The Garden of Solitude by Siddhartha Gigoo - An Extract

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Book:                The Garden Of Solitude
Author:              Siddhartha Gigoo
ISBN:               978-81-291-1718-2
Binding:            Paperback
Publisher:          Rupa & Co.
Pages:              260
Language:         English
Price:                195

‘Life teaches us that there is beauty in ugliness,’ Sridar said. 

Then Pamposh said something that Sridar was not prepared for. 

‘Every day I lead the life of a centipede. I crawl. I lick. I hide. I sting. I wake up to the fumes of kerosene in the morning and the sting of speeding ants, feeding ravenously on the sugar spilled on the floor of the tent. It feels as if I have never had a morsel of rice for ages. I wake up hungry and go to bed hungry. I lead the life of a centipede, I crawl. All around the camp, there is stench of human excrement and waste. People wake up in the morning, hungry and muddled. The awakenings are pallid. The water in the water tanker smells foul, and children lie whole day in their own vomit. The quivering smile on my mother’s face is false. I want to peel off that false smile from her face, so that she is beautiful once again. Father spends most of the time playing cards with the other migrants near the highway tea shop. I am a mute spectator to the horrors of the life inside my tent. The air inside is squalid. My grandfather barely speaks. He lost his voice while leaving the village. A young man had shown him a gun as he was returning from a butcher’s shop. He still thinks that the young man is hiding around a corner, with a gun, waiting to scare him. He stopped talking after we crossed the Banihal tunnel. I saw him look sadly at the fading mountains for long, till they disappeared completely, one by one, into his frozen dreams. And he swallowed his fright. Today I cannot hear what he says. His words do not come out of his mouth. When we are asleep, we cannot even stretch our arms and legs. There are no hangers to hang our clothes on. No cupboards to keep our personal belongings in. We have no portraits of our gods and goddesses. No pictures of our ancestors. During the day, we hide from the blazing sun. At night we live from one insect bite to another. Centipedes, millipedes and spiders are our companions. We must learn how to live with them.  

‘My grandmother does not recognise the insects. She confuses a lizard for a plastic toy paralysed on the wall. Her gaze is fixed at the crucified lizard. For hours and hours, she just gazes endlessly into a dark nothingness! It is a vacant gaze into a world of oblivion and amnesia. Petrified with a sense of desolation, she does not even feel the presence of hundreds of mosquitoes circling her head constantly, while she stares into blank space. I do not know if she is hungry or thirsty. When asleep, she resembles a corpse. She perspires. I wake up to feel her pulse and feel happy that she is still breathing. She would be happy in her death, I pray. My mother and sister wash their clothes and the utensils in a puddle of water outside our tent. They line up for hours in the morning to use the makeshift toilet made of torn shreds of canvas, pieces of cardboard and tin. They await their turn at the filthy and stinking toilets while the loitering men watch the women wait to relieve themselves. Many women prefer to go to the stinking latrines at midnight, away from the stare of men. Even the mosquitoes keep away from the foul smelling latrines. Sometimes, I hear women shriek, fall silent and then cry in solace behind the filthy tank. The nights bring squalor, pallor and heat. We live in fear of the mangled and naked electric wires, crisscrossed around wooden poles that hold the canvas of the tent together. 

‘There is a large rash on my grandfather’s leg, a rash perhaps from the bite of a millipede. The rash has swollen and become a sore now. It oozes puss and resembles a horrifying wound. He scratches the wound with a knife. The festering wound will never heal. I want to burn the wound. The old man looks at my sister change clothes at bedtime. She puts out the light. There are no curtains to hide behind. She sleeps in snatches, sandwiched like an insect between her mother and her grandmother. She dreams nervy dreams of crawling insects in the sun and the shade. The old man wants to touch her clothes hanging from the hook. He smells the clothes of his own granddaughter. And he relishes their putrid smell. We lick the hours that weigh heavy on our half-asleep existence, and tread laboriously into an endless strain of nightmares. The earthen pot in the tent is empty. A discarded plastic bottle used for the toilet contains a few drops of water. I grab it and empty the drops into my parched mouth. My tongue is dry. It can fall off anytime. My grandmother shrieks when she sees the sun. She dreads stepping out of the tent for fear of fainting in the sun. She soils her clothes every day. She can’t even use the bedpan which my mother got for her. From morning to evening she clings to the old box, which she brought along. It sticks inseparably to her chest. I wonder if there are any ornaments or valuables left in it. 

‘Never before have I felt the desire to unknow myself and others. The smell . . . the touch . . . . the breath . . . the sigh! 

