The Love Song of a Secularist

The relative of the Hathras victim gather her ashes
Watch the video here

Let us go then, you and I. We’ll walk through certain half-deserted streets where some neglected truths lie awaiting redemption. We are not redeemers, you and I. We’re just observers. Observers of so-called redeemers.

You and I have endured these redeemers for the past six years. We have endured their deafening, hollow slogans. We have endured the poison they spewed into our air in the name of gods and holy cows. We have endured hatred, lynching, raping, and flagrant fraudulence that masquerades as nationalism.

We have endured endless, tedious arguments of a billion insidious intents. Isn’t it time now to take a break and ask the overwhelming question? Oh, do not ask what that question is. Let us go and make our visit.

Men in saffron come and go talking about Ram Lalla’s palatial abode coming up in Ayodhya. Yonder in Hathras is a young girl being raped by god’s defenders, the yogi’s men by caste. You know who the yogi is and what caste means in this land which they’re supposedly turning into Ram Raj. Here the hapless cries of a gangraped girl have a caste. They call it Dalit.

Everyone has a caste here, you know. And the caste determines the worth of the individual. Just to hoodwink the naïve rank and file the so-called redeemers will raise one Dalit to the President’s chair which has nothing but blinding glitter to offer. Empty glitter for one Dalit. Rape for all others.

Rape is a metaphor, you know. It is the saffron flame that rubs its back upon history’s window-panes. It is the same flame that licks our courts of justice and halls of learning making them blush in saffron shade. The same flame that rubs its back upon bills in the Parliament as if bills were toilet tissues torn off the roll on the wall.

As the flame mellows into autumn yellow, let us walk on, you and I, with faces prepared to meet the slogans that we will pass by. Sabka Saath. Beti Bhachao. Jab tak dawai nahi, tab tak dhilai nahi.

The autumn yellow turns into a burning saffron in the field yonder. You can see khaki men and a dancing flame. You can smell petrol. Women wail in the distance. The women were not even allowed to have a look at the face of their daughter raped and killed by defenders of the country’s glorious ancient civilisation.

I don’t know whether they know that women never had a place in that civilisation. Except to wail. Or to wait and serve. Or be raped and burnt.

Our sacred texts hold the formulas for everything. Formulas for plundering from others in the name of castes. Formulas to enslave the men. To rape the women. And a formula for burning the dead.

You are a formulated phrase, my friend, in this civilisation whose history goes back to millennia. We are proud of its ancestry which knew quantum mechanics and plastic surgery. We always knew how to pin you onto a wall in the form of a sprawling, wriggling formula.

The saffron flame has stopped dancing. The khaki has disappeared. There is only ash left in the field. Black ashes of a burning civilisation.

Wait. There are some boys searching for something among those ashes. Let us go, you and I, beyond smug presumptions and vain assumptions, beyond the grandeur of our ancient history, into that field where the body of a young girl was made to vanish like our redeemers do with wretchedness using financial statistics.

The boys are collecting the bones of the girl’s soul.

Don’t worry, our ancient scriptures have formulas to put those bones to eternal rest.

The yellow evening is turning dark. The saffron passion will turn darker. Let us turn back.

Now I’m sure you know what the overwhelming question is. Ask the question, my friend. Now is the time.

Don’t let dark silence fall like a shadowy spectrum between your dream and the reality, between the emotion and the response… between those neglected truths and you.

 

PS. This blog is taking part in Blogchatter’s #MyFriendAlexa campaign.

The above post is founded on T S Eliot’s classical poem, The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock.