“Your hometown, again?”

“So, what is your hometown?” I’m asked every now and then, and I always end up tongue-tied. How do I do justice to the question without making the response sound like a tedious monologue, where I try to package thirty-five years of family history into a thirty-five second capsule? The fact is, I don’t have a hometown in the conventional sense. The places I’ve spent fractions of my growing years at look nothing more than brief stopovers in a long backpacking trip. To reproduce what I usually present to an inquisitive stranger, my roots lie in Uttar Pradesh but my father moved out soon after finishing college to work for different paper manufacturing units across the country and my sisters and I, thus, grew up in four different states. “Which all?” a few choose to prod further and I excitedly enumerate ‘Odisha’, ‘Punjab’, ‘Madhya Pradesh’ and ‘Delhi’. “And, you see, that’s why I don’t really have a hometown,” I add, in an attempt to provide a finishing touch.

Many people find the description exciting and remark that it’s wonderful to have grown up with such a diverse cultural exposure. I usually agree, feeling smug. And, then, I stumble across someone who pledges an undying love for his city of origin, calling it his home – the place where he spent his childhood, journeyed into adolescence, learned to be an adult – and leaves me to wonder if I’d have preferred having a similar story to narrate?

I have known many homes and I belong to all of them. They have all shaped me into who I am. Of all these places, Delhi is where I’ve felt the happiest. While I hadn’t shifted base here till about eight months back, I’d frequented it as a child, year after year, with my parents, as this was where my father’s siblings had finally settled. To my puerile eyes, Delhi looked immense and enigmatic. The broad roads, the incessant flow of traffic, the well-dressed, confident people and their busy, exciting life!  I wanted to partake of all of it. I wanted to be one with this vibrant, chaotic city! But I had to wait for years before this could happen.

I don’t claim to know my place of birth – my ancestral town – inside out. Many miles off the Grand Trunk Road, ensconced between the better known Agra and Aligarh, lies a town called Kasganj. Full of narrow lanes and cul-de-sacs criss-crossing into each other, Kasganj is a crowded, lively place, famous for its sweetmeats. This is where my great grandfather built a house about a hundred years ago. My grandfather was an adopted child. He was married early and was barely thirty-six when he expired, leaving behind a widowed wife and six children. He was forever on the move, struggling to find a stable livelihood, and died poor and lonely, away from his family. My father and his siblings grew up away from each other, depending on my grandmother’s meager income and help from the relatives to complete their respective education.

The family kept returning to Kasganj, their home but nobody could stay put. At twenty-one, my father moved to Odisha to work for a paper manufacturing unit there. This was in the late seventies. It used to take forty hours to travel from Kasganj to Koraput, where the factory was. The mainstream had so little exposure to Odisha that it appeared to be almost a different country. The people spoke in an inscrutable language, the job looked cheerless and the superior quite hostile. The newness of it all intimidated my father so much that he rushed back within the first ten days. Once back home, he was chastised by my grandmother for this frivolous act and asked to return. His worldly wise uncle advised him not to be wary of the place but embrace it and, with it, the opportunity to learn and enrich himself and to make friends. He returned to Odisha, willing to take another shot at it. It worked for him and, thus, began the journey of finding homes in the most unlikely of places; a journey that shaped the destinies for all of us.

My parents got married three years later and my mother, too, went to live in Odisha, facing the same bafflement as my father. Eventually, she, too, learned to like the place. The residential colony where the employees of the paper mill lived was a little town in itself, very cosmopolitan and vibrant. It was very easy to fall in love with it and its people and that’s where she learned to live away from where you belong to and yet create a microcosm of your hometown, alive with the rich colors of one’s ethnicity, within the confines of your house. In the past thirty-two years, she has changed as many as ten houses, turning them into her home with the same love and alacrity that she had employed all those years ago, as a twenty-one-year-old bride.

