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THE HOUSE ON
LILAC ALLEY
Lalita Pandit
During the day,
the dirt road leading from the Himachal Pradesh university campus to her
dorm looks rugged. Moonlight makes it soft, jasmine-strewn. The sprawling
thing that looks like a historic architecture in ruins will be splendid
when it is done; it will be the new Administration Building. The Women’s
dorm is closest to the construction site. This means that during the day
there is too much noise and dust. The serving women work very hard to keep
the rooms and hallways clean. In the evenings, when it is time to rest,
they sing Pahari songs. Though the melodies are different, as are the
languages, their singing makes Tara think of the house on Lilac Alley, in
Kashmir.
Since her early
childhood, seeing cousins and siblings leave, she has felt her heart fill
with despair. That Tara should devote her life’s effort to the project of
banishing herself from her birthplace does not seem right to her. Yet,
there it is. She is expected to shape her life-goals around the primary
object of exiting from her homeland, to free up the space she occupies
there. It seems like systematic marginalization, phasing out of the
regional, religious minority, but it is not seen that way. To fight
against such an invisible and insistent process of discrimination is, for
sure, a cause, but it cannot be turned into one. The reason is that in
national and many global contexts, the terms in which one can talk of
dispossession and marginalization do not fit the unique history of
Kashmir. Kashmir is too remote a region, too far away from centers of
power, from places where discourses are framed and the universal rhetoric
of ‘right causes’ is manufactured.
On rainy
Sundays, curled up in her bed, Tara indulges in daydreams. She invents
scenarios of fighting against the systematic discrimination in Kashmir.
She imagines writing petitions, getting signatures, using some type of a
satyagraha form of resistance. She rehearses elaborate speeches, hunger
strikes, heated conversations with friends and allies, pamphlets, dharnas,
the whole thing. As happens in daydreams, there is a happy ending. Tara
wins her right to be considered a valid person in her home region.
In this wish
fulfilling world, Tara imagines taking the daily bus from Srinagar to the
Kashmir University campus. The bus crosses a bridge over a strip of the
famous lake. In July, rose colored lotus is in bloom. Blue lotus, on the
other side of the lake, blooms earlier in the year. Tara feels one with
the landscape, the water, the hills and forests, distant snow on the
Himalayas. Of course, she is alone there as she is here. She likes her
solitude, but it is different to be among one’s own people. The phrase,
‘one’s own people’ (apane log, paenin lookh) seems strange to her.
Who is Tara, and
who are her people? If human beings go through many births and deaths,
there are many homes, familial and national ties, many mothers, fathers,
sisters, brothers one has had in previous lives. Why privilege the human
bondage of one birth only because it is here and now. This is a consoling
thought, it brings forth the message of Kashmir’s age old liberation
theology.
At this point,
Tara’s roommate walks in, turns on the lights. Supper is over, the dining
hall is closed. Indu has brought a plateful of food for Tara: corn bread,
rice, dal and some green vegetable that looks like spinach but is
something else. Indu visits her home in Mandi once a month. In September,
she took Tara with her. Rajni is from Solan. She goes home nearly every
Saturday and comes back Monday mornings, carrying bagfuls of sweet bread,
pickled meats and fresh fruit. Indu and Tara meet her at the Summerhill
train station.
In the course of
their leisurely climb from the train station to the dorm up on the hill
(that is very much like the pine forest of the goddess Tripursundari in
Devsar, Kashmir), Tara’s mind returns to the same nagging subject. In her
place, she would do what Rajni does. She would study in Srinagar, return
to the village home every Saturday. On Monday mornings, she would take the
bus again. In late October, the bus would start when it is still dark and
she would watch dawning of a day, ray by beautiful ray, over unending
streams that make their way under foot bridges, around windmills, through
hamlets that are unaware of the pernicious forces of history. The bus stop
in her village is a semi circle of paved road girdled by a hillock.
Children and
adults roam all over this vudar, searching for wild flowers, for mushrooms
on rainy afternoons. The mud is red and sticky, the spring at the foot of
the hill has clean water: warm in winter, cool in summer. Tara remembers
washing the mushrooms one by one, wrapping them carefully in a spread of
overlapping Chinar leaves to give to her mother. She would give the
wildflowers to her grandmother. She remembers the pleasant sensation of
physical exhaustion at the end of a day, waiting for mealtimes in her
grandfather’s room, watching evening shadows gather like layers of quilts
and blankets.
What is to come
relates to Tara’s sense of loss of these years, but it is more serious,
tragically grim. Twenty five years later, she is still homeless. Their
ancestral home has been burnt down. All their families have left, with no
one, not one family, or individual, left anywhere in the entire valley. A
significant portion of an entire generation of Kashmiris has experienced
some form of imprisonment, torture, death and/or unexplained disappearance
of a loved one. Kashmiri Hindus have become an unfortunate class of
people, the ‘internally displaced people of India.’ They have spent
fourteen years in ragged refugee camps with no end in sight to the misery
and the abjection.
Time has robbed
Tara of the capacity for daydreaming. Instead, her heart feeds upon what
is left of memory; it traps her in nightmares. In one recurrent nightmare,
Tara finds herself on the fourth floor of the ancestral house in their
village. She hears her mother call her and her sisters, asking them to
open the front door. Tara is alone on that floor, she does not know where
her sisters are, or if they are there? She tries to call out to her mother
from the fourth floor window, but no voice comes out of her throat. She
tries to make sure her mother sees her, so that she can motion for her to
wait, reassure her. Tara’s mother keeps missing her, she calls out her
daughter’s names, one by one, from the oldest to the youngest, moving
frantically from one side of the house to the other. The rooms on the
other side of the fourth floor belong to Tara’s uncle; they are locked up
and she cannot run over there to make sure her mother catches a glimpse of
her. Finally, she decides to go down the four flights of stairs and open
the door for her, hoping that her mother would not leave assuming on one
is home. As she does so, she can still hear her mother calling their
names. There is unspeakable misery and desperation in her voice.
Tara feels
overwhelmed, but somehow coming down the stairs is not easy. When she gets
to the first floor and is so close to the door that she can see moonlight
filter through the cracks, she wakes up, feeling awful for not having been
able to open the door for her mother. It takes her a while to realize that
there is no more a house on the Lilac Alley; only a mother is still
calling. Perhaps there is a wild cherry tree in the front yard, two almond
trees at some distance from a cluster of walnut trees, lilacs staring at
strangers. |
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