"Manreet Sodhi Someshwar is a gifted writer of great promise. I have a gut feeling we have a new star rising in Punjab's literary horizon. She has an excellent command of English and a sly sense of humour."
A fine headline to be greeted with this morning, on October 2, the day of Gandhi Jayanti. Made me check my calendar to confirm it wasn’t 30th January.
To all those bandying their jingoism the past few days, jung mubarak, you’re welcome to your war. How comforting it must be to thump your chests as you listen to Ornob and approve ‘surgical strikes’. Us folks who live on the border - 553 Kms of Ferozepur, Fazilka, Amritsar, Tarn Taran, Gurdaspur, Pathankot - teetering forever on Radcliffe’s line, are fleeing; leaving behind, yet again, our homes, our land, our crops, our selves.
But, I digress. Happee budday, Bapu! (that’s how we say it in Punjab). If you don’t feel like partying with the chest thumpers, join us as we hastily evacuate and scramble away from the border, sweat lining our sweaters in the autumnal chill, a thousand questions on our minds. Who will harvest the rice? Feed the buffalos? Where will we find shelter? How far before we can rest? Will Pakistan also do surgical strikes? Or will its tanks roll across the border like in ’71? Will we have a home to return to? We have no plan - we were ordered to ‘Evacuate at once!’ - but once we find shelter, in a gurdwaras perhaps, we can swap stories.
You can tell us about the Purana Qila of Delhi, the same Old Fort where in 1947 you found Muslim refugees huddling from the tyranny of their Hindu brothers, much as the Pandavas had sought refuge from the Kauravas as the Mahabharata says. And I can tell you about fleeing from home astride my father’s shoulders, ducking into bushes as sirens sounded, crying when my embroidered jutti slipped off my foot and my father paused in flight as he searched for that one shoe even as the PAF fighter planes threatened to incinerate us any moment …
When the war passed and we returned home to ‘normalcy’, we exchanged stories with friends and neighbors as we recalled our flights. We have so many stories, Bapu, the night will pass before you can blink an eye. For a people used to evacuating upon a crisp command, stories are all we can carry. And in an amnesiac nation (not a single memorial to Partition), stories are all we have.
It is India's 67th Independence Day. For many Indians with freedom came partition - in the part of Punjab I grew up in, two words are spoken in the same breath: azadi-vand. Batwara/Partition is a concomitant legacy of the end of British rule. As we celebrate today, it behoves us to remember the price we paid for that freedom, and the responsibilities that we have yet to fulfill ...
Recently I received the sort of summons you dread when you live away from home. We are a typical expat family that has lived in rented apartments for all the years we’ve been working - home, therefore, is still the place I grew up in, the house my parents built, the four walls within which are ensconced the conspiracies of childhood, the place I have left behind so I can move ahead ...
My mother was abruptly hospitalized but due to the marvel of modern travel, I was by her hospital bedside within 12 hours. My mother is a force of nature, a person with tremendous will power, determination, capacity for hard work and that good ole Punjabi jigra. In my moments of deepest doubt, when I’ve needed to shore up my courage, I’ve closed my eyes and summoned her - and I know: with a mother like that, I’ve no business being a wuss.
And yet, parents, not even seemingly indomitable ones, are immune to the cycle of life. That day she was frail and I felt the baton pass as I realized that I had to, however inadequately, fill those shoes and mimic a courage I didn’t possess. I spent a week in the hospital arranging blood donors, tailing nurses, navigating hospital bureaucracy, procuring medicines, handling bedpans, feeding my mum - food, medicine, tonic, food - and as I zipped in-out of the hospital I encountered Salman Khan.
His brawny self draped in a tight-fitting suit, he was plastered against side walls, as the Bodyguard. The crumbling edifice of the Frances Newton Hospital, a venerable institution started by the American missionaries more than a century back, was in stark contrast to the glossy poster. FNH is the place where my siblings and I got our assorted childhood vaccinations, where my father convalesced after a heart attack, in whose chapel I prayed for his recovery, whose verdant lawns and brick walls were adjacent to my school, whose doctors saved my mother. And yet, the place is falling apart. Like the rest of Punjab.
It swarms with people - needy folks who travel from villages and the town itself because ‘Mishn Aspatal’ is a saviour. But their foreign aid has been cut, the government offers little assistance and, much like my mother, it echoes its former self. But, never mind, Salman Khan is there, the bouncer who is the new saviour of Punjab.
Lest anybody be in doubt, the aforesaid Bollywood film - in a general reflection on the state of us Indians - did exceedingly well at the BO and grossed gross revenues in the state of Punjab. While all Indians seem to be in need of escapist fare, the Punjabis seem to require it like oxygen.
Which is not surprising - the state is going down the drain. But since the deteriorating infrastructure means hardly any functioning drains, perhaps an accurate metaphor would be ‘getting polluted, filthy and stricken like the dying rivers which gave it its name’?
In my home town the pavements have disappeared. We have done the incredible - brought moon to Punjab as its residents navigate lunar surfaces to get from point A to B.
