Originally published as 'Writing Home' in The Little Magazine,
& in International Gallerie, https://www.gallerie.net/archives/
Bombay, October 12, 1999
Dear Feroza and Shehnaaz,
I came home today from Pune. Had to stop
there after Kargil and Delhi, before I could get the leave to come home. The
kids seem younger since I left, though Rohan is taller and Aditi actually
manages to finish her sentences. They say on the mountains, you age decades in
a few months.
Somehow I could not make eye contact
with the watchman. He was so happy to see me, he asked me if I had been with
the same battalion as the young soldier whose wife was on TV saluting his
hearse, and the other one who had lost his leg. It was not that he considered
them to be heroes. He says rather harshly that battle is for men who have
nothing constructive to occupy themselves with. He does not venerate army men,
but I can tell he likes me. I said to him, I just need a cup of tea right now,
that’s all. He must have known something was wrong but he respects privacy.
He’s not one to ramble on if you stay uncommunicative. I wonder if he ever
dreams about any other job. He is a good watchman, but I imagine sometimes that
he would have made a fine leader. I think it’s that caste business that we
Hindus are so caught up in. You know, I married my wife from the same side of
the river and the same caste and all that. I happen to be much older than she
is but that was not cause for concern – that I was twenty years her senior and
away most of the time.
The other day the newspapers carried a
story about villagers who killed a man and woman for eloping because they were
not of the same caste. I wonder sometimes if it’s worth all the effort, you
know, running after people with machetes and sticks when there’s so much to do,
so much to learn. I thought I would join the army and experience the world.
When I fought at twenty-one against China, in 1962, my white canvas Bata shoes
(the one’s school children are made to wear for P.T.) gave way. At one point we
were at 18,500 feet. I think you should be appropriately dressed when you
travel the world.
You can look at the pictures I have sent
you - my wife Aarti and the kids. Rohan is fifteen, Aditi is two and a half.
She was a surprise. We always wanted a girl. But I am pretty old now. Never
mind, I look forward to my retired life, where I can be a normal father and
give Aditi time and energy, something Rohan never did receive from me. He is a
sweet child. Likes to paint. I hope he will be an artist. It’s a nice thought.
I try to be gentle and romantic when I
am at home but it isn’t easy when you have been apart from a woman for so long,
when you have been living off condensed milk cans and wonder why the tea at
home is so phikka. I work at shutting out the culture shock. But a civilian’s
life hits me every time.
You may say that he’s writing all this
to humanize his killings, to come to terms with his sins, to ask for
forgiveness. I wish it were that simple. I will be sixty. It’s easy to
sentimentalize the wars, but I fought in four of them. While India made her
destiny, whatever that destiny was for each of her billion-odd people, I
trained to defend it. It was an interesting defense because I think people are
so quick to judge, to simplify, to make enemies, to slot. Perhaps they should
only allow fifty-year-old academics and ex-servicemen to be politicians and
legislators, and this should be a random selection so that in the end even if
you are choosing bad apples you haven’t chosen an entire rotten stock. Oh, yes,
I was saying, it was an interesting defense. We were fighting off invasions
into our territory, we didn’t appear to be the aggressors. But I am not sure if
just who we are is aggressor enough, because there is something oddly
despicable about us sometimes, the good ones and the bad ones. Sorry, I rambled
off… It is interesting because it is especially at the time of war, (when
everything should be simple, you know, bad against good, and so forth), that
the real gray areas raise their heads and yet, to act, you cannot be in a gray
area at all, you have to take a polar position. Then you become a traitor or a
patriot, and god forbid one of us decides to be the former and opposes war.
I think that is why I am writing.
Because it will be easy for you and your family and your children’s children to
see your husband and son as a martyr who died for his country; to hate me as
the enemy. Especially since I am alive and have children and there seems so
much hope for us in India where life only gets better for many people, where we
are ‘progressing’ so to speak, even if it is a material progress that the self
appointed spiritualists despise.
But that would be a disservice to your
children. I hope that like my child, Rohan, they prefer to be artists. Artists
can be so much more compelling than soldiers. Many artists, (some can be horrible
people, I hear), live in the gray areas like I do but they never touch the
extremes of evil and good like I do, murderer, again and again, patriot too,
each time.
