It’s Time To Invite The Dead To Populate Our Novels

Sometimes, to grapple with the present we have to engage with the past. I don’t mean a rehash. (Woh to ho raha hai.) What I have in mind is a close scrutiny of tradition, an exploration of myths, a deep dive into historical archives. Why? you ask. 

Because, for one, in India, the past is forever intruding upon the present. And yet, it is a syncopated vision of the past with its tropes of glory, communal harmony, ahimsa… Bapu spun us a story to which we could all cohere — how, after all, do you defeat a Raj whose toolkit was entirely dependant on dividing us? (Besides, ahimsa was such a pish posh way to illustrate to the world that Western civilisation would be a good idea, eh!) The historical truth however is that despite Gandhi’s successful experiment we are a people whose history is mired in cataclysmic violence. What we are also very good with is historical amnesia. Not our fault entirely: mass violence is numbing. Which is where the novelist steps in. (Reason two, if you’re keeping count.)

The task of the novelist is to transform general loss into a specific loss, to give us characters and their stories we can care about. I am at work on a novel set in the months leading up to the independence of India in 1947. Set in two parallel threads, in the two great cities of colonial India, Lahore and Delhi, this is a behind the scenes look at the negotiations, the give and take and the political skullduggery that gave India its freedom via the price of division. Consequently, it is also an intimate look at the friendships destroyed, the loves lost and the carnage that occurred in the sticky hot months of India’s hottest summer ever. Hopefully, the narrative will allow readers to make up their minds about topical assumptions of Nehru’s contributions and the Sardar-Pandit rivalry. (Reason three, and counting.) 

The past is never dead, Faulkner said, it’s not even past. (Who knew Faulkner was a closet Desi!) Khair, general elections 2019 have just got over, the journey ahead is long, and I invite my fellow writers, and readers: Why not reckon with that past, and invite the dead to populate our novels? I have been wining and dining and sharing multiple cuppa chais with Dickie, Jawahar and Vallabh, and it’s been one helluva ride! (Reason four, and ending. For now.)

India General Elections 2019 - Some Thoughts

With BJP-led NDA sweeping the elections and having swept the Congress into the dumpster of history likely, people (such as myself) who are labelled “sickular”, “libtard” and other such delectably deranged slurs, are declaring the death of the republic, bemoaning the end of the idea of India, questioning the existence of secular-liberal ideology in India. Moot points, all. Here’s what I think.

• Secularism/liberalism are not foreign to India. Instead of the neat ideals that these two words conjure, a vast majority of Indians have traditionally lived in harmony with others, always smug and snug in the belief that their faith/religion/way of life is superior but they have to coexist with the neighbour whose way of life is different (read ‘inferior’). It was a cheerful disdain for the other, which worked quite well for us for a long enough time period.

• What has changed?

The playbook of identity politics, which Indira Gandhi finessed, has now been taken by the BJP and updated for contemporary hi-tech times. The general public (read majority Hindus) believe that Congress encourages the basest in the minority groups to use as a wedge against the majority. (I have seen this at close quarters growing up in Punjab when Mrs G’s sponsorship of Bhindranwale threatened another Partition.) Let’s just say the chickens have come home to roost.

Meanwhile, for all those crowing about Congress-Mukt Bharat. Let’s just be clear that Indians have voted for passion over reason - a primal response when tribalism is invoked. It is bigotry, plain and simple, the othering of those who are in a minority. Be it Brexit, Trump or Modi. We can hope that this mandate will be used to deliver development and not frittered over make-believe battles with our neighbours. 

Baaki, the journey is long, and there is a shayr for every season (and reason).

Dil na summed to nahin nakaam hi to hai

Lambi hai gham ki shaam magar shaam hi to hai. Faiz

• What India needs? Another Gandhi, not in terms of what he preached, but a person who can sell us a story of India we can all believe in and run with. Maha - atma. Hai koi?

Love’s Labour’s Lost, in India Today: Reflections on a Graduation, Politicians and Parents

Some years back, on holiday in Thailand, I intended to recuperate after finishing writing one book by spending days in a hammock on a beach, eating - lots, drinking - more, and reading - rather re-reading - one book: The Discovery of India.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Discovery_of_India The vacation turned out to be exactly what I needed and the only part of my plan that didn’t work out was that I didn’t end up re-reading as much as I intended to — blame the myriad charms of a comatose holiday. As our hammock days ended, in jest, I turned to my family and said that I could almost hear Pandit Nehru’s gentle rebuke: Beta, aap hamari kitaab nahin kholey?

Fast forward to yesterday when we were driving back from wind-blown Providence after witnessing a graduation — of my friend’s daughter who, in the manner of children we’ve seen grow up, is now a friend too. Sometime during the journey, hubby and I discussed the one defining statement that Brown University’s President made in her commencement address: Do what you love. We both agreed that while that was entirely valid, what was missing in that exhortation was that one essential element of any true love: labour.

How can you know what you love if you haven’t put in the labour that love demands? 

Doubtful? Ask any parent or caregiver who raises a child. We love our children, but of course, yet is there a day when raising them — and Lord! we shall not even get into adolescence here when several WWs are resolved in one day, and largely because one party (the parent must always remember to be the adult in the relationship) — that parents are not tested? Yesterday, my friend teared up so often that we joked it was the stinging icy wind of New England. But when you have raised a mewling helpless infant to the day they toss their mortar boards gleefully into the air, you have scars which your children will never know. Until they become parents themselves. That is the circle of life. Labour - Love - Labour - Love… 

Now we are living in an age where it has become easy and fashionable to denounce our past leaders, be it Obama in the US or Nehru in India. The current governments seem duty bound to diss those visionary leaders. They love being in the public eye — bespoke suits, grandiose rhetoric, social media glitz — not so much the labour of governance, it seems. 

