Wednesday 30 March 2011

Such A Good Husband


you saved my skin from the harsh sun
behind my extravagant purdah

you helped fight pimples on my skin
with the steam from the stove

you made my arms and calves muscular 
with the cleaning cooking scrubbing

you prevented my hair from greying
with the soot from the tiny kitchen

you maintained my hushed coy voice
with the coughs from burning the firewood

you surrounded my eyes with thick lotus petals
when i'd sew your buttons under the kerosene lamp

you let my baby fat be chubby and cute
with the marks from birthing five children

you let my feet remain curvaceous
from the long walks to fetch water

you let my toes blush pink and red
sore from the rust iron that would sneak in

you made me shudder, shiver, moan, cry
when you'd return drunk, with a thick vocabulary

you gave me round red chubby cheeks
with your palms slappity slap slap on my face

you are such a good husband


Wednesday 23 March 2011

Touch And Go


the sun wriggles out
of the blue-black-blue blanket
the crowd of clouds
begin to jump their own jumps

he opens his eyes
and his pillow turns crimson
he touches his blanket
and it warms up in saffron

he looks up at the wayward clouds
they blush pink in awe

united in solitude, they traverse
across the blanket -- sea-like
they will now run, jump, glide
the clouds will now not hide

for they have heard of his tales
of how he wriggled
out of a dark blanket
to bring to us this morning

burning, he smiles,
emulating his light, the clouds fly


Bhagat Singh
Didn't they garland you this morning?



Thursday 24 February 2011

My Hands Can Still Plough The Fields

The non-existent loud voice of Haro Jamunda of Kalinganagar, Odisha.


He was a teacher, my younger boy
He taught me to write my name
Suddenly for days he lay on the bed
Malaria in the brain, they said

We waited for a miracle
To take him to the hospital
No bicycle, no bullock cart
The primary health clinic was 10 kms afar

It was getting eerily dark.

Soups of lentil and basil and yeast
And prayer by our native priest
But you know, he died: my little prince.
Was this a punishment for my sins?

My taller boy missed his little brother
But soon Aati matured into a robust farmer
Soon the rice field was his bed of dreams
Soon he dreamt of a season of rice in heaps

He laboured, we stocked
And thus ticked the sand clock.

Boom! Bam! Boom! The steel factories howled
"Steel factories over our land!" our Ho Munda kin bawled

"What about our crops?" 
"All gone!"

"What about our livelihood?"
"All gone!"

"What about our ancestors' spirits?"
"All gone!"

Boom! We heard it again, but
Aati ran to see, for its sound was different

Gamcha on his shoulder, the gait of a deer
It was the boom of the guns that we could hear
Minutes, hours slipped through the barrel of the gun
Women, children, men wailed for those long gone

"Where is Aati, my young man?"
"They put his body into a van!"

First, there were no hospitals, no development
Then they said steel meant development
But I lost both my sons.

I am old, I am angry.
I cry. No answer to my unending 'why'.

My hands can still plough the fields.


[This poem was first published in Montreal Serai (Vol. 23 Issue 4) and was also recited at the XIII International Conference of the Indian Association for Women's Studies (IAWS) held in Wardha, Maharashtra, from January 21-24, 2011]

Wednesday 23 February 2011

Some Activists Said

On October 1, 2009, some men in fatigues walked into the village of Gompad in Dantewada district of Chhattisgarh, and fired at the people. Nine people died. Among the dead was Kanni Kartam, roughly about 20-year-old, of the Dorla tribe, whose body was allegedly found to be in pieces, with her clothes lying around her. Her year-and-half old son Suresh was found wailing over his mother's dead body, with three of his fingers chopped. Kanni's younger sister and parents were also killed. Her husband had gone to the jungle when the attack took place, and that's how he was saved. While a fact-finding team visited this village -- the only way one can get to Gompad is by walking or taking a bicycle from the nearest town which is 40 kms away -- the chronology of events and the facts of the incident were misleading. A petition was filed in the Supreme Court of India with 13 petitioners, but contrary to the Court's order to have the petitioners (including Kanni's husband/Suresh's father) protected, there is no information of their whereabouts. This poetry is an ode to Kanni Kartam, the victim of the Indian government's Operation Green Hunt. 



Some activists said
my breasts were sliced
like ham
      slapped on a slice of bread.


Some activists said
my breasts were chopped
like potatoes
      to be tossed on a hot pan.


Some activists said
my clothes were strewn apart
      around my body, except for on my body
like strands of noodles lying scattered
      around the pan, except on the pan.


Some activists said
my chastity was infringed upon;
       that I was raped.
That the axe cut me leaving my muscles in shreds
after multiple male ego projections pierced through me.


Some activists said
I was the face of Operation Green Hunt
except that my body was decomposed.
But nobody remembers how I look.