‘In an adjacent tent a family of five torture an old man, their foster-grandfather, who lost his mental balance upon seeing his house fade away in a hazy distance. The old man is a burden for his son and daughter-in-law. Another mouth to feed, they feel! He moans at night constantly, and intermittently wakes up to a cold shiver - a nightmare. His son and daughter-in-law taunt him for their amusement. They whisper in his ears that his mother was dead and that she was beaten mercilessly to death. The old man groans and pleads them not to utter the atrocities. Every evening, the torment continues. The maddening laughter of the men ricochets from the tattered canvas tent. Every night the old man cries. He gapes at his son and daughter-in-law and gives them his blessings. 

‘Darkness! Darkness! 

‘I wonder what is moral and what is immoral.’

Sridar stopped breathing for a while as Pamposh described his experience and condition. He picked up Pamposh’s pack of cheap cigarettes. For the first time, he lit a cigarette and took a puff. The smoke danced its way into the air and disappeared in the whirl of the ceiling fan. 

That day Sridar wrote his thoughts in his journal. He wrote about Pamposh and the horrid mine of his consciousness. 

‘What would it be like to be Pamposh?’ Sridar mused. He remembered the last words Pamposh had told him the previous day. ‘I long for a child’s laughter,’ Pamposh had whispered in Sridar’s ear.

Pamposh never spoke of his days in Kashmir. Sridar tried to strike such conversations with him to get to know about Pamposh’s childhood days in his village in Kashmir. Pamposh’s family came from a village in Kashmir. Some students in the camp told Sridar that Pamposh’s family owned an orchard in Kashmir and grew pomegranates, cherries and walnuts. Pamposh’s childhood may have been full of pranks, Sridar thought. Someone mentioned that Pamposh’s family was the only Pandit family in their village, and that they had to run away from their home in the most horrifying of circumstances. No one was able to narrate what had happened. Pamposh had lost one home and he was not in search of another. 

The migrants sat all day long on a rocky mound and discussed the affairs of their community. Days were spent sitting and talking about whatever came to their minds; their plight and their sordid condition. Waiting kept them busy. For many it was a lacerating wait. They had not yet realised that this waiting was not to end. They did not know what they were waiting for. This waiting was not for returning to their homes, not for peace in the Valley, but for a new day to dawn and the new evening to descend. They prayed for a day without a sunstroke and a night without a snakebite.

Pamposh met Sridar every day after school near an anthill. He wished to demolish the anthill with a spade and to render the snakes homeless, so that no snakebites would take place in the camp. 

There was only one question to be asked during the funeral processions that left the camp every day. 

‘Snakebite or sunstroke?’

In the coming days Sridar and Pamposh saw many camp dwellers line up, one by one, in the crematorium. Between them breathed words bereft of any meaning! Words! Silence! .....................................

...................................

The author Siddhartha Gigoo can be reached at siddhartha.gigoo@tcs.com

Eid Gift

Omar Abdullah keeps coming to Delhi every now and then and the reasons are not hard to find.With total anarchy in Kashmir he seeks his little spa in Delhi,eases himself off by transfering his worries to whoever cares to carry the cross of Omar's blunders.

But yesterday was different.

For once he had an agenda.He was here,we are told, to push for removal of AFSPA or as the bleeding hearts would say,to make it more humane.Humane being the key word here.Now imagine here is a country beset with insurgency and here is an army which is fighting the likes of Lashkar and Jaish not to mention Hizbul and others and is expected to be "humane".It reminds me of Mark Antony's famous lines(from Shakespare's Julius Ceaser) '"we are so meek and gentle with these butchers".They who trade in death and their sympathesizers seek a humane face of the enemy!

It makes for an interesting reading as to how our neighbours in the subcontinent are handling their insurgencies.The Srilankan army simply bulldozed the LTTE into submission without a care in the world about collateral or any damages whatsoever.The country that is so worried about India's human right excesses in Kashmir uses air power,artillery,infantry and navy wherever needed to quell its insurgencies and after doing all this have the gall to lecture us on our human rights.

The argument for removal of AFSPA is that things have improved in Kashmir and hence it is no longer needed.Well have they?

The Army has made it clear time and again they do not wish to enagage themselves in counter insurgency operations yet it is being extensively used to do so.Now let us understand what it means to take off AFSPA and ask army to enagage in counter insurgency operations.They will have to seek a warrant from local police everytime before they have to raid a hideout or act on a tip off.What a dumbhead one has to be to believe that the terrorists meanwhile would munch biryani and wait at the "appointed spot" till the time army gets a search warrant.

