.

The incident has activated power politics. BSP workers are at the forefront and are working in tandem with the administrative officials. The ward’s BSP councillor, also a migrant, is in UP now.

Hence, councillor of ward no. 23 is here with tarpaulins and helpers. In times of calamity, political ambitions run on one basic premise: the victims will always remember who came to their help, who did not; workers of which party were active and which were not; who offered real help and who offered assurances.

(It is the unacknowledged cycle of democracy—making the exploiters accountable to the exploited. The exploiter and the exploited retain their respective positions. Democracy has only interlinked them in a post-colonial way.)

There are provisions for compensation due to fire in the law of the land: tragedy due to official negligence is made intrinsic to official compensation. It is as if the state preempts its own failures and also a way to hide it after showing it to everyone; in a way it’s failing twice and smiling over it.

There was a murmur that this payback will be somewhere between Rs 2,500 and Rs 5,000, after the officials ascertain the exact amount of the losses per household.

The officials know the exact losses; they had seen the ashes. But their rational thinking has been lost in the labyrinth of spiral rules, monotony and power. They have been enslaved to the point that they think of guarding the state’s money against its own citizens for the saved money to be used otherwise (in salary hikes maybe or in developmental projects).

Their thinking is not designed to ask for a uniform distribution of Rs 50,000 to each household irrespective of the losses since they will never believe what a man without a home says. But they can think of building a memorial costing Rs 2 crore in the memory of a leader who had never asked for it.

What is there in a retired Pakistani cricketer’s wife? Curiosity and glamour, and we could have been arrested for this! This is what Keshav said, shivering, mad with anger, waving his hands, adjusting the camera-bag hanging from his shoulder.

The fear was primal: 1947. Keshav and I did not understand this. We knew it to be only romance, or worse, bonhomie.

Now that the reporter’s spell has broken, I have even forgotten the name of Waqar Younis’s wife. A tricky pronunciation– I had practiced speaking it many times in the morning.

Some 300 kilometers from the India-Pakistan border, in Chandigarh, in a new Taj (hotel), the romance: Pakistan in India (!) Punjab in Punjab (!) guarded in layers—the CIDwallah sitting on the G Floor in front of the stylish lift whom Keshav smiled at and shook hands and chatted with briefly. In the warm elevator, watching oneself, comparing with the others, two more policewallahs, gaunt. In the carpeted smelly corridor, two ladies, policewomen, sitting on stools, smiling at us, exchanging greetings with Keshav, looking flushed: in the corridor a bald cricketer in a bathroom towel shouting. In reply, a lewd joke coming from the opposite room, adopted Western manners oppressing the sub-continent’s sensibilities. The romance getting dense. Me, feeling unbearable happiness for being in the heart of this sub-continental romance. Getting used to it, asking for her room, casually. Then terror.

A tall one-eyed elderly man suddenly overshadowing us, shouting at uniformed Indians for not properly guarding cricketer Pakistanis against common Indians, pushing us back into the lift, mad with an old grudge, the cricketers’ Pakistani DIG, the personal security officer, angry at himself for not being able to thrash us, mumbling the same words: “Who allowed them in?”, the armed escorts bewildered in their line of duty. Commotion on the G Floor; the DIG hitting all the security-men with pure, hard fear. Both of us pleading our case in the arrogance of journalists, being led to the lobby as trespassers, as more uniforms swarm us, as the DIG goes wild with rage, circling the lobby, for this breach searching for someone answerable, for us crossing over to the other side (the Hindu fundamentalist fear becoming intergovernmental paranoia as well as fun for the reporters.) Keshav jumping with his own form of rage, alleging insult.

I quietly go to the hard-to-find intercom and call her room. She answers, with sweetness agrees to descend to the hotel’s café “in a few minutes”. No fracas, just a retired cricketer’s wife, a mockery of this rage.

But “a few minutes” later we stand outside the hotel’s gate, pushed out by our own police, pleading to us not to create any more trouble, not to instigate the superiors. No going to the café. No photo. I say to Keshav. The woman (I see her photo in the evening—a pretty young pediatrician from Australia) is waiting.

After one-and-a half years, what I saw in Kolkata was an old city becoming new. I found a city reclaiming itself. It was a city in transit. I was not a traveler. I was once part of the city, but I went away and become part of another city. Now I was returning, but to go away again. It was safe. It was a beautiful feeling. I was part of two cities. This feeling of superiority would overpower me whenever I would try to be humble. I was outside the matrix.

A taste cartel

At five in the morning, under the Howrah Station’s concrete canopy, at the vast waiting lounge, the air filled with announcements, beside the plastic chairs set in a square, on the ground half-asleep pilgrims: middle-aged men and women, their expressions as crumpled as the mix of saffron and popular January clothes they were wearing, people in a holy transit, returning from the Ardh Kumbh after a “royal” bath, after having washed away their “sins”, people, with origins beyond Bengal, content lying on the ground.

At a tea-stall, the tea poured from a large steel thermos like water from a tap. No stove could be seen. The taste was distinct. Later I sipped tea from another stall, the same thermos and the same taste. I had a feeling that the whole individual tea-making process in the city had been centralised, sourced from one big point to numerous smaller points across the mammoth station: equal opportunities and a cartel that sells uniformity in taste, just like the pizza chains; just like the Nestea machines in the offices.

This idea could only have come up Kolkata, a city always longing for tea and, as a result, the beverage now available everywhere in the same taste as a cigarette, a Gold Flake maybe. Just the air Every time I was on the road, I expected the fragrance to go away. But there it was– jasmine-like, floating all over the city. Just above the head, the tiny particles, flowing like waves, entering the nostrils and flying up. It was unprecedented. How could one odour sweep over the billions and billions of distinct odours of a city as old and as new as this?