The Kal Aaj Aur Kal of Secularism
The tonight: This business of secularism. I am pretty tired of it, but here too, I am in fashion a little too late. Rediff.com even has converted the secularism fatigued into value-for-Internet-dollar columnists. Hell they begin nicely like all dissidents, these secularists I mean. When communalism raised its head. In the beginning there were several important heads that twittered at that young passionate gang of
Don Quixotes and their exaggerated fear of some newshogging religious rightist. Then communalism dripped into my own hands.
The Past: Communalism dripped into my own hands. It did not feel like an 'ism…It drooled in long hanging drips first, and the warmth in the viscous fluid that registered its warmth on my clammy palms, despite the heat of a Bombay January. It will remain a dark blackish maroon to my eyes forever, but crimson red to you. At St George hospital, where I had gone after my night shift at The Daily to see a fellow reporter friend.
Manmohan Bharati was stabbed through his lungs. And he was in the general ward. But, the incident happened at the ante chamber.
The blood dripping was from the caved-in skull of an unknown screaming man, who was dispatched to the top of the heap of the dead, piled under the staircase. He was screaming, but the doctors had decided he will not live long enough to justify investing their time in repairing him. There were many more damaged they could save. I was one man who was at hand to heave that live screaming dead man onto the pile of those who had stopped screaming. I assisted those who were lifting him from the stretcher and placed him on the top. That was when I bloodied my hands with the blood of the religious minority of my country.
The ancient past: Of course, my friend Shakir`s blood that also I had on my hand when Jamaal struck him with the thin wooden plank, one of the many used to pack apples in crates, with thin iron nails on it, does not count.
Tonight: I started to realize that I was late to understand and appreciate the fight for revolution that the secularists had raged for. I have a peculiar love for the fringe. I therefore I had always patronized these lot. But Naipual like, I now know, I had always felt afraid of aligning myself to a group. Less out of the anxiety of influence or the need to be pure, more because of inadequacy to see individual efforts in historical context. To meet a policemans swinging lathi with your shin, one need to believe one is historys chosen agent for change.
So, Orwell like I decided I wanted to be with them only by alliance, not by temperament.
Tonight , as in tonight tonight, night of September 16, 2002.: I walk through the lighted streets of Matunga. Full of smart young girls in skirts and whatever else that makes them smart young girls. Smart young men, in nothing other than what made me a part of such a pack 15 years ago. Trousers, shirts. Okay, some quirkily designed disheveled hair, similarly manicured facial hair. Old men and women in exactly the same clothes they wore when I was 18. And all the rest of humanity in-between in the usual in-between attire forever in flux of undefined irrelevance.
The crowd was exotic. But too hot for a dish to be served chilled. By the time somebody serves this fare in an Indo-English novel, it will have chilled to the perfect temperature that suggests exotica, sold to the west.
The reason I took to walking the lanes of my college days was also peculiar. A former student had invited me to her home for Ganpati, the elephant headed gods 10-day visit to private homes and clusters of public homes. This is Hinduisms most recent public festival, with the exception of Raksha Bandhan, perhaps. Started with the avowed objective
of galvanizing the public so that they can then be converted into loyal cadre for the freedom struggle by Maharashtras Lokmanya Tilak, Ganpati is one of Bombays popular annual theme for another party.
Tonight, as in any time recently: The crowd outside Matunga is a vast secular crowd caught in the annual neon glow of Ganpati festival. Plump Gujarati ladies and their about-to-be-plump girls, and long fat Gujarati men. Then, the plump Tamilian matron, silver flower twisted through the nose, with her daughter dark and long legged but with a gawkiness that will peak into another Padma Lakshmi when she hits New York two years later, and the father with devotion crumpled into the folds of his veshti, and Tamil prayers whispered only for himself and the Lord to hear. And the Maharashtrians, of course. Striding in with shy boys and ebullient girls. The father is robust and unmindful of the aliens who have appropriated his favourite god. For Ganpati belongs to the
Maharashtrians. However, this grand Ganpati pandal is famously funded by the legatees of the late Tamilian don of Mumbai underworld Varadarajan Mudaliar.
Past:Fifteen years back, on the low wall that links Matunga Gymkhana with Dadar, known as the katta, I had as a collegian discovered the strength of love, not faith, for Ganesh. I had told my classmate Manju that Hindus
sculpted elephant headed or monkey headed gods while the Greeks sculpted plain nude men and women. They called their nudes gods and the world admired. We called ours gods too, but too many are more amused.
Manju broke down, tears burst out of her large eyes faster than wayward Bombay rains. She said ‘Do not ever say that of Ganpati’. Or she will never talk to me. In front of 16 collegians, that was a real threat. And it came from love for that pot bellied elephant trunk and gorgeous Chinese eyed little imp of a god.
Tonight; as in last night: I am at Tejookaya Park. I decide to visit my aunt who stays there. Their building has a Ganpati. My Maharashtrian woman companion decides to pay her obeisance to her favourite god. She strips me of the ten rupees in change she needs. While I smoke, and she disappears into the pandal housing the Tejookaya Park Ganpati-
Welcome:
31srt successful year of Ganesh Chathurti..or something a banner says- I espy a face with character. Hunting for faces with character is a favourite time pass with me, that is, it is a favourite pastime for me, if you are from outside Bombay.
She is straight from Tamas, the Bhisham Sahni-Govind Nihalani partition epic, or from M S Sathyu`s Garam Hawa too, in fact from any family saga that requires a woman with square well-set determined jaw draped in wrinkled reverence. An old Sardarni. She is praying to the Ganpati there with the fervour with which I presume her ancestors somewhere in Punjab or in and around the Indus prayed for their men folk. The faith of the women that kept their men alive. I remembered that line from Chemeen, the Malayalam opus by Takazhi Shivashankara Pillai. The lives of men at the high seas reside in the hearts of their women on the shore. The old Sardarni brought such images because her face had that colloidal mixture of extreme reverence and extreme need. The rawness of human faith.
Next to her was a younger Sardar, presumably her son. And his two jauntily dressed daughters of five and four finished their prayers, a military exercise that snapped into reverential attention for three minutes and broke into more immediate issues of playing boys all around.
The man was all attention and meditation for sometime, and then waited almost apologetically for his mother to finish.
Past: ‘Chorundoo kiya.’ That was Shakir when I was 14. He must have been 12 or 13 then. That was Azamgarh Malayalam shot out at my Malappuram mother. She laughs. I laugh. So does Suresh, a half-Chrisitian half Andhrite but fully Keralite friend. Others who laugh without understanding include Jeffrey, Hanif, Sushil, Darshan. And we eventually sit down to have a vegetarian feast for Onam in a cramped house in a small industrial town of Gujarat. Funny as it seems, food united us at that moment of festivity-in-exile in broad daylight inside my small house in my small town Gujarat. The same way as in the late nights after the entirely platonic revelry of Navratri, we all headed to Paradise Restaurant to have chicken masala. Too many of us were not allowed non- vegetarian food in our own homes. The faith of shared promiscuity is as profound as that of the faithful believer.