Skip to main content

Makers of History

Fiction

When Sumit put up one of his old snaps on his Facebook timeline, he was only relishing nostalgia for a moment. Or maybe, he wanted a few likes from his virtual friends. Political writing was ignored by people these days like the plague. Politics in the  country had become kind of plague. 

He tagged David to the pic. In fact, David had clicked that photo and Sumit wanted to give him the credit. Or maybe, Sumit wanted at least one person, the tagged one, to take note of the pic. 

David was too quick to distance himself from the tag. "Did I click that picture? I don't remember. I was never so close to you," he texted in Whatsapp. 

"Don't you remember?" Sumit asked in disbelief. How can he forget it? It was the day when Sharmila Chakraborty, their classmate, had spent a whole day in David's rented room whose door remained closed all the while they were together. 

Sumit and David lived in nearby rooms both of which were rented from one Hiren Barua whose main job was to construct cubicles in his little plot of land on the outskirts of Guwahati and give them on rent to students and migrant labourers. "Only one person per room," that was his only commandment. 

"Saala, why do you mention Sharmila? She came for a combined study. Remember it was just a couple of days before our final exams?" David asked. "The door was closed because we didn't want Hiren Barua to question us with his single occupant commandment."

Well, it could never be as innocent as that, Sumit was sure. David had boasted many times, while the two of them shared a few drinks on weekends, about his varied sexual conquests. David worked in a small town in Meghalaya as a teacher for a year or two before he decided to do B.Ed. so that he would be professionally qualified for the job. "I have tried girls from all the tribes available there," he told Sumit on one of those wild evenings. "Each one has a unique flavour, a unique style of doing it." After adding some salacious details he said, "I want to taste a Bengali girl next. I'm sure the Bengali women are tigresses when it comes to the real game." That was just a week or so before Sumit saw Sharmila Chakraborty, their classmate, walk into David's room whose door closed behind her in absolute surrender to Hiren Barua's commandment.

All that was long ago. Those were days when the state of Assam had just confronted the monstrous visage of nationalism by killing more than two thousand migrant Bangladeshi Muslims to whom Indira Gandhi had decided to give voting rights. Now Narendra Modi was repeating Indira's history with a twist: he would legalise all immigrants in Assam except the Muslims. 

There's some poetic justice even in the repetition of history, mused Sumit. 

Sumit and David had parted ways after their B.Ed. David married a Goan Catholic whom he first met on a train and settled down in Bombay which eventually became Mumbai in one of the umpteen comic twists in the country's history.  Sumit returned to his home state of Kerala and found a job in one of the government-aided schools by paying a huge bribe to the management. 

Facebook brought them together after many, many years. A lot of history was written and rewritten in those years. A lot of people were killed as part of those writings and rewritings. A lot of migration and miscegenation took place. The children born to husbands and wives belonging to different regions and religions looked and behaved like any other normal children. 

Yet the new leader wanted a new history. He stepped into a mired pool he called nationalism. He riled its waters. He fished in those riled waters. But he was a vegetarian. He claimed so at least. He knew how to make new histories.

Donald Trump was claiming historicity for his visit to India when Sumit sat in the waiting room of Cochin Airport. Trump said that ten million Indians would be there to welcome him in Ahmedabad. "That's what Mr Modi has promised me. This is a historic event." Didn't Mr Trump know that Mr Modi creates new histories? He could have at least googled the population of Ahmedabad. 

"Hi, aren't you Sumit?"

Sumit looked at the interrogator once again. "Sharmila Chakraborty?"

"Glad to be recognized." She sat next to Sumit. 

Memories were brought alive. Were they the truths? How much of your own life do you remember accurately? Doesn't time add colours and patterns to memories? 

How reliable is history? 

"David once told me about how the two of you visited a brothel in Ulubari," said Sharmila.

Sumit felt a tremor run down his spine. 

"He was testing you, that's what David told me," Sharmila carried on. "He wanted to know whether you were as righteous as you pretended to be. He just sat there outside smoking a cigarette while you had your fling inside."

Another history? Why did he have to tell you all that anyway, Sharmila? 

Sumit didn't have the guts to ask that, however. 

