Virginia Mahi

[Published in Dreadlocks Vol 5, 2008. School of Language, Arts and Media: University of the South Pacific.]

Bortee mama (i) and Xorutee mama were the twins and younger than Virginia mahi (ii). Baganor koka-aita (iii) did not name their daughter Virginia. The Christian midwife did. The midwife was a tea-tribal woman who lived in the labour lines and picked tea leaves like all other labour women. Her name was Rojina. Midwifery was Rojina’s “side business” and they said there was no one who knew more about bringing babies into the world than she did. Even Bijon Roy Compounder who was the only medic in the tea estate, had had to take her help in many complicacies.

Anyway, Rojina brought Virginia mahi into the world and predicted that she would grow up to be a very beautiful woman. “Like the virgin Mary”, she said and Virginia she named the baby.

Baganor aita always had a tough time with babies. Had Rojina not been there, everybody says, neither aita nor Virginia mahi would have made it. As it happened, Virginia mahi came into the world safe and healthy and as Rojina had predicted, she grew up to be quite a beauty.

Baganor aita however, was not very healthy after Virginia mahi’s birth. She had always been a frail woman and when a few years later, Xorutee and Bortee mama were to be born, everybody thought she would die. But again Rojina took charge of things and the twins were born and Baganor aita did not die. But then she never really recovered either. She continued to be weak and fell ill so often that nobody was really sad when she died. “It’s a mercy on her,” they said. But I suppose it was a mercy on the entire family, especially on Virginia mahi who had always had to look after her mother instead of her mother looking after her. Our own aita said that in their family the roles of mother and daughter were quite reversed.

When Baganor aita died, koka who loved her very much took a transfer and went off to work in a tea company in Upper Assam. Virginia mahi and the twins stayed back and koka said, “My Virgie is such a capable and responsible girl, she can look after her brothers while I’m away.”

So Virginia mahi looked after her brothers, and when Baganor koka came home on his monthly visits, she looked after him as well.

Only, in the process, she forgot to look after herself. So one month when Baganor koka came home, he realized Virginia mahi was pregnant. And she was only sixteen. Baganor koka felt he could not carry the burden of the shame on his own and he dragged Virginia mahi to our koka-aita’s house and handed her over to our aita. Aita sent for Rojina who also knew more than others about not bringing babies into the world.

After a month, Virginia mahi went back to her own home and Baganor koka had also come back home for good. And when we went visiting next, it was like old times again. Baganor koka gave us rides on his bicycle through the tea garden. He didn’t mind when we put our hands into the pockets of his shorts looking for lozenges. He said he was younger than our koka and so he wore shorts instead of dhutis (iv) like our koka wore. We did not believe him of course, because our koka looked so much younger and was so much more active even though he wore dhutis.

Then Virginia mahi gave us orange cream biscuits, and when we pestered her she also made malpuas (v) for us. Then she sat down with us and told us stories.

Bortee mama was always studying but he wouldn’t mind taking some time off to ask us about our studies. Xorutee mama was hardly ever there. We always went hoping he would be though, because when he was there, he would teach us how to climb trees, pluck fruits for us, and tell us about the leopard he and his friends saw among the tea plants at night when they went there for a picnic. At this, Baganor koka would tell him to shut up and not frighten us kids and Xorutee mama would shut up and walk into his room and not come out for the rest of the time that we were there. That is why we never wanted Baganor koka and Xorutee mama to be home at the same time. They seemed to be fighting all the time.

One day we heard Xorutee mama had left home after a fight with Baganor koka. They tried to trace him but he was nowhere to be found. Our visits to Virginia mahi stopped. Our aita said we were not to trouble her and Baganor koka as they were very sad. We thought we could cheer them up if we went but aita still wouldn’t let us go. Instead, we were sent back home to Guwahati.

Guwahati was a different place altogether with different people and different sets of growing-up problems. And after a while, we quite forgot about Virginia mahi and Xorutee and Bortee mama and Baganor koka.

Then suddenly one day, Virginia mahi turned up at our place in Guwahati. There was a girl with her whom we had never seen before. Mahi said she was Xorutee mama’s wife and could she stay with us for a couple of days till she could catch her train back to Calcutta?