Some activists said
Suresh wailed to see me wailing in pain.
That he was dropped on my dead chest.


Some activists said
His baby fingers were grounded
when he held my breast
     which nourished him.


Some activists said
They were at peace that I was dead
     what with my body dissected
        what with my womanhood dissected.


But all I ask is:
Will just one activist
trek to my abode amid Ram's Dandakaranya?


Will just one activist
stop asking questions and
find out what was done to me, my village, my family
on that October morning?


Will just one activist
stop asking
     stop negating
         stop dissenting
but instead start walking
     towards finding my bloodied grave?

[This poem was recited at the XIII International Conference of the Indian Association for Women's Studies (IAWS) held in Wardha, Maharashtra, from January 21-24, 2011]

Sunday 23 January 2011

Not One to Wage War


On 24 December, Dr Binayak Sen was sentenced to a life term on charges of waging war against the State, sedition, and for colluding with Maoists. I saw a very different man on my last visit to his house

I had called him a day in advance to check if anyone from his family would be in Raipur the next day. I knew his younger daughter Aparajita would be in Mumbai till the Christmas college vacation. “We three are in Raipur. We would love to see you,” Dr Binayak Sen had said, with a certain higher-pitch emphasis on ‘love’. I arrived in Raipur the next morning at 7 am, and hesitated to go to the Sens’ residence at such an early hour while the sun was still struggling to make itself visible through the fog. But the cold winds had attacked my spine through the night on the bus from Jashpur, and I desperately needed some warmth. On my way to the Sens’ on a cycle rickshaw, watching the capital city of Chhattisgarh straining to usher in the new day, I found myself cutting back and forth to memories of my acquaintance with the Sen family. I had first met Dr Sen’s elder daughter Pranhita—a 25-year-old budding filmmaker—in May 2009 to interview her. The interview was published, and my relationship with the Sens had dropped root. It had strengthened in the past 18 months.

I rang the bell and waited. A minute later, there stood the man at the door, in his vest and pyjamas, looking confused. Soon realising it wasn’t the milkman, he hurried to unlock the bolts. He waited for me to drop the bag off my shoulders, and then wrapped his arms around me in a long embrace. After the cold night, I was home and warm.

Dr Sen’s wife Ilina walked into the room and the warmth was superfluous. I apologised for arriving at such an early hour. “I was up at 5.30 am, and made tea for Ilina,” Dr Sen said, while Ilina looked at him lovingly. “Tea or coffee?” Dr Sen asked. I said anything would do. “But give me some indication which of the anything you want,” he requested.

Sipping coffee, we began to talk of the government’s undue attention on the family—Ilina had been called an ISI agent in the Raipur sessions court the previous week, during the course of Dr Sen’s trial. The family had been through much in the past three years; controversies seemed to litter their path like glass marbles. I joked only Rajinikanth could intervene, given his unusual powers to sway opinion. “Isn’t he the Tamil actor?” asked Ilina. Dr Sen and I exchanged a look of disbelief and laughed aloud.

Pranhita was up by now and soon we got into a girly banter. She wanted to see how much my hair had grown. I loosened my bun, exclaiming, “Now, there I look like a woman!” Dr Sen, who was making breakfast next door, peeped in as I let my hair dance. Pranhita and I screeched like adolescent schoolgirls caught talking about boys.

Sometime later, I spoke to Ilina about getting my bus ticket to Nagpur. Dr Sen, meanwhile, was dressed in his jeans and kurta, ready to go to court. The good doctor’s relationship with the courts and cops began in 2007, when he was arrested on charges of being a Maoist sympathiser. Now, as he paced about the house, he looked confused: “Who will buy the ticket? How will Ashwin buy it if he has to be with me in court? But he can’t buy it later at noon; tickets might not be available then, and it is already 10.30.” Ilina interjected to allay his doubts. He turned to me, “Won’t it be cold on the bus?” I assured him I would be fine. It was finally decided that Ashwin, a law student who has been helping the family with minute details of the case, would buy the ticket on the way to court.

We had a lunch of Bengali fish curry and rice grown on their own farm on the outskirts of the city, while watching an animation film on TV. The discussion among us women (with their dogs Safia and Dottle playing earnest listeners) veered to reality shows on TV, and the palpable surge in India of a generation devoid of soul.

Dr Sen returned from the court and got into a discussion with Ilina and another guest about the case. Meanwhile, I poked around the many bookshelves that house everything from Victorian to Bengali literature, to medical journals, to all manner of human rights reports. I remembered what Pranhita had told me when we first met in 2009, a few days before her father would be released on bail: “The Chhattisgarh police took my sister’s algebra notebook; they suspected it might contain Maoist code!”