"I don't trust him but," Sharmila was saying. "The cunning little bastard. He called me to his room once to explain Bloom's taxonomy and ended up discovering the taxonomy of my organs." And she laughed.

Narendra Modi was hugging Donald Trump on the TV screen in front of them. 

"Isn't there something artificial about their smiles?" Sumit asked.

"They're making a new history, aren't they?" Sharmila laughed again. 

"You want to know what happened with me in that brothel that evening?" Sumit asked.

She stopped laughing. 

"Nothing. Because I had an erectile dysfunction." 

Sharmila hesitated between an apology and a laughter.  

"It's okay but..." Sumit fumbled. "I mean it was a temporary problem, one of the infinite lacunae in history."

Sharmila stared at him for a moment before bursting out into another ringing laughter. "History's lacunae are more interesting, Sumit. The actual truths lie there."


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Grandeur of the dooms

John Keats by William Hilton [Wikipedia] One of the poems included in CBSE’s class 12 English literature is an extract from Keats’ Endymion . A question that has come to me again and again from students as well as teachers is: What does “the grandeur of the dooms…” mean? It is a line that has perplexed me too. I have been amused by the kind of interpretations given in the guidebooks for students. Quite many of these books interpret the word ‘dooms’ to mean the Doomsday. Look at the following answer given in one such guidebook made available online by a well-known educational establishment.  That is very amusing considering the fact that Keats was an agnostic, if not a confirmed atheist. Keats would never accept a God who would come riding a majestic cloud on the day of the Last Judgment to apportion the good and the evil souls to Heaven and Hell. Evil is an integral part of life, Keats knew too well. No human can avoid evil any more than “a rose can avoid a blighting wind.” How...

Anyone for a better world?

The above video was sent to me on WhatsApp by a friend who also asked me to write a blog post on the injustices of capitalism. The friend quoted Lenin: “Capitalism is going to give us the rope with which we are going to hang them.” I wasn’t particularly enthused by the message or the demand for a blog post because I am like Benjamin the donkey in Orwell’s Animal Farm . Benjamin is cynical when it comes to politics. He knows that no party or ideology is going to make any substantial difference as far as the common folk are concerned. What can be an alternative to capitalism, for instance? Socialism/Communism? Benign dictatorship? Theocracy? The video above shows the absolute heartlessness of capitalism. But has socialism/communism been any better in the erstwhile USSR, China, and present North Korea, Venezuela, and Cuba? Dictatorship and theocracy are not economic systems, but have they saved any nation from injustices? I believe the problem is not with systems or ideologies . T...

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Innards of Spirituality

When a huge concrete cross was being shattered with a demolition hammer, I laughed rather raucously. I was watching the breakfast news on TV as usual. Most of the time, breakfast news is depressing with news about drug addicts, rapists, murderers, and politicians. This video of a cross being brought down in a very unceremonious ritual officiated by revenue mandarins was unique in a country of people whose religious sentiments are more brittle than dry leaves in an Indian summer. Maggie was not amused at all by my laughter because she misunderstood that I was laughing at a religious leaf being crushed with a political hammer. “This is the same cross in front of which our X (I named a very close relative of ours) fell prostrate a couple of months back during their picnic to Parumthumpara,” I explained. “She is a very spiritual person and so she respected the cross, that’s all.” Maggie’s spirituality is more like a leaf in a storm: I am the satanic storm and she is the tenacious ...

Insecure Leaders

Yakshi in Pinterest In his book The God Delusion , Richard Dawkins argues that nationalism, religious bigotry, and other forms of zealotry are often the result of insecurity, a lack of self-confidence, or a deep-seated fear of insignificance. Quite many of today’s world leaders, who are all extremely and unwarrantedly belligerent, reminded me of Dawkins though I’m no fan of the man’s scientific extremism. Dawkins is only one among many thinkers who expressed similar ideas, however. Eric Hoffer says in The True Believer that mass movements, including religious and nationalist ones, attract individuals who seek to escape their own personal failures or anxieties by identifying with a larger cause. There are too many people suffering from personal insecurities in today’s world, it appears. There’s so much nationalism and even more unhealthy religious fervour. In India, both nationalism and religion have got mixed into a lethal concoction. M any Indian newspapers of today have give...