‘Calcutta?’ my ma asked. Yes, Xorutee mama’s wife was from Calcutta. A year after he had left home, Xorutee mama had sent word that he was in Calcutta and doing well. He would not be coming back home again. But he had to come back four days ago to attend Bortee mama’s shraddha (vi).

After we had left Kopati, Bortee mama had joined the xangathan (vii). He had given up his studies to become a revolutionary. And last week, he had been picked up by the army. They had beaten him to death. Virginia mahi cried when she told us she had gone to collect the body but could not make out at first which one was Bortee mama’s. When they had picked up his body to place it on the pyre, his head had rolled back at his neck – there was not a single bone intact in his body.

Baganor koka had taken to bed as soon as he heard of Bortee mama’s death. And when Xorutee mama had come home, he had been taken to the army camp too for questioning. He had not come back since and Virginia mahi had decided it would be best for his wife to go back to Calcutta and wait for news there.

‘And what about you, Virgie?’ my ma asked.

‘I am going back home to look after deuta (viii),’ she said, and left.

***

(i) Mama – maternal uncle.
(ii) Mahi – maternal aunt.
(iii) Koka – grandfather; aita – grandmother; bagan – garden (here, refers to tea garden/estate), baganor – of, or from, the bagan.
(iv) Dhuti - men’s lower garment; a white piece of cloth tied around the waist.
(v) Malpua - kind of fried, sweet flour cakes.
(vi) Shraddha - Hindu funeral ceremony.
(vii) Xangathan - literally, organization. It is a common Assamese euphemism for the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA), the most prominent separatist insurgent outfit of Assam.
(viii) Deuta - father.

Dhodar Ali, Or The End Of Ennui

[Publsihed in Pratilipi, March 2009.]

[Read some other poems: Tejimolā Forever; Mother Goddess Kamakhya; Manufacturing Memories; For Nilikesh da, Shot Dead; End of Ennui; From Exile (1); After This Sky; Tryst; Would I Be A Poet Still; elegaic; A History of Violence]

Roll over, roll back.
Did you hear the story of these two Assamese bums?
Their house was on fire.
They were too lazy to get out of bed and run.
The flames scorched one’s back.
Pi pu, he said; not in full pithi purise.
The other wanted to sleep on. Xi xu, he said.
Xipithidi xu.
Roll over on the other side.
Yes, roll over and go back to sleep.
Good idea. That’s what I shall also do.

Outside, the Sardar is watering his plants.
The other morning he scared me
Half to death with his howls.
When I went out to see
Who was strangling him, he said
He was chasing the monkeys away.
(The monkeys come from the ridge nearby
They uproot his plants and break his flower pots.
They are his mortal enemies.)
Today he is quiet. Thank god. I can laze in peace.

Dhishiau, Dhishiau.
He he he boss. Police ne tyre mein goli mar di.
Ei chinta mat kar la mobile de.
Hello, JK tyres dial-a-tyre service…

The FM had kept me drifting
In and out of sleep the whole night.
Snatches of Beethoven, Roxette and Udit Narayan
In between muddled dreams of sex
With the unlikeliest persons
And of being back in school.
And now these gun shots.
Somebody switch off the radio.
The radio is the opium of the people.
Was it Papa Hemingway who wrote that?
(You know of course
He did not do half the things he boasted of.
So what the eff? Nobody ever wrote like him.
The existentialist outsider. Read Colin Wilson.)

Today is Friday.
No not quoting Hemingway again.
It IS Friday today.
What difference does it make?
I could sleep through the weekend.
I could sleep through all weekdays.
Nothing happens. Nobody comes. Nobody goes.
This time it is Beckett…

True nobody goes. I can’t go. Anywhere.
Like the lizard on the wall.
Stuck to these four walls.
No, these walls do not close in on me
Like they do in other people’s writings.
It would be a change if they did.
Something different. But they don’t.
They just stand where they are,
Boobs, dicks and all.
There’s Gaugin’s Breasts and Red Flowers.
(Do all Tahitian women have such well-formed breasts?
Why couldn’t I have such nice breasts?
They are called boobs, Ed!
Julia Roberts as Erin Brockovich…
She’s got a nice pair I suppose.)
And then there’s David’s dick.
Michelangelo was stingy with his brush strokes.
David’s dick is too short.

