Seeta called me up one evening when I was in Bangalore. She had been watching Maachis, the movie on Punjab terrorism by Gulzar, and thinking about something that made a lot of sense to me. Seeta has worked with children all over the world, promoting ‘protection’ among them. It is a theme close to her heart. Equipping children to protect themselves acquires its deepest meaning when she works with them in Africa and Kashmir, places torn by war and terrorism. What follows here is her thoughts in retrospect about her work in Kashmir.
She was asking herself why is it that, even after two decades of violence, Kashmir does not heal. She was comparing it to the Bombay terrorist attacks (26/11). She noticed that India started healing even when Bombay was going on and attributed it partly to the fact that in Bombay we already had a number of heroes as the battle was on. The media beamed images of the ATS head, the NSG commandoes, the rescue operations, the Taj staff, and ordinary folks who had saved lived. But there is nothing like that from Kashmir, or the NorthEast, or those strife torn parts of the world where violence continues unabated.
This, she says, is because places that heal find their heroes, but sites of violence which do not heal partly simmer because they find no heroes. What do you tell a Kashmiri child? That your father was a terrorist?
Her argument made sense to me because I am writing Roll of Honour which deals with the terrorism years in Punjab and have been trying with various points of views, time lines, characters, and so on but have failed to present the story. I realise it is because I am unable to create a hero. My story may deal with terrorism but it seeks to heal, how can I do it without creating a character that rises above the tragedy? If I do not do that I do not give the reader a peg. If I do not win my reader, draw him in, how can I expect to make a story? Thank you Seeta for showing me this fundamental truth: healing needs heroes. No heroes, no healing.
Those who know me also know that I have been obsessed with a set of events in my life which I am trying to fashion as a story for nearly twenty years. I have written many drafts, but do not feel satisfied. Recently, I decided to read books written on a similar concept, to see how those writers had tackled the subject.
I read The Temple of the Golden Pavilion by Yukio Mishima. It was a fantastic analysis on the mind of a neurotic. Its fundamental tenant being: I do not want the world to understand me. In one sentence Mishima upturns the entire argument of the human race. Not wanting to be understood can be so fundamentally different from anything I have known, we all want someone or the world at large to understand us.
I read Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys and that book does not belong to anything I have read until now. It is a book about the breakdown of a mind, and is structured as a breakdown. It is located in a space between the white and brown population in Jamaica and I have not known another book to be so edgy. The whole story revolves around one change in point of view in the middle. The beginning and ending sections are the woman’s point of view; the middle is the man’s point of view, except for one intervention by the woman. That is how fragile a work of this nature can be, and how solid.
Any books you want to recommend to me?