There is the fantasy of love and the reality of worthwhile achievement — Shakespeare well understood this when he wrote Love’s Labour’s Lost. As do our current politicians. Having little worthwhile achievement to show, they are rewriting Nehru’s Legacy via their frothing social media troll wagon. Anyone with a smidgen of historical knowledge knows the “contribution” the RSS and its right-wing cohorts made to the freedom of India — the most famous being the letters of apology Savarkar wrote begging the British for his own freedom, the country be damned. 

As for Nehru, he was jailed so frequently by the British that he picked up gardening, often turning part of the prison yard into a flower garden with the help of fellow prisoners. Spinning was another activity he took up in jail. Indeed, the pale pink khaki silk saree that Indira Gandhi wore on her wedding was spun by him in jail. And while Savarkar was writing his mercy petitions, Nehru wrote The Discovery of India in jail in 1944 over five months, without the aid of the internet or any research assistants — it covered 1000 handwritten pages. 

Labour - Love. Got it? 

You raise a child, you got scars to show. You free a nation and work to ensure its freedom is sustained, you got scars to show. Of his 74 years of life, Pandit Nehru spent almost a decade shuttling between jails. As Prime Minister, he worked to the beat of Frost’s homily to love & labour: I have miles to go before I sleep…

Pandit Nehru died 54 years ago. But his words live on. You can read mercy petitions or you can read the The Discovery of India. Question is: are you willing to put in the labour for what you love?

Swatantra Gantantra

When I was a child, 15 August and 26 January were like Siamese twins: lookalikes who were even otherwise indistinct; born like twins are, one following the other. We celebrated them similarly too, with school assembly and singing of patriotic songs, which blared on loudspeakers as we ventured to school and back. On those days, Bhagat Singh and Manoj Kumar popped up in the manner of seasonal heroes, and I hummed “mera rang de basanti chola” because even AIR’s Urdu Service favored the song. Only in secondary school did I begin to glean that much like the judwa Ram-Sham, the diwases Gantantra and Swatantrata, were actually unlike each other and stood for different things.  

In Civics I learnt that 26 January marks Republic Day when the constitution of India came into effect in 1950. Three years after Independence Day which came first on 15 August 1947. Was India therefore not a Republic (Gantantra) in those 2.5 years between the two historic days? No, not officially. Those years were when India, led by the fierce scholar Dr Ambedkar, was crafting a constitution which would effectively serve a multilingual, multi religious, multi ethnic, ancient civilization such as India that had newly transitioned to a modern independent nation. In keeping with the complexity of the task at hand, the Constitution of India is the world’s longest. (No, now’s not the time to faint.) To ensure that the average citizen of India knew exactly what this long document was all about, its drafters handed us a key, kind of like the one you use when preparing for exams? It’s called the Preamble, a simple 1-pager that you can, and are indeed expected to, know by heart. I do.

Along with poems, ghazals, certain Hindi songs, the Preamble is one of those things I recite to myself as I walk — if you’re surprised, go hasten to read it for the power and poetry of its words. Recently, I was trudging through Central Park after days of incessant snow. As I walked, I kept an eye out for shiny patches of ice which will have you splayed out on the ground faster than a banana peel. The sun shone bright, its incandescence lighting up the field of snow like halogen. A fellow walker and I fell into conversation, and as happens with New Yorkers nowadays, we were soon talking about Trump and his calamitous presidency. We bemoaned his misogyny, buffoonery, chicanery, greed, his disregard for science and global warming, his bigotry and small mindedness and those small hands… Yup, we covered most everything that’s bothering us. As we came to a fork where our paths diverged, we paused, my companion forlorn as he shrugged: But what do we do? 

A 71-year-old Jewish gentleman who loved the Beatles and Sai Baba in his youth (I had learnt), his big concern was the world he was leaving for his grandchildren and all the other children. What can we do, he reiterated.

I stuck my chin out and said, Exactly what we did now. We talk. 

We talk to state our opinion. We talk to make sure we are heard. We talk to enable those who want to talk to know that yes, while we do not burn buses or lynch folks or rabble rouse, we are a community of people who believe fiercely in the premise that all human beings are created equal. A precept that is the foundation on which rests the world’s oldest (US) democracy and the world’s largest (India). A premise that is declared in the Preamble to the Constitution of India, and is meant to be upheld by all citizens of India. That is exactly what Bhagat Singh, our favorite martyr — oh so young, so heroic! — exemplified: Zindgi to apne damm par hi jeeyee jaati hai, dusron ke kandhe par toh shirf janaaze uthaye jaate hai. We live life on our terms, shoulders of others are handy for funeral processions. 

In these perilous times when the Constitution is being mistaken for Cowstitution, by-hearting the Preamble is the first independent step you can take. Then, start talking. 

Happy Republic Day, folks — India’s looking at you! (Try not to fail her.)