But the Sardar’s hair is too long.
He washes his hair on Sundays.
Then you can see his flowing mane.
On other days, it is hidden under his turban.
He’s got turbans of all color – red, blue, black, brown…
The brown bald patch at the back of his head
Can be seen on Sundays
When he leaves his hair loose.
It looks like somebody cleared
A portion of the forest to pitch a tent.
Ever seen a hill in outline?
Looks like a bald pate sprouting new hair.

There are no decent hills in Delhi.
There were so many hills back home, in Assam.
Did you know that hills are not just about height?
I’m staying one flight down from the moon, Zax says.
Maybe all barsatis are that close to the moon.
But living in a leaking barsati is not the same
As living on a hill. We used to live on Chintachal hill.
That was a long time ago. In my dreams,
I still think we are living on the hill.
But we moved to the bottom
Of another hill some time ago.
This bottom doesn’t show in my dreams.
Others do. Dream bottoms. Bottom of the dream.
How do you get to the bottom of a dream?
Freud didn’t know all.

Last night between Saira’s voice on FM
And maili chadar orh ke kaise,
I dreamt I was ow kuwori. The princess inside a fruit.
Somebody was removing the layers from the ow tenga.
I wanted to see who it was.
But the Sardar rang the bell and woke me up.
I woke up feeling hungry.
I’ve skipped two meals in a row.
This morning’s breakfast will be the third.
My ulcers will start complaining,
My reflux esophagitis will flare up again
And I will throw up some more blood.
But I can avert that with an omeprazol.
I shall have one soon.

Ghadi detergent cake ki dhulai sajana…

Do they have to sing about cakes now?
So long as you don’t remember
You have to eat, you’re ok.
I have to switch off the radio.
Even the lazy Assamese bums built a road.
That is the Dhodar Ali.
I have to build my own.
I also have to xi xu.
I will in a moment….
***

Notes:
Dhodar Ali: legend has it that the Ahom king of Assam mobilized the dhod or sluggards of the kingdom to build a road which has been known as the Dhodar Ali ever since
barsati: Hindi for ‘rooftop apartment’
maili chadar orh ke kaise: a line from a bhajan or Hindu devotional song
ow kuwori: from a popular Assamese folktale

elegaic

[Published in Tonight: An Anthology of World Love Poetry. South Africa: The Poets Printery, 2008.]

[Read some other poems: Tejimolā Forever; Mother Goddess Kamakhya; Manufacturing Memories; For Nilikesh da, Shot Dead; End of Ennui; From Exile (1); After This Sky; Tryst; Would I Be A Poet Still; elegaic; A History of Violence]

in our skies
an emasculated sun
borrows silver light
from leaden birds
while a forgotten wound
is reopened by
a concrete phallus
and it rains green mucous
on the earth
where a grey peacock
spreads its fan
to keep the sun
from our eyes

we cry but our cries cannot
wash away the sky's venom

we laugh and our laughter drowns
the cries of the peacock

After This Sky

[Published in Tonight: An Anthology of World Love Poetry. South Africa: The Poets Printery, 2008.]

[Read some other poems: Tejimolā Forever; Mother Goddess Kamakhya; Manufacturing Memories; For Nilikesh da, Shot Dead; End of Ennui; From Exile (1); After This Sky; Tryst; Would I Be A Poet Still; elegaic; A History of Violence]

You cannot sow seeds
in a parched sky
and hope they will germinate.

Just as you cannot
drive along cloudy streets
and hope they will tell you
which way to go.

You have seen naked trees
but you want to believe
you need not cry.

Instead you dream
and your dreams
hold up mirrors of sand
for you.

So what do you do
but make love
under a street lamp
while a lunatic moon
on the loose
peeks in through
the frosted panes
of your car window?

And cry
for bleary streets
for denuded trees
for unwilling dreams

for a jack-in-the-box love
that jumps to life
or fades away
while you join
a voyeuristic street lamp
in watching yourself make love?