You may ask if I am demanding you to
forgive me. No, Feroza, it is not forgiveness that I want for killing your son,
please don’t misunderstand. I am asking for much more, I am asking that in some
small way civil society in Pakistan comes to understand that I really don’t
want to go on killing. It is more a plea for mercy. Have mercy on me. I didn’t
ask to be the gate-keeper of the Kashmir valley. I’ve never had the feeling
Kashmir belonged to anyone but itself. Why are we imposing our nationalisms on
a piece of land that is only swaying from one side to the other because it
cannot protect itself?
How do I know so much about you, you may
ask, how do you seem to be able to talk to us as though you have known us all
your life when this is only your first letter to us?
The answer is a memory. The watchman,
he’s eighty-two now, used to be the watchman of our little building, Pil Court,
from the time he was twenty four. He was born in 1917. He used to talk about
the Muslim family that lived in my flat, overlooking the railway tracks, the
kindest people he ever knew; they were charitable, spoke to him in their shudh
Urdu, making him feel like a courtier. The men were ‘army’ like me but they
chose to live in civilian quarters because they had this extended family and
each was closer to the other. They left Pil Court during Partition. You know, he
told me, I once said to Feroza bai, now I know why people turn to Islam, it is
to give everyone equal respect, then no one feels lesser when they are with
you. She laughed and told me, “If you are in India, it’s better to be Hindu.
Hindus don’t treat everyone as equal, but it’s better to be one step higher in
their ladder.” I guess, Feroza, your husband and your family must have had many
aspirations for an equal society in Pakistan.
The watchman also told me that Feroza
bai had just had her son, Farukh. He was a baby when they left for Karachi. The
most beautiful child he had seen, and so happy. He talked so much about Farukh.
I think part of him feels he was a god father to that child because he says you
allowed him to push the pram and even hold the baby, something that would
mortify my wife, Aarti.
When I read Farukh’s name on his dog tag
in Kargil I was curious if it was the same child grown up. We sent Farukh’s
body back to the Pakistan side and I inquired some more about him from a
Pakistani POW, who happened to know Farukh well. I was right about who he was
and the POW told me your family’s address. It is a strange thought, you know,
that I sleep in your bed, Feroza. And you sleep in my ancestral home in
Karachi. You see, Sea Wind, 9-B New Queen’s Road, was where my mother gave
birth to me in 1941, in Karachi. Like many Hindu Sindhi families we left
everything behind to catch the train to India. And you gave your fully
furnished house in Bombay with the sound of the trains going past, a sound I came
to find difficult to sleep without, to a man who then sold it to my
grandfather.
I heard you were pregnant, Shehnaaz. I
wish you luck and every one of God’s blessings. I never saw my father you know,
after 1947. He was on the train that followed ours from Pakistan. We were on
the last train that came back to India safe. The one that came after, there
were only corpses.
I don’t like it that it appeared to be
in my blood or my fate or my religion or my country to avenge my father’s
death. I don’t like that feeling of being controlled by fate. I have been. I
have come full circle. Today, I will go down and tell the watchman about
Farukh. I think he should know. I hope he tells his people and they tell
theirs. If only the word would spread fast, but that’s the irony of it all,
that the good stories always find a way to end quietly and the bad ones, they
fly. Too many years of death and propaganda. But how can I take on the whole
wide world? I can only act for myself.
I am counting on you.
Brigadier Jeri Mansukhani
The Brigadier’s letter never reached the women. It was intercepted and he was brought before a Court of Inquiry. But his son, Rohan, had read it before he sent it. Rohan vowed that one day he would visit his ancestral home in Karachi in Pakistan and read out the letter his father had written, from his memory. For the moment, all civilian movement between India and Pakistan has been frozen.
-The End-
Notes:
Independent India has had five armed conflicts since 1947: The expulsion of armed intruders in Kashmir, 1948; the Indo China War, 1962; the Indo Pak War, 1965; the Indo Pak War, 1972 over Bangladesh’s secessionism; and the Kargil War between India and Pakistan, May 26, 1999 – July 14, 1999.
phikka - bland or not sweet
P.T. - Physical Training
shudh – pure
Published as 'Writing Home' in The Little Magazine,
& in International Gallerie,
http://www.gallerie.net/issue10/story1.html
Wow - lovely and thought-provoking. Great work!
ReplyDeleteThank you for reading! I just saw this. Best wishes.
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