My parents remind me of Ashok and Ashima Ganguly, the central characters of Jhumpa Lahiri’s celebrated novel, ‘The Namesake’ (Houghton Mifflin, 2003). The Ganguly couple, too, moves from India to the US in search of a better life, bringing with them memories of the past that have shaped their present, hopeful of using them to create a beautiful future for themselves and their children. Theirs is an endearing story of leaving one home in search of another, struggling to hold on to their roots as they attempt to find a footing in the new land. Their sense of unease translates into confusion about their origins as it travels down to their children who have grown up away from India and don’t know what country to call their home. It is reminiscent of my parents’ journey and the slightly disoriented opinion that I have about my hometown.

So, the bottom line is that I don’t have a hometown. Or maybe I have too many of them! I can’t disassociate myself with any of the places I’ve lived in because doing that will take a little bit of my existence away from me. I know that I will go on to make many more homes and continue to delight in the sense of belongingness they will all exude. I will live many lives and they will all collate to form the story that is me.

A collective disgrace

The horrors of the Guwahati molestation incident just don’t cease to surface. The way the narrative of this grotesque tale unfolded has left us all shaken and outraged. A quick look at the disturbingly vivid video clip dismantles all our notions about belonging to a hallowed land of saints and spiritualists. If the growth of a civilization is really gauged by the way it treats its women, then India is surely sliding deeper into the nadirs of ignominy with every passing day. The outrage and shame doesn’t belong to the city of Guwahati alone. It’s a collective disgrace that goes on to show how miserably we, as a society, have failed. Are we, like always, going to rant against whoever is in sight for a few weeks and, then, try to forget that it happened? Can’t we admit that the the very root of the problem lies in the recesses of our collective psyche? Can’t we, for once, pledge to rectify it?

A fashionably dressed teenage girl visits a pub and ends up getting assaulted by a group of as many as twenty men. This isn’t happening in some obscure and dimly lit corner of the pub but out on one of the city’s busiest roads! The perpetrators, mostly in their twenties, do not belong to Guwahati’s underbelly. They’re a bunch of supposedly well-educated youngsters who are expected to be the leading light of any generation. The Facebook profile of one of the men who was identified tells us that he works as a constitutional rights activist. It makes for an amusing joke indeed, save for the fact that the joke is on us!

Somebody showed the resourcefulness to shoot the pathetic incident in its entirety and, then, it entered the domain of electronic and social media, setting them abuzz. But fresh evidences suggest that the man who shot the video was friends with the offenders. Thus, what was being celebrated as the Good Samaritan’s technology-induced bravado transformed into a shocking testimony of a diseased and voyeuristic mind, adding to the bewilderment of an entire nation.

The most wounding aspect of this episode has been the outrageous suggestion by a few that the girl had called the adversity upon herself by being present at a place ‘not meant for her’, sporting an ‘indecent’ attire. Some showed a numbing alacrity to label her as a ‘slut’, hinting at her easy virtue. Does it imply that a girl has the right to seek protection from a sexual assault only if she lives as an epitome of chastity all her life? Does a so-called slut not have the right to say ‘no’? What makes us take pride in a school of thought that celebrates a philandering man as sexually endowed but keeps the worst kind of contempt reserved for women who choose to assert their individuality?

We can’t write this off as a random occurrence in one of the country’s forgotten corners. The story of the Guwahati teenager is little different from that of the hapless girls who were beaten black and blue at a Mangalore pub by our self-appointed moral custodians a couple of years back, of the girl who was molested in a similar fashion at Mumbai’s Gateway of India a few years back or the young women from the northeast living in Delhi who are slightingly referred to as ‘Chinkis’, considered loose and easy and, thus, taken liberties with. The Guwahati case has only showed us that it looks much uglier than how it sounds.

The media, the administration and the NCW have all gone on to expose the moral rot that ensnares us. The victim’s identity was thoughtlessly revealed on national television and the culprits would have escaped unscathed had it not been for the hue and cry made by various sections of the media. The incidence has forced us to question if India is really progressing towards a sparkling future.