For no doubt you know
there’s nowhere to go
after this sky.
***

Tryst

[Published in The Other Voices International Project, Volume 34, 2008]

[Read some other poems: Tejimolā Forever; Mother Goddess Kamakhya; Manufacturing Memories; For Nilikesh da, Shot Dead; End of Ennui; From Exile (1); After This Sky; Tryst; Would I Be A Poet Still; elegaic; A History of Violence]

When we met
On the afternoon sands
The Dibong was on fire
And I, my Kaneng,
Was on fire too.

When you let fall
Your ribi-gacheng
At my feet,
I was scalded.

I reached out
For coolness in the shadow
Of your breasts
And I was scorched.

You did nothing to help.
***

[Notes: Dibong: A river in Assam; Kaneng: Beloved, in the Mising language of Assam; Ribi-gacheng: A Mising woman’s clothing.]

From Exile (1)

[Published in Pratilipi, March 2009]

[Read some other poems: Tejimolā Forever; Mother Goddess Kamakhya; Manufacturing Memories; For Nilikesh da, Shot Dead; End of Ennui; From Exile (1); After This Sky; Tryst; Would I Be A Poet Still; elegaic; A History of Violence]

Each day is another lifetime
In purgatory.
Immediately as I step out,
I am drowned in a sea of eyes,
Hands seize me,
Breaths scorch me.

Somehow I swim across,
Somehow, I’ve learnt to.

On the other shore,
I am shorn of my identity.
I stand half naked.
They ask me:
‘You eat human flesh, don’t you?’
Nowadays I do not protest
Quietly, I pay the price of being
What they are not.

As I swim back across
Fighting monsters, gasping for breath
I miss life.
I search for an anodyne,
Find oblivion.

But even as I do, I remember,
Tomorrow is yet another lifetime
In purgatory.

The exile begins to seem pointless.

***

A History of Violence

[Published in Pratilipi, March 2009]

[Read some other poems: Tejimolā Forever; Mother Goddess Kamakhya; Manufacturing Memories; For Nilikesh da, Shot Dead; End of Ennui; From Exile (1); After This Sky; Tryst; Would I Be A Poet Still; elegaic; A History of Violence]

A river flowed here
When we reached the valley
Carrying our gods
On the strains of our songs.
Some gods were more enterprising:
Khunlung and Khunlai climbed down on their own
From heaven on a golden ladder)

Our gods were good gods, free gods
They mixed well, changed names, traded identities
Like the river, they ebbed and flowed
Sometimes we too ebbed and flowed, together
On the banks of our river, singing
Luitare pani jabi o boi…
But we were only human
Soon we wanted to be our own gods.

We called the river Red
Because that was our favored color
And we thought the favorite of our gods
Who drank the red blood we offered
And read patterns in sacrificial blood.
We drowned our gods in the red river
Where we drained the blood from our souls
And thought: Now this is how we pray.

The deafening noise of our prayers
Could not be drowned
By the river Red which flowed on
Blood clotting in its heart
Skeletal remains of our sacrifices
Clogging its veins
Till one day, there was a river no more
And our gods died a violent death.
***
Notes:
Luitare pani jabi o boi…: Literally, “Waters of the Luit, keep flowing…” A line from a song by Jyotiprasad Agarwala.

The Question of 'Assamese' Identity...

Been pondering on this question for a while. An article published in Dainik Asom on 26 December 2004:

[Also read Identity in Exile, Burnt Flesh and Xewali Flowers, Baptism by Beer...]

Terror and Urban Apathy

(For those who could not read the earlier, more emotive Axamiya version: Burnt Flesh and Xewali Flowers)

[Published Assam Tribune, 21 January 2009]

After the devastating serial blasts in Assam, on October 30, – six of which were in the capital Guwahati – everybody in the media and elsewhere was talking about how insurgency there has degenerated into urban terrorism. What very few people were talking about is that Guwahati has experienced such terror before, many times and with similar shocking impact. It is of course true these most recent blasts were of a higher magnitude and much better coordinated than any other that the entire North East with its long history of conflict and violence has ever seen. What is also true, however, is that it is definitely not the first instance of big or serial blasts in the city, nor of multiple casualties and severe damage as was being projected by most media with clichés like terror getting a new face there.