Ladyz, gentlemen, mitron, lend me your ears... (With apologies to the Bard)

Ladyz, gentlemen, mitron, lend me your ears (arrey, kaan nahin kaatiye, bus suniye — I know we’ve got mighty handy with cutting of late)

I come to bury the Idea of India (which Indira put on ventilation many years back, and now Shri PMji is putting to permanent sleep), not to praise it.

The grandiose idea (secular amidst multiple ancient religions) birthed by the likes of Gandhi-Nehru, 

was a stillbirth when Gandhi was assassinated within the first year of independent India (achhe din version 1.1)  

But Nehru slapped it into some semblance of life, and let it be. Siri PMji 

has told you the Idea of India was bogus:

A Hindu land, Hindu from the golden age of the Vedas, what you mean sickular?

And grievously has India answered it.

Here, under leave of Shri PMji and the rest —

For he is Hindu, Bharat varsha is Hindu;

As is his party of all Hindu men and some (Hindu) women —

Come I to speak in ‘Idea of India’s’ funeral.

I learnt of the Idea of India in my Civics class when I by-hearted the Preamble to our Constitution;

But Shri PMji and his Godse-loving party insists it is an invalid idea;

And Shri PMji has a vision for achhedin and an army of bhakts (so stay in line, I must.)

The idea of India brought many glories to our nation:

An ancient civilization! the world’s largest democracy!

Home to all world religions! Home of non violence!

Did this seem invalid?

Yet Shri PMji says India is for Indians (and Babur-ki-aulad types shush!),

Cent percent Hindu, if Brahmin, better, 

If male, even more so.

I speak not to disprove what Shri PMji and his Bhajapa speak (and promise and trump about Make in India and the din of achhedin)

But here I am to speak what I do know.

You all did love the Idea of India once, not without cause:

(You rioted at regular intervals — 1984, 1992, 2002 — but regained sanity, as if realizing that the good of India lay in a collective good)

What cause withholds you then, to mourn for the Idea of India?

Which Tagore described as ‘Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high,’

Which the Preamble (yes, that dusty old tarp that refuses to die, for me at least, a minority twice over: woman and Sikh) promised?

O judgement! thou art fled to an army of trolls,

And men who will protest the plight of fictional women,

And behead, burn and film a poor laborer because he’s Babur-ki-aulad, 

(Never mind that there are 500 years between the two, and hey, in the meantime we had the English too!) Bear with me;

My heart is there in the coffin with the Idea of India,

With Tegh Bahadur who gave his life for the Kashmiri Brahmins,

With the widows and children of ’84 who are still awaiting justice at the hands of their Hindu brethren,

With the women of India who must endure because they are not fictional or mythological but all too real,

With the Muslim woman who raised me, the Catholic nuns who taught me, my Hindu and Sikh family,

And I must pause till it come back to me.

And here, Mr Shakespeare, I must take your leave and recall one of my favorite poets, 

Bahadur Shah Zafar, beleaguered in Burma, who recalling his motherland India, waxed:

Bahut lambi hain raahein pyaar ki, aur zindagi kum hai …

So long are the paths of love and hope, they oft outrun our lives. 

So hope I must, even as I mourn…

© Manreet Sodhi Someshwar

The Unique Charm of Dimples & Fangs

I don’t recall when exactly I became aware of Shashi Kapoor, but like all lingering encounters, I remember the frisson I felt upon witnessing him as the rakish Javed Khan. So smitten was I that in my later feverish imagining, I cast myself as Ruth (played by Nafisa Ali) who is the object of Javed’s desire. 

Now that I google the film, I realize it released in 1978, which means I fell for Shashi Kapoor at the tender age of ten. What can I say! I’m sure there are others who were younger when they became fans of the Kapoor with the sexiest smile and risqué head turn. 

I watched Shashi Kapoor in many films and somehow, he managed to leave an impression, always: a swinging jiving lover who will sprint his beloved away from under the nose of sasurji (Le jayenge, le jayenge…); the soulful reflective man (Ghungroo ki tarah …); the man whose ardor will melt ice even (Tera much se hai pehle ka nata koi…). There is of course the perennial hit dialogue: Mere paas ma hai. 

But what stuck out for me was the man in Kabhi Kabhi who will say in support of his wife, who he realizes loved another man before marriage, that a woman leaves behind everything when she marries and yet the husband will cast doubts upon her. It was dialogues such as these, which gave voice to an opinion rarely heard in Hindi films, which made me love him more. And he clinched it for me on the memory board when he essayed the aging poet Nur in ‘In Custody’ (based on Anita Desai’s brilliant namesake novel.) This was in 1993, Shashi Kapoor was corpulent, I had grown up, and watching the film was such a bittersweet feeling for here was an actor portraying so beautifully a legend who has wasted away that the line between acting and reality blurred. 

At the end of ‘In Custody,’ Kapoor’s voice recites this couplet:

Jo ruke to koh-e-garan thay hum, jo chale to jaan se guzar gaye

raah-e-yaar hum nein kadam kadam, tujhe yaadgaar bana diya

Once I was steady as a mountain, but now as I walk I leave all behind

at every step on the road on which I walked, I built you a shrine

From the rake Javed Khan to the effete Nur, Shashi Kapoor traversed a long distance. The joy of watching him never diminished — dimples and fangs gave him a unique un-replicable charm, and a place in all our hearts. And in some cases, a shrine. 

