Romancing the Past

A few years back, when I was teaching Jack Finney’s story The Third Level in a section of grade 12, I put a question to the entire class: “If you get a chance to live in another time, which would you choose – past or future?” Ann [not her real name] put up her hand first. “Future,” she said.

In Finney’s story, Charley chooses to go back to Galesburg of 1894. He loves those big old frame houses, huge lawns, and tremendous trees with branches roofing the streets. It’s a ‘cool’ place whose evenings were “twice as long.” Life was a relaxed affair. People had time to sit out in the evenings, sipping tea and playing music on their guitars. There would be fireflies all around. Peaceful world. Charley wanted that world.

My question to the class was in relation to that description of an old world. “My father speaks about the horrors of his childhood,” Ann said. “There was poverty. Not enough food to eat, no proper clothes to wear, no vehicles to carry you… Who wants to go back there?” Ann threw the ball back to my court?

“Dear Ann, my childhood belonged to the late 1960s and early 1970s, perhaps ten or more years before your father’s childhood,” I answered Ann. I walked four-and-a-half kilometres every morning to school and another walk of the same distance back home in the evening. Barefoot. On metalled road. Our feet would hurt. Toes were often bruised. One of nature’s laws seemed to be that if you have a bruised toe, that same toe will hit against a stone the next day too, and the next day too. Nature loves to keep bruises alive. Painfully. We walked on, however, because we had no other choice. There were no schoolbags in those days. Maybe, our parents couldn’t afford them. We tied all our books into a bundle, placed the lunchbox on top of that, and carried the entire load on our shoulder. The lunchboxes would be placed near the wall on the floor of the classroom since our desks were too narrow even for keeping our books. Most of the time, ants would enter the lunchbox by lunchtime. We would throw away the lunch and endure the hunger. Some of us would blow away the ants and eat what we could. We even coined a motivational credo that eating ants improved eyesight. When we walked back home in the evening, we would pluck mangoes or guavas or rose apples from any farm on the way. Nobody would chase us away. Children were entitled! Yes, Ann, the world was a good place in those days in spite of all the pain and misery. People were good at heart, by and large. Children could walk freely on the roads. Nobody would kidnap them, boys or girls. If something did go wrong, the adults nearby would make sure that the child was taken care of and reached home safely. There was goodness…

“So would you go back to those days?” Ann asked.

“No,” I answered emphatically and with a warm smile. “I love the luxuries I have now. Why would I choose misery? I was only trying to tell you that luxuries don’t make the world a better place. Because it’s not luxuries that make the difference; it is people.”

Why are Indians so eager to glorify the past? Someone asked me the other day. Is it because, say, Hanuman’s devotion is still the ideal? Sita’s fire-tested chastity has no parallels today? Even a rakshasa like Mandodari was naïve enough to be tricked by an Aryan ape? 

There’s a huge difference between romancing the past and weaponizing it. I answered my friend curtly. Sometimes explanations are not productive.

Today in some churches in Kerala, a pastoral letter [letter from the bishop] was read out about the increasing attacks on Christians in India in the last ten years. Ten years ago, when I warned repeatedly against the Modi government, these same church leaders accused me of being biased against Modi. Now I turn out to have been prophetic.

Eating ants doesn’t open your eyes more though you make such myths for the sake of dealing with hunger. Hunger is a painful reality; myth is a soothing illusion. And some hungers are political. These latter hungers are like Shurpanakha’s love for Rama.