The United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) which is one of the groups under suspicion for the October 30 blasts, has on earlier instances also been accused of involvement in triggering powerful explosions in Guwahati and killing many. In 2004 alone, for instance, the group targeted Guwahati five times, one of which included a series of blasts in one upper and four lower Assam districts, besides two in Guwahati. Six people were killed and about 80 injured. But Guwahati has not been targeted by the ULFA alone. No one who has followed the conflict scenario in Assam can forget the 1992 blast in the busy Paltan Bazar area of the city where at least 43 persons were killed and nearly 150 injured. An ex-‘insurgent’ who is currently the chief of the Bodoland Territorial Council (BTC), Hagrama Mahilary, was widely suspected to be behind this blast. Today, Mahilary’s party, the Bodoland Peoples Front (BPF), is part of the ruling coalition in Assam, sharing power with the Congress-led government.

So if any new face was given to terror at all, it was not done on October 30, 2008, nor by the perpetrators of terror alone who have only done what they have been doing for a long time now ever since they traded away their ideologies in exchange for shelter and security. On the contrary, the painting of a new face for terror has been in process for a while now and at the helm of this process has been the state itself which condones such acts, often even legitimises them. Whether this legitimisation be in the form of political power sharing, or bestowing of financial largesse and an above-and-beyond-the-law status – as that provided to many Surrendered ULFA (or SULFA as they are popularly known) cadres – the fact is that nobody has been held accountable for perpetrating such heinous crimes against humanity. On the contrary, they have been rewarded and the powers that be have patted themselves on their backs for bringing ‘the youths gone astray’ back to the ‘mainstream’.

Meanwhile, what has been happening to the ‘mainstream' – whatever its definition? With such criminal elements being pushed back into its midst and woven into its fabric, the very nature of Guwahati society has changed forever. From a predominantly quiet middle class city holding dearly on to certain traditional values that defined it, it has transformed – in the course of much less than a decade – into a brash, garish, confrontative, ugly city that has internalised the discourses of death, destruction and violence to the extent that it has become inured, even apathetic.

Many ‘morning-after’ reports in the media relating to the bomb blasts talked – again in clichés – about people bravely coming out on the streets of Guwahati defying terror and fear, refusing to be cowed down, their spirits uncrushed. I saw these reports on national media, which usually relegate news of such events in the North East to the tickers at the bottom of the screens, or better still, ignores them: like the October 22 blast in Manipur where 15 people were killed and 24 injured. The October 30 Assam blasts however made it big, given their resemblance to the recent spate of bombings elsewhere in India and speculations about the suspected collaboration of Islamist militants. The day before, I had also seen raw unedited footage of the blast sites on TV, thanks to satellite technology. And everybody in Guwahati had seen them too. Earlier – before the North East had its first satellite television channel and insensitive unethical journalists thrust their microphones at burnt, bleeding and grievously injured blast victims and camerapersons blithely filmed charred bodies and mangled limbs and the channel aired them with a cursory ‘unedited footage’ note – the reality of suffering in and witnessing a bomb blast might not have been so palpable. And yet, on the evening of the blast when I spoke to my parents in Guwahati for the ninth time that day – my father had had a close call – my mother told me with horror that she could hear people bursting leftover Diwali crackers!

No news channel, national or otherwise, of course reported this because it has nothing to do with changing the faces of terror. And talking of urban apathy does not go well with the proclaimed political agenda of tackling terror and its perpetrators. So they call the proverbial rose by another name, one that smells sweeter. After all both are ways to come to terms with the blood and gore that defines city life in times of terror. Only, the way my city has learnt to live with the phenomenon seems as inhuman as the acts of terror themselves.

Politics and Art

[Published in Geometer Magazine, January 2009)

[Read some other poems: Tejimolā Forever; Mother Goddess Kamakhya; Manufacturing Memories; For Nilikesh da, Shot Dead; End of Ennui; From Exile (1); After This Sky; Tryst; Would I Be A Poet Still; elegaic; A History of Violence]

Would I be a poet still?

Your vocabulary is no longer mine.
My language you may not know.
But would you call me a poet still
If I did not write the words you spoke?

Would I be a poet still
If I wrote instead the cacophony
Of insurgent cross-fires
And false encounters, secret killings?
Will you consider it poetry
If it were splashed with mud from military boots
Mixed with the blood of revolutionaries and mercenaries
And political touts and merchants of ideology?

