| Death in a Cold Country By Amitava Kumar
It
is not the immigrant, but the ones who stay behind
who are the true unvanquished.
It
is not yet dawn in Delhi. I am beginning to write this
column because I am jet-lagged and awake at an hour
when I normally pretend to be dead. I left the United
States as scheduled but, because of missed connections,
I arrived here a day late and, surprisingly, in the
day instead of the middle of the night. The plane banked
over acres of white and limestone rooftops and then,
suddenly, I began to tell myself, not without the doubts
that accompany such thoughts, that I was now home.
The one reason to convince you have indeed come home
is offered soon after arrival when the man at immigration
at the Indira Gandhi International Airport does not
look up from your passport and ask, “What is the purpose
of your visit here? How long do you plan to stay?” There
is little to be sentimental here. The fact that I was
not asked those questions is simply a reality of the
modern state and the rules that regulate entry and exit
for its lawful citizens. Home is where the passport
says it is.
In recent years, the Bollywood film industry, alert
to the reality of the Indian market overseas, has begun
to attend to the fantasies of the NRI. In Southall or
in San Francisco, New York or in New Mexico, it is the
desi films borrowed from the local grocery store that
teach us not only how to cry, but also, in fact, how
to be Indian.
In that execrable film, Pardes, marketed as a story
of the “American dream, India soul,” we are offered
a song which is the national anthem for nostalgic N.R.I.’s:
“London dekha, Paris dekha, aur dekha Japan / Michael
dekha, Elvis dekha, sab dekha meri jaan / Saare jag
mein kahin nahin hai doosra Hindustan” (I saw London,
I saw Paris, and I saw Japan / I saw Michael, I saw
Elvis, I saw it all, my dear / But there is nothing
in the world that is like India).
From this film, and it would seem every other film of
its ilk, we are all taught to behave like Amrish Puri,
returning from abroad to utter, in a deep baritone,
platitudes about the glistening fields of wheat, ghar
ka aangan, and, with their lissome form outfitted in
suitable boutique-wear, the numerous gaon ki betiyaan.
Such touching hypocrisy. But saying that doesn’t explain
much. It does not, for example, touch upon the truth
that this hypocrisy is crucial to a belief that sustains
so many in the diaspora: on some nights, it assures
me whenever I am hurt or humiliated or just lonely,
that one day I will come home. It gives me reason to
sacrifice my days to the myth of eternal return. Instead
of paeans to the abandoned home and the home-nation,
what I would like to know more about are the day-to-day
struggles, successes, failures, and confusions of the
ones who leave home to seek better fortune elsewhere.
And, equally crucial, I would want to see are accounts
of what is suffered as well as celebrated in the most
ordinary of ways by those who do not leave, who stay
behind, whether because they want to or because it cannot
be otherwise.
Have you ever been on flights that come to Delhi via
Dubai or Abu Dhabi? Has your luggage gone around the
carousels in the baggage claim area with large cartons
strapped together with tape? Have you traveled on flights
where the flight attendants and even some passengers
have smirked at the accents and demeanor of the less
well-heeled travelers? What if we were to replace all
the hypocritical, self-mythologizing accounts of expatriate
fiction and its more vulgar version in Bollywood cinema
that provides a nationalist fantasy with imaginative
maps of toil and tales of small, unnoticed triumphs?
Against generalities, we need individual stories. A
few weeks ago, a writer-friend in Calcutta wrote me
a letter asking me if I knew anything about the case
of an Indian student who had been found dead at a nearby
university. My friend’s family had known the young man
since he had been a boy. I made inquiries and discovered
that the young man, whose name was Anirban, had drowned
in the river that ran past his university. The college
newspaper said that the Indian student had died on his
birthday. The cause of Anirban’s death remained a mystery,
and, unfortunately, the police had accepted it as such
and closed the case.
Many Indians, some of them students and some others
who had been former colleagues of Anirban’s, wrote letters
in the press saying that the police needed to investigate
what exactly had caused their friend’s death. Anirban
had been healthy and also busy and engaged in his work.
How had he ended up in the river one night? I was saddened
by the news I was reading about a person who had, after
all, been a stranger to me. And I found myself feeling
sadder still as I read the detail about the university
chaplain seeking the help of a Bengali professor to
convey the news of Anirban’s death to his mother in
Calcutta.
What had the chaplain said? What words had the Bengali
professor added to what the chaplain had said? What
were the words that she had held back? I ask these questions
not because I am a writer, though I think this has something
to do with it, but because this provides me a way to
imagine the realities of an immigrant’s life and the
way it is joined to other lives in the homeland that
he has left behind. These questions are the only way
I have to measure the distance that death had added
to the enormous divide that already existed between
Anirban’s two homes.
My mind went back to a moment one night in Delhi, long
before I had left India for America. Our family had
bought a black and white TV in the early eighties. I
watched television religiously. One night, they showed
a short TV film made by Mrinal Sen. The film was called
Aparajit. The film was about an old couple, played with
great restraint and vulnerability by the NSD veterans
Manohar Singh and Surekha Sikri. The pair is waiting
for a phone call from their son in Chicago. He went
there five years ago, to get his doctoral degree. The
call is awaited at a neighbor’s house. The son is to
call because it is his birthday.
The call doesn’t come. Twice the phone rings, but it
is not the son. The lady who is the neighbor, and in
whose house the old couple is sitting, waiting for the
call, says that they have gotten four or five wrong
number calls that morning.
The phone call doesn’t come. At night, the mother takes
out a bundle of letters from her drawer. She asks her
husband to read one of them. He asks which one. He looks
at the letter and protests. He says, “The same one.
You’ve read it nearly a hundred times, it’s two years
old.” His wife says, “Read it. I love it. It never grows
stale for me. Please read.”
The letter that the husband, the character played by
Manohar Singh, a white shawl wrapped around him, begins
to read is a moving one. Midway through the letter,
we begin hearing it in the son’s voice. The effect is
heightened. It is as if we ourselves were receiving
news from a distance that now, for a moment, has been
bridged.
The film’s director, Mrinal Sen, had quoted from an
actual letter that his own son had written to his mother,
Sen’s wife. I want to end by quoting the letter as it
was used in the script for Aparajit because, caught
up in its sentences, is a familiar drama of return.
It relies on a promise, and it is already aware that
dreams live on broken promises.
Sen’s film was also a tribute to the solidarity of an
aged couple. It is not the immigrant, but the ones who
stay behind who are the true unvanquished. There is
a more individual, and personal, story here too, I think.
Tomorrow, I will begin another journey. I will travel
from Delhi to Patna, where my parents live. I will be
able to spend only a few days with them. And I will
return to America.
It seems to me that I recognize in this letter with
a degree of startling intimacy the routine of crumbling
resolve, and the course of desires, quite naked and
unprotected by guilt. And I want, like Sen, to believe
that my parents, old and set in their ways, anxious,
and forever bickering, find in each other the strength
that their children do not provide.
Perhaps, Anirban’s mother will also, I pray, have the
comfort and solace of family and friends. Here, then,
is that letter:
“Ma, do you remember I had taken you to see a film once?”
It was Satyajit Ray’s The Unvanquished. You had wept
a lot. You had said: Apu - the son - why is he so cruel?
Why did he have to leave his mother and go to Calcutta
to study? He wouldn’t visit his mother on vacations
even. Instead he tells his friends that he has sent
some money to her and ‘managed her.’ Then you had turned
to me: ‘Will you behave the same way - like Apu? Then
it’s going to be exactly like the film — on your return
you’ll find me no longer — I’ll be dead and gone. You
won’t even see my dead face... Yesterday, a few of us
had gone to the Chicago University Film Club, to see
the film again. The Unvanquished. This time I cried.
I cried a lot. After returning we had a heated discussion
till the early hours of the morning. My friends who
would like to settle down here - some have already secured
jobs — argued that mothers shouldn’t expect so much
— shouldn’t the sons think of their own future? — mothers
shouldn’t be selfish and tie their sons to their apron
strings, and it’s really unfair of them to take revenge
by dying... Ma, I don’t agree with them. I shall return.
Definitely. As soon as I finish my work here. I shan’t
wait a day longer.”
..-
End Of Article.....
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