We may demand the administration to be more vigilant and stringent as a kneejerk reaction. The pubs may install CCTV cameras and appoint more bouncers, and the Police vans may start patrolling the roads more frequently. But that’s not quite the point! The number of cases of crimes against women being reported is spiraling with every passing year. Whether that has to do with a hyperactive media industry is debatable but what we should acknowledge is that the problem isn’t constrained to the domain of law and order. It has to do with the kind of society that we have come to be.

The problem lies within, with our attitudes, our perceptions and that’s what needs to change! A telling quote that has been making the rounds on Facebook says, “Don’t ask your daughters to avoid getting raped but teach your sons not to rape!” We need to accept that a girl who goes to a pub in the night, dressed in a western outfit is doing it because she has every right to have a good time the way she wants! It’ll be completely juvenile to attribute her getting molested to her attire. As many women will agree, stepping out of your homes conservatively dressed doesn’t necessarily shield you from a sexual assault; your being a woman is enough!

Our job doesn’t end with expressing concerns over the issue. We must facilitate change and it should initiate at our homes, our families, our centers of education and our communities. We must teach a growing child that the two genders are equal; that one wasn’t created to subjugate the other! Ask boys to respect the freedom of a girl to assert herself. Ask girls to not be silent. Empower them to confront; support them if they choose to fight back. We need to invest the right values in a growing generation. Only then can we expect them to form a sane, sensitive and sensible society.

White is bad and Black is good

White is bad and Black is good

Another write-up I had turned in for 'Big Belly' at Career Launcher Gwalior. I love it for its metaphysical tone... :-D

White is a color, an idea, a perception that intimidates me! Why? Because it’s too palatable, too flawless, too ideal to be true. To me, it symbolizes a pretentious display of spotless sublimity. The glaring brightness of it leaves me wide-eyed and utterly confounded… I wreck my being trying to draw parallels to its incredible immaculacy from the real world and fail. I’ve found that all that exists is a deviation from the ideal. Nothing manages to elude this anomaly, the extent varies. Then, how come, white doesn’t have to bow to this universal law? What’s the truth behind its dazzling facade? Where has it tucked away its flaws?

I like black for its unapologetic admission of imperfection. It looks one in the eye and declares that it defaults, that it’s a medley of all that is uninspiring and distasteful, sometimes even grotesque. Its candor is disarmingly comforting. It keeps me aware of what I’m up against. It feels strangely real and delightfully commonplace. I almost feel it challenging me to try and be just as up-front.

White, I conclude, is a farce. It has come to represent all that pretends to be perfect, hiding its inadequacies beneath the surface. Its display of righteousness is outrageous! It makes me feel as if it’s out to insult my sensibility and trick me into buying its claim of being perfect. I’d rather go with black. I feel safer that way for it allows me to gauge how deep the ravine is that I intend to wade through.

White appears to be hideously narcissistic! It enjoys, celebrates its superficial allure… And what disgusts me even more is the effect it has on us. We fall for its pretence. It blindfolds us to veracity. In the attempt to attain it, we tread over what is real and within easier reach. I resent white the success that it manages at its nasty game. It frustrates me. Its treachery takes it where it has no business to be, to a position from where it deserves to be dragged down, to a pedestal that’s not meant for it.

My heart goes out for black. It suffers much, from neglect and hatred to scorn and derision. It pays the price of coming out in the open with its deficiencies; for admitting to its reality, for speaking the truth. But its resilience gives me strength. It shows me how to stand the jibes, the shame, the agony of being true and still pull off a beaming existence. It tells me why, at the end of the day, it’s infinitely more blissful and fulfilling to stick to reality than to live a lie…

Her claim to dignity

This is an essay I had to turn in for our writing course. We had to draft it based on our takeaways from Amitav Ghosh's essay 'Tibetan Dinner'. 
Click here for the original essay by Ghosh

You may struggle to make a living but you have an undeniable right to dignity. Reading Amitav Ghosh’s ‘Tibetan Dinner’ brought home the point. I was moved not by the stories of the struggles the Tibetans faced, but the resilience with which they pulled together their scattered existence. It reinforced my belief that people who dare to struggle don’t need our pity or charity. One may offer a silent acknowledgement of their honest endeavors though.