They were dreamers who thought poetry
Was about nation, revolution, freedom.
They were dreaming in their sleep
Their dreams died as they slept.

Poetry became a casualty of armed skirmishes.

***

Identity in Exile

[Published Indian Journal of Postcolonial Literatures No 11, Jul-Dec 2008.]

[Also see A Question of 'Assamese' Identity, Flesh and Xewali Flowers, Baptism by Beer...]

I grew up amidst an atmosphere of ultra-nationalism generated by the Assam Movement of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. And then, there was the romance of insurgency, the fire of idealism that inspired an entire generation of Assamese youth. That fire, though dimmed to a great extent, was still burning when I left home in 1996: ‘home’ has always been equated with Assam - and Northeast India as a whole - in my vocabulary. And that was my first time away from home, away from everything held fanatically dear.

I was eighteen then and romanticism at age eighteen is permissible. With juvenile simplicity I wrote in a poem how ‘after cradling me for nine months in her womb, my mother planted me – a tiny seed – in the soil of my birth’; very idealistically, I wrote of myself as the tree that grew towards ‘the sun and the blue’, till one day, ‘I touched the sky and gathered the blue’. I bent then to plant the sun in my soil and my siblings thereafter grew higher and higher, taller and taller, ‘till all said, “Look, they are the sun, the blue.”’

It has been a long time since I shed such messianic ambitions and unquestioning idealism. But at the time, I was very much steeped in these sentiments and did not see the irony of the fact that I had unintentionally symbolized Delhi as the sun and the sky of my poem. Delhi, after all, was the place I was grudgingly going to; for me, as the heart of mainland India it was a place where every person (or so I thought) would be hostile to me because I was Assamese.

I was wrong. They were not at all hostile. They were mostly curious. I was something exotic to them, coming as I did from the land of half naked tribals, perhaps even cannibals, and which was now the land of insurgency, of terrorism, of secessionism and all things decadent.

Do you have plains in Assam?
Haven’t you done your geography in school?
You have buses in Assam!
No, we travel by bullock carts, or by boats across the Brahmaputra.
But the Brahmaputra is in Bengal.
How did you ever reach college?

I did not look ‘Oriental’ – the politically correct term that had been devised in lieu of the derogatory sounding ‘chinky’. So I did not have to face some of the more incendiary questions. My friend from Mizoram was asked if she needed a passport to come to India. ‘I am Indian, f*** you’, she said in sheer exasperation. But who cares? Naga or Mizo, Assamese or Manipuri, it was all the same. If one came from beyond Bengal, one came from beyond India. Like this first year student who was ragged when we were doing our second year BA who thought that Nagaland was in Nepal.

The ‘Oriental’ looking among us were not ragged – Indians are always nice to foreigners. One year, the students from the Northeast volunteered to be ragged in the hostel ragging sessions – ‘we also want to feel a part of the community here’. And then they ask why we need separate students’ unions for the Northeast students when none of the other regions have such bodies. I wonder now if it would have served any purpose to tell them that we have very strong community ties in the Northeast, especially those among us who come from ‘tribal’ communities. Some communities even own land as a body, not as individuals.

And these communities may be patriarchal in many ways, but at least in the public space, women are not treated as sex toys. Imagine the rude shock then to find men masturbating over you in public buses! It is no romanticism certainly when I say that in my part of the world women are not burnt with their husbands, or by them. A Naga friend could not understand what the big deal was in being from the opposite sex – ‘we are brought up as different units of a community; we have our well defined functions in the community but we are not polarized by gender.’

My angst as a woman and Northeasterner come across in everything I wrote at the time. I wrote,

From exile

Each day is another lifetime in purgatory
As soon as I step out, I drown in a sea of eyes
Hands seize me, breaths scorch me.
I struggle to swim across.
On the other shore, I am shorn of my identity
I stand half-naked
They call me a barbarian
‘You eat human flesh, don’t you?’
Now-a-days, I do not resist
Quietly I pay the price of being superior.
The exile begins to seem pointless. (1996)
***

Distance, they say, makes the heart grow fonder. Though in some cases, blinder too. I’m thankful that in my case distance from home only cleared my perspective and cured me of my blindness. Familiarity with the outside world, instead of breeding contempt, bred tolerance in me. Fanaticism and love were sifted and separated. Yeats felt like a kindred spirit.