#ShashiKapoor

The New York Times Tries Its Hand At Saree

Uh-oh, New York Times, where did you come across this peddler-of-inane-drivel of a writer? Calling him a reporter/journalist makes you look woefully inadequate as a newspaper of some chops. Do you have no Indian on your international/editorial desk who gave a look over to this piece before it appeared in all its ignorant uninformed biased bigotry on your esteemed pages? First, some facts: 

1. The saree is not Hindu — My Punjabi mother wore it to work and parties; my Kannadiga mother-in-law wears it even as her nightdress; the Keralite sisters at my Catholic school wore sarees, with flowers in their crinkly hair; my Maharashtrian bai bustled through my house, cooking-cleaning-laundering, dressed in her saree… I can continue endlessly but you’re getting the picture, hopefully? Let me break it down for you: My mother is Sikh, my mother-in-law is Hindu, my Keralite sisters were Christian. Gotcha!

2. The saree is not nationalist — Heck, the saree is a garment as old as our civilization, give or take a few centuries, considering we’re several millennia old. And yes, we are one of the two (alongside China, albeit that market is steadily substituting its traditional clothes for Western apparel) oldest continuous civilizations of the world, which means our great-great-great-whatever grandmothers have worn the saree as do we, even our very young daughters — we have the concept of a half-saree, too. Surprise!

3. The saree has nothing to do with Mr Modi — The Prime Minister of India is doing many things, as elected leaders are wont to do, but the last I looked he was neither wearing a saree, nor promoting the wearing of one. And why would he? Indian women work in sarees, party in them, even jog in them! What? You haven’t seen Milind Soman’s mum jogging beside her handsome son?! Haw!

I could go on but let’s admit, dear NYT, you goofed up, big time. Time to shed those blinkers, say sorry, and meet some real Indians. You might end up losing those biases — how bad can that be? — and I promise, the six-yard garment might flummox you but one of us can teach you how to drape it. How elegant (informed, international, effective) will you appear then!

The Taj Conspiracy

I last visited the Taj Mahal in winter of 2008. Early morning mist curled up from the charbagh, the Persian gardens of Paradise at the base of which stands the red sandstone platform from which arises the famed marble mausoleum. It wasn’t my first visit — you cannot grow up in India and not go see the Taj on a school trip, at least. I was there to show it to my six-year-old daughter: a UNESCO Heritage site that is the world’s most famous monument to love. I had made sure to hire a guide in advance, one who came highly recommended as his client roster included foreign corporate executives. I was anxious for my daughter to learn some of the facets that make the Taj extraordinary — glorious symmetry, exquisite pieta dura, elegant calligraphy — and appreciate how it is truly symbolic of India. 

The guide proved a downer. He hurried us through the gardens, made a brisk halt at the central pool — where celebrities from princess Diana to the Clintons have been photographed, ignored the garden wall pavilions with their intriguing verandahs accentuated with coupled columns and arches, rattled off dimensions of domes and minarets, amidst a steady dribble of urban legends. I was disappointed, until I was livid.  

As we perambulated the monument, he pointed to the pinnacle atop the central dome, urging us to notice its design. The finial is too far for the naked eye to discern much. But a replica exists on the red sandstone platform and he walked us to it. See, he triumphantly pointed to a carving — a coconut resting on mango leaves atop a pot of water — a popular Hindu design! Then he began his spiel about how the Taj Mahal was actually an ancient Hindu temple called Tejo Mahalya which the Mughals had repurposed.

Perhaps my husband spied my thunderous expression; he paid the guide and packed him off. Thereafter, we perambulated the Taj on our own, guiding our daughter through a building that while Islamic in conception is imbued with Hindu design elements. Shah Jahan, the builder of Taj Mahal was an islamic ruler to a very large Hindu population and he pioneered an architectural style that replicated his own mixed heritage (his mother and grandmother were both Hindu princesses) and reflected the diverse nature of his subjects. 

The guide’s story, attributed to one P. N. Oak, is routinely dismissed by historians. But I was so disillusioned I determined to write a story that would rescue the Taj Mahal from lies and show the monument for what it truly is: a symbol of syncretic India. The challenge was huge. Most Indians know little about the monument except for its famed beauty and fabled love legend. There is a dearth of scholarly work — indeed, the Austrian historian Ebba Koch is the only one permitted to take measurements of the complex over her thirty-year research on the monument. 

I decided to do a ‘Da Vinci Code’ on the Taj Mahal — a thriller format to make a medieval monument go contemporary. Ms Koch’s ‘The Complete Taj Mahal’ became my bible as I strove for historical and architectural accuracy in my novel. Upon its release in 2012, ‘The Taj Conspiracy’ became a runaway bestseller. Most gratifying to me was readers who wrote saying they took my book along as a guide when visiting the Taj.

My research on Taj also familiarized me with the fragile state of the monument, something I wove into the narrative to raise awareness of its alarming vulnerability in the face of increasing pollution, a depleting Yamuna river, and rising terror. And now, the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, the state in which Taj Mahal is located, has initiated two things. Taj Mahal is omitted from the state’s official tourism booklet, and it is not allotted any cultural heritage fund for the coming year. 

Yogi Adityanath, who dresses in the saffron robes of a Hindu priest, has gone on record to state that the Taj Mahal “does not reflect Indian culture.” The right-wing Hindu party he represents — which governs India under Prime Minister Modi — is doing a fine job of mixing faith and fundamentalism as it attempts to pour a several-millennia old Hindu faith into its narrow Hindutva ideology. Indeed, the single largest contribution of the Modi government might be that it has made a majority (Hindus make up 80 % of the population) feel insecure.