The army's record in counter insurgency has been close to impeccable.It has instituted enquires and initiated action against its own people found to be guilty of any form of human rights violations.A concerted and orchestrated campaign has been unleashed by the separatists and the bleeding hearts to tarnish the image of the army.The NHRC and other institutions of the State have found that less then 0.02% of the complaints of human right violations carried any weight and the rest have simply been unsubstainted and baseless.Now this new demand of setting up "greviance cells" would simply mean that more unsubstantiated complaints would be lodged and then used by the bleeding hearts and some sections of the media to simply cast more aspersions on an institution that makes us all proud.

While we understand that the Manmohan Singh government wants to be seen as doing "something" to "assuage" the feelings of the "alienated" Kashmiri Muslims but pray what an Eid gift would it be to tie the arms of your armed forces behind their backs and make them sitting ducks so that the "alienated" population armed with stones,bullets and Islamic venom could tear them to shreds and we here in Delhi would await for the bleeding hearts to give us character certificates for good human rights record.

Kashmiri Pandits expose separatist propaganda - catch Aditya Raj Kaul and Radhika Koul on Face the Nation, CNN-IBN

Kashmiris protest against Separatists Propaganda in New Delhi

Under Separatists Threatning, Kashmiri Pandits forced to leave Kashmir valley

Media Frenzy

I have a question first up.Have more Kashmiris(Kashmiri Muslims-now the media uses Kashmiris for them so liberally that even people like are me are brainwashed into thinking that the only Kashmiris who exist are the Muslims,forgetting that I am not) been killed in the last one month or is it less than the average number of people killed in Kashmir.The separtists keep shouting that more than 1 lac(100000) people have lost their lives in Kashmir in the last 20 years.Now if I believe them as Barkhas and Sagarikas do then every year there are 5000 people killed in Kashmir which means approx 13 per day.Now since July11,the total number of people killed is only 50.Isnt it less than what the figure ordinarliy should be?Am I being a death monger or am I belittling the loss of human life?Quite on the contrary,I am only calling the separtist bluff and the media naivette or willfull suspension of dibelief whichever suits you better.

We are bombaried these days with columns in newspapers and TV programmes who lecture us on how the Indian State has failed in Kashmir.Well it has.And how should understand the anger of the stone pelters(read roiters).We are consistently told that these people need to be listened to and they be given emplyoment while the Islamic Don Syed Ali Shah says quite the contrary.He says we are not fighting for better civic facilities or jobs.He is unequivocal in saying that we want Independence and not good governance.Yet column after column,one programme after another makes this nation feel guilty of "genocide" of "innocent Kashmiris".Now can anyone please tell these self appointed moral guardians of our "collective conscience" to please listen to Geelani and hear the speeches of Hafiz Saeed that mosques in Kashmir are loudly playing these days.

Fathom this..a young man or a woman or even a kid who throws petrol bombs or stones,burns public property,tears the unfirom of a policeman or simply lynches him.Does it give any sane man but the sleeveless siren any idea of this "innocent victim".Yet for the Indian media(except for one odd man out) such a person symbolises the innocence and purity of thought (of the Islamic kind may I ask?).What is the state supposed to do with a person whose intenet is reflected in the way he appears on the street.Is it the time to hear his greviances-real,imagined or perceieved.What about the Policeman whose eye was taken out by such an innocent group of people?Doesnt he have a family or are his human rights less legitimate than those of the mobsters who are the Indian Media's idea of an "innocent Kashmiri".

True human life is pious and shouldnt be lost and we keep repeating here,that no cause is worth one human life but doesnt the onus lie on both sides.Isnt it for the parents of these "innoncent Kashmiris" to tell their young ones that there are other more civil modes of protest available than the Islamic mode of protest.What does the Indian Media want?Should the CRPF and the local Police Garland the people who hit them with an intention to lynch them,should they cook mincemeat for the "innocent Kashmiris" who attack them?

And now all this bullshit about the "children of conflict" which a senior journo keeps going back to.My daughter is 5 and goes to a local school in Delhi.A month back me and my wife were asked to come to the school to discuss about my child.I was taken aback by the teacher told me.She said, my daughter needs a psychatirst because she belives that her father's house was burnt and one day they will go back to some land which she hasnt even seen.The teacher told me that my daughter is imagining things and should be shown to a child psychologist.Is she a child of the conflict too or just because she is a Hindu none of it sticks to her or just because Barkha looks the other way.