Out of Ireland have we come,
Great hatred, little room,
Maimed us from the start,
I carry from my mother’s womb,
A fanatic heart.

Literature is good. It emancipates, makes you bigger, better, broader. At last you have found the right set of people. Of course, once in a while there is a new lecturer in class who makes it difficult for you to remain very tolerant.

Uddipana. Nice name. Bengali?
No ma’am. Assamese.
But you don’t look Assamese.
What is looking Assamese?
Why, chinky of course.
***

College over and the world of journalism. You write about your culture, your people. You are read and appreciated; you feel you have done your bit. Of course, the mainstream national media cannot give you the kind of space you would ideally want for representing your region nor afford to place your concerns over Delhi’s, but within these constraints, you can work your way around.

Then suddenly one day, you open a magazine where your write-up was supposed to be. Only, it is not your write-up anymore. It used to be until the printer’s devil (I suppose) took away whole alphabets from the transliterated text of your language. The language that in your literature has been described as honey-dripping, the very language to incite the dumb to speech, is not even a coherent language anymore; just some garbled conglomeration of letters. Perhaps a language spoken by the fidgeting females and the peacock-feathered accompanist in the illustration? Where do these people come from? They are surely not Assamese. And certainly not the graceful, erotic, enticing, ecstatic Bihu dancers about whom the write up was supposed to be!
Time then to return from a pointless self-imposed exile.
***

All this was a long time ago. I am told Northeast students in mainland India still face similar questions and prejudices. Now when I go back to Delhi, I see many eateries increasingly employ girls from the Northeast – the ‘Oriental’ ones – to serve customers, a trend not entirely absent even 10 years ago when I first went to Delhi. To my mind it is commercialization of an attitude. It seems to me as cashing in on the mixed reaction I had seen even among my mainland Indian classmates seven to ten years ago – on the one hand they were in awe of the more ‘Westernised’ (as they felt) Northeasterners and the way they dressed or carried themselves; and on the other, they looked at them with some curiosity, some derision, some fear: the usual ambivalence attached to exotica.

I used to shudder to think that it was people with attitudes like this whose parents, or relatives, or friends were sitting in crucial decision-making forums and determining the destinies of my region. By now some of them would themselves have picked up the mantle of 'Northeast experts' perhaps. The popular imagination is after all, not so far removed from the political and all of it affects policy-making, which in turn determines the destiny of an entire region.
***

Burnt Flesh and Xewali Flowers...

After a long gap, I am writing in Assamese again. This one was a reaction to the 31 October serial blasts in Assam, the media circus that marked it, and the urban apathy that followed. It was published in Deobariya Khabar, the Sunday supplement of the daily Asomiya Khabar on 16/11/2008.

[Also see Identity in Exile, A Question of 'Assamese' Identity, and Baptism by Beer]

Sometimes Poetry is Written in Blood

[Read some other poems: Tejimolā Forever; Mother Goddess Kamakhya; Manufacturing Memories; For Nilikesh da, Shot Dead; End of Ennui; From Exile (1); After This Sky; Tryst; Would I Be A Poet Still; elegaic; A History of Violence]

I have been fascinated with the 1 Giant Leap concept since the time I was with National Geographic Channel, India, and I got to have a preview of the film before it was aired. So when I came across The Other Voices International Project on the web, and it said it is dedicated to 1 Giant Leap, I was intrigued. And then, Roger Hulmes published my poetry on the site, and I was thrilled. Here’s one of the featured poems, one I should not have had to write:

For Nilikesh da, Shot Dead

(He enriched me for life in the two days I met him)

I.

A man lived and a man died

And I can still hear his song:

Melākpānite dubiba sapnāte dikhiba…(1)

His voice must be floating now

On the Melakpani river

Stopping at every bend

To tell a tall tale.

II.

The man’s voice on the telephone:

Uddipana, toi kelei uddipanā?(2)

Yet, he inspired zeal like none else.

To him and those around, all else was

Because he deemed just so.

III.