Cultures such as India’s don’t die abruptly. Radical Chinese experiments such as the Great Leap Forward, or the dramatic overhaul of a communist society to a capitalistic one, are near impossible in a country as diverse as India and composed — as the Nobel-Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen has coined — of “argumentative Indians.” What guts it is steady erosion. The benign neglect that Taj Mahal has suffered thus far is in line with what other historic monuments in India face. But what Mr Adityanath’s stipulation does is to fast-forward the Taj for neglect hoping for its demise. 

Taj Mahal is more symbolic of our heritage than we Indians realize. To borrow from a character in ‘The Taj Conspiracy’ who, at a crucial juncture when the monument is facing an extraordinary threat, exhorts: Just as the color white contains all colors within it, this monument of white embodies our innate ancient pluralism.

If the Taj Mahal goes down, so will an integral piece of India’s soul.

© Manreet Sodhi someshwar

  

  

On the perfection of Indian men, and the absolute essentialness of kumkum-sindoor

Today is the death anniversary of Pandit Nehru, architect of modern India. (Which, incidentally, looks more medieval than it did 70 years back, but that is for another post.) Jawaharlal Nehru's biggest misfortune might well be his progeny -- all those letters wasted on Indira.

Yet, while Nehru's legacy is tainted by the conduct of his descendants, today is still a good time to recognize his many achievements, foremost amongst which is his support for women's rights. Especially when in India today, sanitary napkins are taxed but "essential" items such as sindoor-kumkum-bangles is not. Progress, welcome!

In the Indian parliament, the 'Hindu Code Bill' was stalled repeatedly by more conservative-minded politicos. However, after winning the first general elections in 1952, Nehru revived the reforms which were passed into law after a lengthy and bitter debate in Parliament.

"Now, we are often told, reminded of the high ideals of Indian womanhood, Sita and Savitri. I do not seem to remember men being reminded of Ramchandra and Satyavan, to behave like them. I do not know if Indian men are supposed to be perfect, incapable of any further effort or improvement, but it is bad that this can be so. You cannot have a democracy if you cut off fifty percent of the people and put them in a separate class..."

- excerpt from a speech by Nehru in Parliament, from Ram Guha's Makers of Modern India

Award!

My current work-in-progress novel wins City College New York's 'The Jerome Lowell DeJur Award in Creative Writing (Fiction)'. 

After feeling faintly stunned, I was happy. But I have to admit, my strongest feeling is one of relief: there might be light at the end of the tunnel yet. 

This novel has challenged me, and continues to do so, and the award lets me tell myself 'Say not the struggle naught availeth' ...

Some pics from the award ceremony :)

Arab Apathy and Trump Tantrum

What is wrong with the Arab world? When Assad gasses his own people, the Arab leaders are mute. When Trump launches missiles on Syria without any plan whatsoever on how he'll deal with its aftermath, the Arab leaders crow in praise.

Wars don't happen between nations, they happen between megalomaniacs, those near-sighted, dim-witted men who cannot see beyond their noses, whose hands are trigger-happy because they have to continually demonstrate that they are indeed in possession of functioning apparatus.

Meanwhile, there are babies to be buried and families to be mourned and scarce rations to be procured because the thing with life is that the living do not die with the dead - somebody has to bear the terrible burden of grieving with every breath.

It truly is an effed up world.

Gimme Red!

Another International Women’s Day. I have reached that stage in my life where the idea of celebrating one day for women is amusing. Nevertheless, I like to mark the day, so I woke up my daughter with a cuppa tea and after our family pooja, shared with hubby and her a photo of a fearless girl facing down the charging bull of Wall Street, an installation that came up yesterday to mark Women’s Day and urge Wall Street to have more women on the boards of their companies. 

I was more charged-up about “A Day Without A Woman”, an initiative by the organizers of Women’s March, to push for gender justice. It asks women to stay away from work for a day, if possible, and wear red to show support. So, hubby went to office wearing a red tie and my daughter wore a fire-engine red shirt to school. My red blouse is ready for class later in the day.

My Facebook feed, expectedly, overflowed with messages and posts wishing women a happy day. To which I added Maya Angelou’s “Phenomenal Woman”. All good but as they say, I wasn’t feeling it …

Returning from running errands and scooping up books from my library, I was crossing 84th street when I sighted an old woman pushing a shopping cart. It isn’t unusual in NYC, especially the Upper West Side, to sight some really ancient people going about their business, slowly, steadily. The woman was hunched over her cart, face sunk into her chest as she pushed forward, her cart emblazoned with a placard: Donald Trump Is Not My President. I looked up and saw the badge she wore on her coat lapel: Jews Against Trump. We crossed paths and once across, I paused and turned to look at her making her way down. 

I wanted so badly to fly back and hug her, she reminded me of women I have known and loved growing up. Women whose stories I eavesdropped upon, whose laps I climbed into to be part of the story-telling, women who chopped vegetables and rolled rotis and fired up tandoors as they swapped stories, pinging them back and forth, picking up where one left off… Women we called Nani, Ma, Amma, Bebe, Buddi Mai. And at times, Papa and Tayaji even. Because what united the  raconteurs was not their gender but the ability to spin entire worlds, to resurrect the dead, to toss tales in defiance. 