It further brought to me a recurrent image that belongs to an old but agile woman I know from my childhood. She was called Lalmani and worked as our domestic help. She must easily be in her seventies now and it’s been almost a year since I saw her last. Chances are dim that I’ll ever set my eyes on her again.

I was never all that fond of her when I was growing up, to begin with. I deeply resented her noisy and dominating presence around me. I grew up watching her go about life with an unnerving swiftness. I remember staying perpetually intimidated, as a child, by her hawk-like sharpness that was disturbingly accentuated by her ridiculously petite appearance. I grew up watching her squabble with whoever was in sight – my mother and the others in the neighborhood she worked for over timings and wages, with the hawkers who passed by and her relatives who dropped in every now and then. I remember disliking her for not letting me have my way with her prized collection of chicks and ducklings. She never quite enjoyed spotting me chase them around the garden, trying to get hold of their podgy bodies. Infuriated, she always took the news to my mother with a diabolical consistency. I then had to endure the scolding that followed, swear not to indulge in the ‘unclean’ activity and redeem myself with a Dettol bath.

The only time Lalmani approved of me was when I spoke of Jesus. I used to sing for her all the new prayers I learnt in the convent school I attended. She didn’t know a word of English but loved the prayers and reciprocated with rhythmic claps and swaying shoulders. When in the mood, she joined in with a prayer or two in her croaky voice. On Sunday mornings, she went to the very chapel that stood in our school campus. Once, when I played an adolescent Jesus in the nativity skit in school, she swayed and trembled and cried with awe and told my mother how moving my two-minute long performance was. When I grew a little older and began to understand my surroundings better, I asked her why she never bowed to the Hindu deities we worshipped while I always spoke of her Jesus with such fondness. She responded with an acidic gruffness, telling me that it was Jesus and not my gods and goddesses who came to her rescue when her son fell ill and was at the verge of death. My newly acquired rationality hurt, I tried to reason with her but it only strengthened her rigidity. And that was when my resentment towards her subsided, giving way to something more powerful – contempt.

Lalmani belonged to Odisha. She migrated to this part of Madhya Pradesh in the sixties when the paper mill my father worked for was being constructed, tagging along with her husband who had come to work as a labourer. They stayed on after the construction was over and the unit was up and running. It was located in the middle of nowhere and the staff and administration lived in the residential colony that came up next to it. The bungalows stood neatly along symmetrical lanes, with their backs against each other. Between them ran a narrow street where the servants’ quarters opened. Lalmani lived behind our house. She worked for four different families living close by and occupied four servant quarters that faced each other, living quite comfortably with her children. She cultivated a patch of our kitchen garden that took care of her minor needs. Her poultry products were much in demand too.

She was incredibly consistent with her routine. She would wake up at sunrise and take a round of our garden, banging on our bedroom window when she reached it. This worked almost like an alarm for my mother: they started the day like a team! My mother would make her some tea to charge her up, sending her racing to do her chores. My mother worked as a teacher and needed to be out of the house and on the school bus by seven in the morning. This meant that she usually had a little over an hour to wake us up, cook, bathe and leave. Lalmani acted deftly, doing the washing and cleaning as my mother ricocheted from one corner of the house to the other. After her bus plied off, it used to be Lalmani’s job to wrap up the work, lay out the breakfast and remind us to lock the house well before we left. The routine remained unchanged around the year. While I struggled to wriggle out of my warm quilt on winter mornings, she cleaned the wares in the courtyard, with just a tumbler full of lukewarm water at her disposal, a flimsy cardigan her only defence against the cold.