That Punjab isn’t the prosperous state it once was isn’t news any more. Mounting state debt (which has set the ruling SAD and the Opposition snarling at each other), falling agricultural incomes, mounting farmer suicides, rapidly poisoning water supply because of excessive use of pesticides, growing unemployment, degrading soil, and a declining sex ratio, are amongst its litany of woes.
No wonder the consumption of drugs has increased to a point where sociologists are labelling drug-addiction an epidemic in the state.
What do you do if you are a Punjabi youth, educated, with no job on hand? You escape reality - either through drugs or through Bollywood crap. And contend yourself with the tropes that Bollywood churns out for us: Singh is King! Really? Where?
As the state with the most precipitous decline in prosperity? Yes.
As the state with one of the worst gender ratios? Yes
Does Bollywood address the above issues? No. It is happy singing Singh is king and having the Singhs swallow it whole.
No wonder Bollywood heroine Kareena Kapoor has quipped: “My fans love me in a desi avatar, in a traditional salwar kameez look.” Does she know that in the state of the traditional salwar kameez, her fans also like to kill their girls? According to Census 2011, the Child sex ratio of Punjab is 846 females per 1000 males.
Since we, the Punjabis and the nation alike, are so besotted with Bollywood, let’s turn to Rockstar, the movie which released recently. Its music has been well received and a song, Sadda Haq, has got some enthusiastic nods.
‘Sadda Haq’ is a traditional rousing cry of the embattled Punjabi. I remember when my sister and her classmates in Medical College went on strike and ‘Sadda Haq’ was their constant refrain. It is time for Punjabis to raise that refrain again.
Our political leaders - be it SAD, congress or any other bad politico - are choking us with their self-serving greed and rampant corruption. They learnt from the British how to divide and rule and they haven’t stopped since. During Partition, they drove the Muslims out; during Khalistan movement, it was the Hindu-Sikh divide. The sad Akali Dal wants to to be the party of the Sikhs and yet, for all their flowing whiskers, they don’t understand the principal tenet of Sikhism - Ek Onkar, the oneness of God. The Congress only wants to oppose the sad Akalis and stay afloat by keeping a foot each in the Hindu and Sikh boat.
Gulzar saab says he cannot forget the sight of bloody corpses being scraped off the tarmac in the aftermath of Partition. I grew up during the Khalistan movement and, like others who witnessed those times, came away scarred. Which is why I wrote The Long Walk Home - lest we forget. And yet, in Shining India and Declining Punjab, we seem to have merrily shrugged off our history as we careen in a downward spiral.
Enough!
The way I see it, we have a choice: we can choose to escape or we can complete the refrain.
Sadda Haq, Aithe Rakh.
It’s time we looked beyond the political play and demanded our right - the right to good governance.
One of the blood transfusions my mother received was from my husband - I sat by her bedside and watched his good South Indian Brahmin blood course drop by drop through her proud Punjabi Jat Sikh veins. When she recovered, my mother proclaimed that my husband had saved her. Very dramatic, but very Punjabi too.
The state of Punjab needs new blood too - its time we cast our prejudices aside and demand the same of our leaders. Whether we are Hindu or Sikh, we need good governance, political propaganda isn’t going to save us.
"... it is possible to love a place like it is a person... a place is never just its physical coordinates, for its location is often in the heart. Thus, it can be carried around forever, and passed on to one's children, with all its lingering memories and wistful fragrances."
Yup, I am quoting from my own book above, my second novel that is, where a character grapples with Partition. But that is also how I view places; a place is organic, it has pulse and rhythm and smell - much like a human being. And places speak for the people who come from them. For a California resident, a New Yorker is an alien and if you're in India, whether you are a Delhiite or a Mumbaikar can be a decoder for the entire You!
Paris is one of my favourite places and because its Paris - that much feted City of Love - it is a world unto itself. So, any Parisian will tell you, whether you are from the Left Bank or the Right will speak volumes about you. The Right Bank is the traditional upper crust, where you find the big businesses and banks, along with the Louvre, Champs Elysses, Arc de Triomphe, Centre Pomipdou and others. Left Bank, on the southern side of the river Seine, meanwhile, is historically the boho hangout of legendary writers and artists - Picasso, Matisse, Hemingway - who lived in the more affordable part of the city.
With that as a backdrop, let's walk the Right Bank, shall we?!
Probably the most prestigious resident of the Right Bank, certainly for an artist: Musee du Louvre
I thought you couldn't snorkel in the Seine but clearly some folks can!
This is one American even the French like to flaunt: classic Pacino swigging cigar in place of George Washington.
The pavement vendors have interesting wares on offer - this is Paris, after all!
My daughter and I never, ever, miss any dog - this evoked a simultaneous sense of deja vu and wonder. We see such sights in India all the time where the homeless often make their home with man's best friend. The pups, mother and master were catching some Easter sunshine.
Shop after shop of postcards, vintage posters, rare books on the Quai du Louvre, enough to make up for the professed lack of bohemia in the Right Bank!
I mean to do a post on the Left Bank as well; meanwhile, au revoir!