For several moments, I watched her make her way down the sidewalk, frail, determined. Thankfully, I didn’t give into the urge to hug her - likely she’d’ve smacked my forearm for that show of sentimentality! But I am so glad I chanced upon her. And that she took me back to all those women whose stories I still feed off to this day. On this “Women’s Day”, I wish for women to never stop telling their stories, on their carts and clothes, to their children and grandchildren, to the world at large. For we will make the world a kinder, better place, one shared story at a time.

And oh, did I mention the color of the coat she wore? Fire-engine red. What can I say: I’m feeling it, Nana, I’m feeling it!

How To Be A Nationalist in India

1. Be male (if not possible because of gender reason, still try)

2. In the unfortunate circumstance of being female, birth boys only and girls, you abort or kill (May you be the mother of a 1000 sons!)

3. Object to everything you don’t approve of in the name of Mother India/Bharat Mata while swearing teri maa/behan ki all the time

4. If a woman says something you don’t like, start by pelting her with stones, then threaten her with rape, publicly and on social media (your followers will multiply and you’ll get entry to student unions which lead to national politics)

5. Just as ‘Great Grand Masti' is your birthright, ‘Lipstick Under My Burkha’ is ashleel because of “lady oriented” story

6. All soldier-and-soldier-phamily are patriot until they disagree with you
 
7. Logic has no place in life, only Pakistan does

8. India is a great nation with a glorious history which you know best

9. Debate - what debate?

10. Democracy - we are the world’s largest! You disagree? Demo-cracy ki aisi taisi! 

January 26, 2017

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high ... 

Where women are not treated as domesticated mammals 

Where men do not despise each other because of their headgear 

Where people do not have to die in front of ATMs to learn to queue

Where 'ancient civilization' means we are also civilized

Where 'Republic' is truly greater than the sum of parts

... Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

26 January mubarak ho! Happy Republic Day, India! 

Womens March On NYC

Sadda haq, aithe rakh! 

Give me what’s my right, right here, right now! Rhythmic, rousing, pithy and propulsive, it was our rallying cry as we pounded the pavements outside the offices of a college Principal or the Superintendent of the Girls’ Hostel. Our demands were simple: no diktat on what clothes we could wear, no 9 pm curfew by which to return to our rooms, no discrimination between students, girls or boys …

Three decades later, today, I was back to pounding a pavement and raising rallying cries. Only, the pavement was Fifth Avenue, Manhattan, I was pounding it with friends, yes, and my daughter in tow, and our cries were in English.

Not my pussy!

Can’t build the wall, hands too small!

Hey-hey, ho-ho, Donald Trump has got to go!

You get the import, don’t you? I have journeyed across years, crossed oceans, traversed continents, and travelled from the third world, presumably, to the first. And yet, my fight with patriarchy continues. 

And my question, as that of my sisters, remains the same: Why are you so obsessed with my uterus?

Down But Not Out

December 1, 2016

Like the Queen once admitted, I too feel that this might go down as annus horribilis. I am looking forward to my India vacation but the eagerly-awaited viewing of Aamir Khan's film, Dangal, in cinema hall will have to be forfeited - I fail the test of showing duty-bound respect. So cinema is out but hey, hubby reminds me, standing in long queues is not. Seems my country folks have finally learnt to stand in line and I shall be joining them soon. What joys await me!

But it is December, the first day of the last month of 2016 and I have much to be thankful for. Even though I have spent last six months being repeatedly assailed by an orange blob. I have also spent that same time immersed in trauma literature. You could commend my prescience - believe me, I surprise myself at times.

But as I have plowed through some of those texts, on Auschwitz, on the South African TRC, on slavery in America and its legacy, on the Indo-Pak conflict, I have concluded that the ability of homo sapiens to dig themselves repeatedly into holes is really quite phenomenal. Keynes be damned, we aren't even getting paid for that. (To be fair to Mr Keynes, he said, dig holes, not get into them.)

So what is the way forward? What do I look to do in the soon-to-be New Year 2017? Besides the same ole same ole, because hey, nobody transforms overnight at the flick of new year's eve - we are humans not pumpkins. (Though we would all like a magic wand-waving fairy godmother.)

When I am lost, I turn to stories. I am still a child that way, you could say, but stories and the telling of them is the one true gift of homo sapiens. So let me tell you one.

In 1705, after the historic Battle of Chamkaur, the tenth Sikh Guru, Gobind Singh, found himself in the woods of Machhiwara. Alone, having lost his family and his army through Mughal treachery, he wrote a letter to the mighty Mughal emperor Aurangzeb. Zafarnama, he called it, the epistle of victory. (Gotta love his spirit!) Openly defiant, its 111 stanzas of Persian poetry hold a mirror to Aurangzeb, his lack of morality and sound the death knell of his empire.

The most quoted couplet from Zafarnamah is:

Chun kar az hameh heelate dar guzasht,

Halal ast burdan bi shamsher dast.

When all else failed, it was right to resist.

Growing up on stories of the Sikh gurus, the most riveting invariably belonged to the tenth. Only as a grown up, have I learnt the love of literature that he married with his martial spirit. To put a contemporary twist on the poetic Zafarnamah, its essential message remains: Down but not out.

Come 2017, that’s what I intend. Stand my ground. Stay the course. Do my duty.

Down but not out.

A ditty to my Park in Fall

I thought I'd write an ode

To the red maple,

Its red hair, yellow brow, green chin

Walnut trunk that such colours hid.