As I grew older, I learnt more about her personal life. And the more I did, the more pity I felt for her. She was abandoned by her husband for another woman. This was surprising because I’d always taken her for a widow. I was amazed to observe how seamlessly she had managed to subtract his existence from her life. I never found her as much as mentioning him, let alone brood or lament over his deceit. She had earned much of what a woman needs a husband for – a livelihood, a sense of security and a social standing. She couldn’t be bothered with his whereabouts! She had a life of her own which she lived with much aplomb! I will never know if it was that easy for her as I’m making it sound; if she ever craved his presence, his warmth, his proximity, she never showed it.

She had three children – a son and two daughters. Her elder daughter was married off at a suitable age, but she was soon returned because she had turned insane. She charged at random people, sprayed spittle on them and made strange growling noises. People advised that she be kept locked up in one of the servant quarters, but Lalmani decided otherwise. She ran from town to town and doctor to doctor, determined to get her daughter treated. The girl could never go back to being the same person, but she at least stopped being a violent wreck and, gradually, even started helping her mother run the house. But this took a long time – a spine-breakingly long time. My sense of pity turned more intense. Her son was a proactive and worldly wise sort of character and was expected to dispel her financial woes once he reached the right age. But soon after he started earning, he eloped with a married woman many years his senior, only to resurface much later. Lalmani refused to receive any sympathy. She spat on her runaway son’s cowardice and went about her life as usual. She took it upon herself to get her younger daughter married and found a suitable boy for him. The last I saw of her, before my family shifted from the place, she was still working for four families and bringing up her grand children with the same deftness and agility that I remember about her the most.

Her struggles didn’t cease to exist but nor did her resilience. When I look back at her life – or whatever I had seen of it – I feel, mostly, a sense of awe. Respect. Bewilderment. Here, we have a woman who refused to break or give in, come what may. She aspired not to survive on charity but lock horns with every adversity that hit her. Her story, for me, is just as glorious as those of the Tibetan refugees who refuse to be bogged down by circumstances but, instead, thrive on their undying perseverance wherever they go.

When I look back at my growing up years, I realize that Lalmani deserved neither the resentment my puerile self once harbored towards her nor the contempt that my arrogant adolescence had conjured for her rigidity. Least of what she required was the pity that oozed out of my freshly acquired ‘mature’ disposition. I wonder if she would’ve offered resentment, contempt or pity for my outlook!

Lalmani may have considered discussing her story with me, I hope, and nodded indulgently at my silent salutes, but she wouldn’t have thought much of my endorsing her life through this essay. What good will it do her, I want to find out. Am I not marketing her struggles? Am I not selling her story? Am I not trying to narrate a patronizing version of her arduous journey? That, too, to an audience that has never known her, has no stake in her sorrows and will never be able to alleviate them. It’s only I who has seen her move about the courtyard on those wintry mornings, sheathed in a shawl, washing the ice cold floor, staying apace with life all the while. And I’m not even sure if I’ve marketed it all well enough!

What ITIHAAS changed for me..

This piece dates back to June 2009. I had drafted it as a short speech I was asked to deliver at the first annual ITIHAAS Educational Summit.

It was during a ‘walk’ to the Red Fort on a chilly January morning that I had my first interaction with ITIHAAS. We’d been taken there on a school trip and, in spite of the obvious sense of excitement, didn’t know what exactly to expect and just stood ogling at the imposing facade of the fort. The resource person soon arrived and asked us to gather around her as she stood facing us on the embankment of a tree.

The lady, with folded arms and a friendly but distinctly no non-sense demeanor, promised to take us on a journey down the lanes of history. Our skeptic attitude towards anything to do with history gradually melted away as her details and stories, peppered with her impeccable expertise in reaching out to us, turned from interesting to impressive to enthralling.