Sahariā suāli, toi ki bujibi?(3)

True, big politics lives in small border towns

Where administrative expediency sunders lives

Barters souls vends death

Transplants land to paper from earth while

City dwellers complain of value erosion.

IV.

Nilikesh da(4),

Self-crowned swargadeo(5) of an independent dreamland

Foul-mouthed rum-drinking stealer of hearts

Doer of deeds weaver of tales leader of men

Killed because he happened to be.

***

[Nilikesh Gogoi was shot dead by Indian Central Industrial Security Force personnel on 23 January 2007 in Geleky, a town on the Assam-Nagaland border. In a highly militarized and insurgency prone frontier zone like the northeast of India – of which Assam and Nagaland are a part – such incidents keep recurring to remind one how cheaply are the lives of precious people like Nilikesh da dispensed of.]

***

Notes:

(1) “I’ll drown in Melakpani, you’ll see me in your dreams”. Folk song in Nagamese, a creolized version of Assamese, used as link language between the Assam valley and the Naga hills of Nagaland. Both Assam and Nagaland are states in India’s northeast frontier.

(2)“Uddipana, why are you uddipana?” Uddipana means inspiration/enthusiasm.

(3)“City girl, what will you understand?”

(4)A term for addressing elders in Assamese.

(5)King of the Ahom dynasty which ruled over Assam for nearly six centuries.

***

You can read the rest at http://www.othervoicespoetry.org/vol34/ugoswami/index.html.

Manufacturing Memories

[Published in Muse India 18]

[Read some other poems: Tejimolā Forever; Mother Goddess Kamakhya; Manufacturing Memories; For Nilikesh da, Shot Dead; End of Ennui; From Exile (1); After This Sky; Tryst; Would I Be A Poet Still; elegaic; A History of Violence]

My memories do not go so far back as that.
I do not even remember the 80’s agitation –
The Axam āndolan.
I would like to believe I do
But I would only be impinging
On āitā’s wide-eyed memories
Of how there was ‘the smell of blood in the air. And fear’.

Āitā had ten children
And a fair sprinkling of grandchildren
By the time of the āndolan. I was one of them.
I would like to believe I remember her ample figure
Standing guard at the front gate, three-not-three in hand,
Her limbs trembling, her mouth dry,
As she waited for the militant migrants to come
With daggers and dās to fall on her brood.
But I don’t.
I only have a piece of conversation with me.

Āitā: I couldn’t let that happen; I had to save what was mine.
Me: But āitā, you don’t know how to work a gun!
Āitā: It would have gone off somehow.

Being a poet, I need no more.
I build on it and shape for me
The memory of the life and times of
Sushila Kumari Misra, dārogā’s daughter,
Fiercely proud, and still believing
She’s queen of a scattered tribe.

What I narrate could be
The true story of Sushila Kumari,
Arrogant but not unkind daughter
Of a colonial serviceman whom everybody feared,
Married off to a man, who led other men
To reclaim land and open a frontier –
He became the arbiter among communities,
The patron whom everybody revered.

This might really be how life took shape
For Sushila Misra nee Debi
Whose hands were never idle
Even while she received her regular feed
Of community gossip
From ādhiār’s wives and the headmistress
Of Kopati High School.
She knitted and kneaded and sifted and sorted
While doling out advice and some money
To distressed women whose husbands
Dared not approach the patriarch
Whose progeny she had borne.

What I actually know though,
Is that she is today a queen without a clan,
The queen who weaves even now
That her husband is no more
(He only wore clothes she wove).
She weaves even now
When all she can see is her dead son’s ghost.
Because she has been weaving forever,
Even when she was mistress
Of five elephants, ten granaries, and thirty-nine servants.

She weaves furiously
As though not to weave would be
Not to be able to hold it all together.
As though all of it is still together
Only because her māku flits in and out
Of the threads of diverse lives –
Lives she had saved
At gunpoint one day…

And I of her progeny,
Realise as I weave her story
That it is very easy
To manufacture memory.
***
[Axam āndolan – Assam Movement of 1979-85 against illegal migrants in Assam; āitā – grandmother; dā – big cutting blade; dārogā – policeman; adhiār – sharecropper; māku – shuttle used in the handloom for weaving.]