Then I sighted the pin oak

that did show me 

all those colours 

in a single leaf!

The Northern oak 

in bright Fall light,

is a web 

of spun gold.

What is happening?

My head spins -

I see a painter's palette

Where there used to be green.

This is Fall, I remind myself;

you know, when leaves fall from trees?

But they don't just fall -

They pirouette and spin and twirl. 

And smack me, occasionally,

on the cheek.

Fall is old age, right?

Remind me, 

isn't this supposed to be decay and rot and -- 
time to leave?

Oh, I don't know anything, 

it seems.

This beauty, 

this gorgeous letting go ...

In such a rainbow of surrender,

I too, some day, would like to go!

© Manreet Sodhi Someshwar

Keep Living

I woke up today determined to be normal. To prepare tea with which I wake up my daughter daily, ready her breakfast, change into exercise gear, walk her to school, go to Central Park for a run. But overnight the definition of ‘normal’ had changed. A man who grabbed every conceivable prejudice against every available minority - women, Blacks, Muslims, Jews, gays, differently-abled - had hurled it to such astonishing effect as to win the presidency of the United States! A sexist, racist, misogynist hypocrite was voted to power and all prejudices had been rendered normal. 

Meanwhile, my daughter, had one question, her eyes wide as chrysanthemums: What is going to happen?

I maintained a semblance of normalcy as I tried not to squint at the New York Times, lit the morning diya, we did our puja and wrapped our arms in a family hug - extra tight today as we huddled for something usual, familiar, normal - before heading out on our respective paths. All the while, the question - What is going to happen? - ran ticker tape through my mind. I remember asking that same question of my parents in the 80s when school days were regularly punctuated by curfew days, when hit lists interfered with my reading lists and people evoked 1947 as if it was a relative who’d gone missing had returned. 

What is going to happen? 

My parents kept their chins up, heads down, as they determinedly plowed their way through the morass of that time. They were Punjabis and Punjabis know a thing or two about the way life can abruptly upend itself, when all you have can be snatched away in one stroke, be it in the wake of Abdali’s rampage or the whirlwind of Partition. If you’ve seen the earth crack beneath your feet, if you’ve fled with your young children straddling your waist and shoulders, if you’ve deposited the dead by the roadside because the kafila cannot wait to cremate the countless falling off like flies, then when the question arises -What is going to happen? - you tell your child either of two things. You look your child in the eye and say: You’re my sher puttar. And the child knows, you don’t get to be a tiger cub for nothing. And then you bless them. In a land where calamity can arrive with the unpredictability of a dust storm, the exhortation-as-blessing always is: Keep living. And the child learns, you can determine to live. 

As M and I walked down to her school, that is what I tried to tell her. 

Then I went to the park, a book in my hand. And I sat on a bench and watched a pin oak leaf spiral its way down in the light breeze. The mellow sun lit a gentle fire in the auburn tupelo and I feasted my eyes on it. I watched a sparrow dip its feathers in a puddle, shake them, dip them again, the wet flutter of its wings informing me of its joy. I watched a black poodle pup sit on its haunches as a woman instructed him. She arced a red ball in the air, his body shivered with excitement, but he had to wait until her command: Go! Then he shot like an arrow. 

There is joy in the world, abundant joy and beauty in small things, and I wanted to feast my senses on them to rid my body of its gloom.

The book I am reading is ‘Auschwitz and After’. A holocaust memoir by a French resistance fighter called Charlotte Delbo who survived Auschwitz but lived with it all her life. The book is assigned reading for a course I am taking: Representing Trauma in Literature. When I started college this Fall and chose this course, I returned from my first class and told hubby that there were only three men out of a total class size of 25. 

He laughingly remarked: Why do you women have such trauma in your lives?

Today, November 9, 2016, the world has awoken or is going to bed with the knowledge that a man accused of sexual assault by a dozen or more women has been elected President of the world’s foremost democracy. Do we need any more evidence that the world is principally skewed against one-half of its population? That we live in a world that is sexist and openly demeaning of women’s quest to be treated as equal citizens? That a superbly qualified woman with a 30-year record of public service will be sidelined for a bullying blustering blob of orange? 

That trauma - in one form or another - is a woman’s legacy?

And yet, there will be November 10, and 11 and the days will unfold in the unceasing march of time. What is going to happen?  The Bhagavad Gita says that at each juncture in life we have a choice. From that choice follow consequences. The doing of one’s duty is the path of the karma yogi. The reward of one’s life doesn’t hang like a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. The living of a good life is itself life’s reward. 

So, this is what’s going to happen. We are going to Keep Living, and Keep Being Tigers, and Keep Raising Tiger Cubs. And the consequences of our karma will right the world, one  day at a time, one choice at a time.

Namaste

Two auburn oak leaves crisscrossed at the stems, a steaming mug ensconced within - the cheery sticker on the green-coloured door announced Fall. After dropping Mehar at school, and brisk-walk-alternating-with-jog in Central Park later, I had taken to stopping by Starbucks for coffee. Twin odors of baking and coffee were what I associated with America, from when I had first arrived on a consulting assignment. I joined the line of caffeine seekers and scrolled down my Twitter feed. Oonagh’s tweet - Okay universe, let’s do it one more time. #NewDay - made me smile.

Pumpkin spice latte. 

Mmm… that sounded delicious. I looked up. A high school girl - she could afford the calories. 