The sun had set and the dogs were trying to find a comfortable warm corner. I prepared tea for Dr Sen and Ilina, while they began to arrange the papers for the court the next day. “You are staying tonight, right?” Dr Sen asked me suddenly. I managed a smile and shook my head. Ilina was on the internet, looking for citations to be used from a decades-old case. Fifteen minutes and a few phone calls later, she’d found what was needed. Dr Sen left the TV remote—he was trying to fight sleep while watching news updates on the latest developments in the 2G scam—and ran to see what Ilina had found. As I stood over and watched, Dr Sen put his hand on Ilina’s shoulder and said with a proud beam on his face, “Among other nice things, my wife is also an internet expert.”

Dinner followed, and I began to gather my stuff to catch the night bus. Ilina noticed I was sticking my nose into a book whenever I could, and asked me to just take it with me. Mother and daughter decided to drop me to the bus stand. “Bye, Baba. Take care of yourself,” I said, and he embraced me in a ring of safety and love, for one long moment. “When do I see you next?” I shrugged my shoulders.

“Come back soon or I will fall asleep and won’t be able to open the door,” he shouted out to Ilina as she descended the staircase. I looked back to see him one last time, not knowing that ten days later, he would be made to walk into jail once again. “They will be back in just ten minutes. Please don’t fall asleep,” I said. “I was just joking,” he chuckled.I hugged Ilina Ma and Pranhita as I walked towards the bus. The gush of cold wind was unbearable.

Monday 13 December 2010

Aruna's Keepers

Last Saturday, Aruna Shanbag, a former employee of KEM Hospital, Mumbai, completed 37 years as its ‘baby’. This is the story of the nurses and doctors at KEM who have taken care of one of their own ever since that fateful evening of 27 November 1973 when Aruna was raped and strangulated by a ward boy.

Jyoti Motilal Shrivastava was a young, 20-year-old, first-year nursing student at KEM Hospital in Mumbai, when she had her first introduction to the hospital’s ‘baby’. The woman on the bed had long black hair and smooth fair skin. A constant low-shrill whine emanated from her, but even then Jyoti couldn’t help thinking that she was indeed as beautiful as she had been told. Aruna Shanbag looked up at her with restless eyes. “I remember getting mad at God for having left her in that condition,” she says. Today, Jyoti is 58 years old and the matron of the hospital. Many nurses have come and gone during her tenure. Like her, every one of them is made to meet Aruna, who is introduced as the hospital’s ‘baby’.

On the evening of 27 November 1973, 25-year-old staff nurse Aruna had finished her duty hours. She had then gone to the basement of the Cardio-Vascular Thoracic Centre building of KEM Hospital to change her clothes. Several hours later, she was found unconscious inside the tiny room, bleeding from her vagina and anus. She had been raped by a ward boy, Sohanlal. A dog chain tied around her neck during the rape had asphyxiated her, cutting off blood supply to her brain. Aruna turned into a vegetable overnight, and continues in that state. She is 62 years old now, but has no knowledge of the time elapsed. Rare stretches of facial muscles reveal a possible smile, and a faint whimper is heard now and then in the narrow corridor of the ward on the hospital’s ground floor. The whimper is a sign for the nurses to check on her. The hospital authorities are protective of her; nobody other than doctors and nurses on duty are allowed into her room, which is locked from outside. The media has been kept at bay. Hospital dean Dr Sanjay Oak says, “We ought to give her the space she deserves.”

Despite her condition, Aruna is healthy. Says Shrivastava, “She has no ailment usually associated with someone in her sixties—no high blood pressure or diabetes, no loss of appetite or wrinkled skin. She doesn’t even have a single bed sore!” Aruna has a diet of chicken thrice a week. She also has an appetite for eggs. She says, “Dede, dede...” while being fed her daily quota of two eggs, Shrivastava says. It is only in recent years that her food is being ground to a thin paste—because all her teeth have been extracted. She turns her face away when she is fed any sweetmeat. She has a strange dislike for water, and spits it back at the nurse when goaded to sip some.

“The urinary tract of a patient can get infected if the catheter is used beyond a certain period. Also, it would be extremely uncomfortable for Aruna if she’s made to wear adult diapers. So she just wears the hospital’s patient uniform—shirt and pyjama. She cries when she has urinated or passed stools. We let her soil her clothes and bed linen, and then after a sponge with warm water, followed by a spray of some talcum powder, Aruna is made to wear a new set of clothes,” says Leny Cornelio, 55, who was sister-in-charge of the ward until two months ago. “Not a single nurse or even a grade IV employee of the hospital will ever complain about the amount of work s/he has to do to take care of Aruna.”

The hospital staff working the ward know exactly when Aruna is being bathed every morning. “She is extremely averse to bathing. Not a single day has passed in these many years when Aruna has not cried out loud while she is being sponged,” says Cornelio, who still visits Aruna after her day’s work.

Before she falls asleep for the night, a nurse runs her oil-dipped fingers through the tiny gray stubs that are Aruna’s hair. There has been not a single visitor from Aruna’s hometown in Karnataka for several years now. The resident doctor who was her fiancé waited for four years in the vain hope that Aruna would become normal again. He finally gave up, got married and has not returned to check on her. For doctors at KEM, memories of Aruna through the years run long. Dr Ravindra Bapat still remembers the weight on his arms as he carried Aruna’s limp body out of the basement on that evening of 1973.

On the day that she retired two months ago, Cornelio went to meet Aruna. “I told her ‘I will come to meet you on your birthday next year, on 1 June.’ She heard my words and began to cry. She may have so many things to tell us! I visit her daily, but honestly, I pray that she is blessed with natural death soon.”

Monday 30 August 2010

'Maoists are not terrorists'


Once upon a time, there was a king who oppressed his subjects. A century and another king later, nothing changed. One young peasant decided to oppose the king's tyranny, but was killed by the king's men. The onlooking angry subjects began an armed revolt. Several decades of toil and oppression finally kicked off the throne. Democracy set in, and the people lived happily ever after. Almost.

This incomplete fairytale is that of Nepal, and portraying its colourful history since the time of Prithvi Narain Shah's rule in 1770, is Anand Swaroop Verma's documentary film Flames Of The Snow. The film depicts the chain of events and circumstances that led to the people's movement under the leadership of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist). What's interesting is that unlike the gory images of ideological violence in our country that pepper the news channels' prime time, this film details the ideological basis of the revolution. It also includes an interview of Maoist supremo Prachanda, describing the genesis of the armed movement in 1996. As Verma puts it, "The revolution was under threat as there was enough international funding to douse the fire. There was only a distorted image of the struggle. Being a journalist who had covered the revolution since its inception in the 90s, I knew that there was a different truth which had to be shown to the world." Until last year, Verma was writing for the Hindi daily Jansatta.

Verma's book Rongpa Se Dolpa Tak was one of the first voices of the movement — it documented the genesis of the movement in Rongpa, and how it evolved by the time it reached Dolpa. Understandably, his name was not new for Nepalese households and the crew got access to shoot in the thickest jungles infested by Maoists.

Wouldn't it have been simpler for a filmmaker rather than a journalist to make this film? Director and editor Ashish Shrivastava presents a contemporary analogy: "The media sporadically gives us statistics about the growing number of farmer suicides, but does not delve deeper into the reasons. Verma was clear in his head about the reasons why the Maoist revolution had such a strong support base among the working class in Nepal. In fact, when we went there to shoot, everyone from the waiter to the hotel's bellboy was a Maoist. The essence of the film is the ideology, and not the violence." Both Verma and Shrivastava are sure that they may not be able to make a similar film about the current Red revolution in India.

It was at Shrivastava's behest that Verma scripted the film. Not surprisingly, interviews with historians and activists dot the 125-minute movie. But as Shrivastava puts it, "Not a single scene is longer that four seconds at a stretch. I was sure about Verma's thorough groundwork. My only concern was the narrative. The film had to look interesting. After all, we were dealing with a very interesting subject. And certain events have been dramatised." A unique feature of the revolution, which has been captured in the film, is that women comprised 40 per cent of Maoist cadres.

Filmed over a period of three years, Flames Of The Snow was banned by the Indian Censor Board in June this year.

Their reason? "Any justification or romanticisation of the Maoist ideology of extremism or of violence, coercion, intimidation in achieving its objectives would not be in the public interest, particularly keeping in view the recent Maoist violence in some parts of the country." Eventually, the ban was lifted last month by a Revising Committee of the Censor Board, without any deletions, but with a disclaimer added that the substance of the film had been compiled from various media publications.

Ironically, a scene from the film showing the burning of Israeli and American flags by Palestinians was deleted during its screening in Nepal, as the Nepal government's foreign policy is to maintain good relations with all nations.

The big question: Will Flames Of The Snow impact the revolution in India? "The Nepalese had to fight the monarchy. Indian Maoists are fighting the illegal grabbing of natural resources by MNCs. But it is tough to talk about the influence of the Nepal experiment in India," says Verma, choosing his words carefully. He knows that the film will be watched in India widely —if not among the masses, then surely among the IB, which keeps a tab on every person who may utter the 'red' word. Till then, Verma is confident that he will be able to reply to any query from any audience which has been taught to believe that Maoists are terrorists.

Flames Of The Snow will be screened on Aug 30 at Prithvi 
House at 6 pm and on Sept 1 at TISS (old campus) at 6.15 pm