What caught up with most of us was the sheer innovativeness associated with the entire exercise as we walked from stop to stop within the fort. Delectable snippets of history, talking of unimaginable grandeur, riches and luxury seemed to be oozing out of every nook and cranny of Shahjahan’s sprawling abode. It was incredible to see how much of history and legends lay hidden within the confines of the red sandstone monument which, as we were later told, was originally called the Quila-i-Mubarak.

We finally came out content and a lot more enlightened about our city’s glorious past. This is what a friend of mine had to say about the resource person after we were through with our walk, “How I wish I had a Social Studies teacher like her back in the middle school. Studying history wouldn’t have been that nightmarish then…” We all agreed.

 I had been planning a novel based on Delhi around then and felt that the lady might help me with the research work. I gathered the courage to approach her with my intentions and she, after giving it some thought, handed me her visiting card. It carried a logo in a crayon-etch pattern that read ‘ITIHAAS’ with ‘Smita Vats, Director’ printed below it. It was the start of a journey that has proved to be thoroughly enriching for me.

What I managed to imbibe during the three hour trip with ITIHAAS was just a brief trailer of the whole lot of other things that the organization stands for. What impresses me the most is the fact that the aim of its walks is not just to state the mundane historical details associated with the sites but to make the students connect to them. It’s the story behind the structures and the way it’s influenced our culture and society that actually manages to seep into the young minds. For instance, it was only through the walks that I came to know how the dewans with arched openings entered the Indian architectural style. It was what the Mughals ended up creating when they tried to reproduce in stone the tents that they had a fixation for dwelling in, owing to their west Asian nativity. I now understand why a watered-down version of the dewan became a part of the baithak in my ancestral house.

One of the statements often used by Smita ma’am during her walks and which I’ve myself come to adore after all these days of being associated with ITIHAAS is, “There’s nothing great about being a tourist in your city and a foreigner in your own country..” It pretty much sets the stage for the endeavors of ITIHAAS. The idea is to bridge the gap that has emerged between today’s youngsters and the traditional Indian culture that they mostly feel alienated to. It is usually the first time for many of the students of Delhi that they step into a conventional Muslim locality when they walk with us through the lanes of Chandni Chowk, eating langar at the Sisganj Gurudwara , discovering Ghalib’s poetic legacy sitting in his haveli at Ballimaran and treating themselves to bowls of sewaiyyan  in traditional Muslim households on Eid.. Needless to say, they all savor the many lovely flavors that the experience offers..

One of the images from ITIHAAS that have stayed with me is of Smita ma’am squatting beside the Imam Sahib of the historical Fatehpuri Mosque, her dupatta wrapped around her head as a sign of respect, as the religious exponent interacts with the children who’re visiting the mosque as a part of their trip. How often do students get a chance to meet a person of his stature and get answers to their queries pertaining to the religion that he represents? Rarely… ITIHAAS, through its initiatives, provides the students a gateway to a world that they live in close proximity with but seldom get to understand in its entirety.

I’m sometimes asked by people, whom I talk to about my experiences with ITIHAAS, how this work is different from that done by the sundry tourist guides who swarm outside the various historical sites.

 My answer lies in the fact that the sole motive behind ITIHAAS’ programs is to educate the young Indians about their country’s rich tradition and heritage, make them connect with its past that’s shaped its present and ultimately  help them turn out as citizens who’re better informed about their roots and more considerate towards it. In fact, this very idea is reiterated by Smita Ma’am during her walks when she chides the badly-behaving kids, reminding them that they’ve not come on a picnic but are studying outside the class.

What made me return to ITIHAAS after walking with it as a student was the prospect of being a part of such a unique endeavor. It’s helped me perceive my country and its culture in a whole new shade - a shade that makes it look endearingly exceptional. I have been providing my creative assistance to its various projects under the guidance of Ms Vats and every time I see a kid come out smiling from a walk or an orientation conducted by ITIHAAS, I feel that I’ve done my tiny bit to help our heritage and culture acquire a renewed sheen. I wish all the luck to ITIHAAS for everything that it’s going to venture into in the near future.

Thank You!