With cream, yes. 

Bingo. 

When my turn arrived, I asked for a tall pike and waited.

"You speak such good English!" 

The woman behind me in the line seemed genuinely appreciative. So I decided to return the compliment. "As do you."

The woman was surprised. "But- - of course, I live here." Emphasis on "live".

She was stocky, blonde, blue-eyed, with a washed-out complexion that hinted at Teutonic origin. In my track pants, I was not making any fashion statement. I had been mistaken for Latina before, grocery boys at Fairway hailing me with "Hola"; blinkered Japanese tourists chasing deals in Century 21 had taken my brown skin for a store helper’s. But I had also figured that in Upper West Side one could get around anywhere with their business - ferrying children, pushing strollers, buying groceries - in sweats and none batted an eye. I made myself taller and smiled. I was prepared to enjoy this conversation. "As do I."

A quiver of consternation across the woman’s forehead as she attempted to navigate the conversation without appearing intrusive while being exactly that. "I meant I was born here. I’m a native."

One out of three New Yorkers was immigrant, which was indeed reflected in the spectrum of faces and languages I saw and heard daily. So the woman was clearly not from the city.

"You are a New Yorker?" I asked as she waited for the tall Pike to arrive.

"No, I’m visiting."

A Midwesterner, likely. I had encountered that particular American variant: polite, white, quarantined from the salad bowls of West and East coast cities."As am I."

The woman seemed to relax visibly. Her smile returned. “That's what I meant. You look," she searched for a word, shrugged, "exotic."

I tilted my chin, an imperious shorthand for "I see". 

"How long will you be here?" 

Perhaps the Midwesterner in New York assumed every non-white was a tourist. "Oh, I don’t know, a few years."

"Years?"

"Un-hunh."

The server arrived with my coffee. I scrolled to the Starbucks app on my iPhone and flashed it at the reader. Taking my coffee, I smiled at the woman and proceeded to the counter for Half and Half. As I stirred in the creamer, I noticed the gentleman, pants darned at various spots and the same frayed check shirt, in his spot by the tall window, nursing his coffee and reading a book. On occasions, I would bring my laptop along for change of writing location. I had observed him for several weeks now. He seemed to come daily, and spent hours with one coffee. Private school kids, posh Mamas, corporate executives, handymen, NYPD cops, elderly retirees - I had seen them all in that Starbucks store, a microcosm of the variegated city. 

As I headed to the door, the woman caught up with me, a grande cup in her hand.

"If you don’t mind my asking," she said, as if the conversation was ongoing, "where did you move from?"

"Hong Kong," I said.

"Oh! I thought you looked Indian." 

The woman was dismayed with the disordering of her mental picture. And I was getting tired of the inquisition. "Yourself?" I asked.

"From North Dakota."

"Then you must speak Dakota."

"Excuse me?"

Just that week Mehar was working on a lesson on Native Americans in the US. Browsing through her seventh grade social studies book, I was intrigued to learn the connection between the Native American tribe Sioux and Dakota, a linguistic sub group, which in turn gave the state its name. To me, Dakota meant Fargo, that atmospheric film with its pregnant police chief protagonist, surely a first. "You said you were native, so I assumed."

The woman stiffened visibly. "I meant native English speaker."

"Sure." I wagged my head. "And did you know India has twice the number of English speakers as England itself? Have a good day!" A wave, and I strode off. 

Seriously!

Of course, I spoke English. I also spoke Punjabi, Hindi, some Urdu and Kannada, and part-comprehended Gujarati and Bengali. And that tiresome Midwesterner? Not even a smidgen of Spanish, I was certain. Despite the fact that there were more Spanish speakers in the US than in Spain. 

A storm of tweets rose in my mind as I planned to unleash them, Trump style.

English not a foreign language for Indians who'd made it their own & given it a generous dousing in garam masala #NothingNativeAboutEnglish

Next time you go to the gym, lounge in your pajamas as you watch a re-run of Avatar, shampoo your hair, remember #NothingNativeAboutEnglish

Next time you wear those Khakis, fancy yourself a tech guru, or a media mogul, remember #NothingNativeAboutEnglish

All those words, and more, we Indians lent to the English language. Remember #NothingNativeAboutEnglish

English became the world’s language coz it borrowed from wherever it went: Arabic Chinese Italian Polish Persian #NothingNativeAboutEnglish

The French have a council that is official authority on French. The English created no borders for their language #NothingNativeAboutEnglish

English embraced others & absorbed from them. Its mantra for success? Stay open, stay flexible, stay alive #NothingNativeAboutEnglish

Ah! Feeling like I could out-Trump Trump even, I swiped my phone and tapped the blue bird, all set. Ahead, to my right, a door swung open and a man made to exit. Somebody hailed him from inside and he hovered in the doorway, neck craned back. Behind him, I sighted a row of people in sweats, arms extended skywards, necks retracted, before they straightened, lowered the arms and folded them in front of their chests. The group was in sync with a tutor who faced them, lithe and graceful as she bowed her head and said something. In unison, the class sang. 

Nahm - as - tay!

I glanced at the board atop the shop front: Upper West Side Wellness Through Yoga

The phone had gone to sleep mode, my right thumb hovering over the screen. I pocketed it, took a long sip of the pike, and smiled. 

Twitter aside, there were other ways to win the world.

Namaste.

© Manreet Sodhi Someshwar