The Fiddleer. Marc Chagall. Courtesy: WikiArt
Ashoak Upadhyay
A
t Howston I felt it! That salivary ecstasy of words cascading across the stage down the aisles towards me, cheerleading , birthing our frenetic fantasies that had waited so long, decades even to see the roseate light of a new dawn, in this hall graced with the haloed patina of greatness curled up in that bird’s Golden Nest and in the 56” inch Chest, our Prime-time Minister and their Precedent-less those two starry helmsmen of our destiny-ships. hands entwined in a tango of hyphenated fates, Indian-Americans us all, at Howston his words tumbled out of his majestic Chest and rolled thunderously towards me in the fiftieth row, my own rheumatic chest wheezing with unskinned delight at new found fantasies of self-discovery; Hindutva is my birthright I mumbled throatily into a stout red-gold sari heaving with mysterious joys long dormant bulbous eyes glued to the Chest, and we have just got it, there it is I held her soft-as-mango pulp arm, look here it comes. Spellbound I grabbed at them, Words, I mean, savoured each, swallowed some rapidly, their vital juices coursing through my thinning blood, thickening arteries. Drinking in that hyphenated empire of greatness speeding down the stage 50,000 of us chanting that four letter word for magic, “Modi!” “Modi” making America great again! And then it was over and I headed to the car park, three sheets to the wind; still clutching those words gilt-framed with the vibrations of grand gestures of solidary starry dictators.
Teary-eyed, cheeks radiant with gold-dust fantasies showered on us I, a diasporic dyspeptic Indian-American, twice-divorced father of a boy, bi-polared into love for a neighborhood somewhere in this wonderful trumped-up country and hate for a land he does not read, I, the proud owner of a 7-11 in King of Prussia, knew deliverance had arrived in my patru-bhumi! I hold it in my heart, heard it echoing like the chants of freedom from a slavery I had been taught had mired us Hindus into ignorance, dirt, fear–orphans in our own maha-bharat, trampled under the hooves of Mongoloid beasts, raping our fair-skinned, rosy-lipped damsels, desecrating our jasmine temples where our champions were born and sired. Oh, the indignity of it all! But now? I had to just listen to the roar in my cranium, empty all these years of all positives except empty hatred; I had to hear the thunderous Word: its vibrations inflecting our parched lives our wilting destiny, a strength emanating like the rays of the Sun, so the Words from that Chest heaving with the recognition that the End of History is Nigh! The new HIndutva dawn is here!
Why you ask dear reader did this blessed spectator travel by Greyhound with smelly darkies down to the Howston Carnival? Because he was there to attract the benison of death-defying Words! At Howston, we Indians desperate for a place in the bleeding sun of this adopted benighted Disunited State of bloodied histories–we needed Words to fill our emptied, scooped-out souls; words; their post-truth; their grounding in spectacular resonant emptiness weaving magical swirls of ice-creamed evanescence!
Our star-studded helmsman renders possible what is not available in grimy reality; he makes reality disappear in the sweet magnolia-ed perfume of his Words, the Strange Fruits of a language of which he is creator, dissipating distinctions between itself and reality, between language and the speaker. No! He banishes reality to the dustbin of History indeed exiles history itself because his words are History, he is History because he is India and if he is Great then so is India and here in Howston we, I, you dear Reader imbibed such potent words as to stagger out to our dismal lives drunk with distillled Post-Truth and History Manufactured On the Spot! Freshly brewed!
I wanted to play the fiddle. To fiddle away to the ringing cadences of his Words…game-changing. No! Climate changing! Thrusting out his treasure Chest of vaunting ambitions, glorious destinies for us all cowed down by the ravages of history into a climate of submissiveness, compromise accommodation, tolerance for skull caps, hot pants, hijab-ed heads shamed into effeminacy, ashamed of selfish pleasures, when, to the contrary, Swaraj lay in military might…all this changed and if this is not climate-change…what is, I ask you?
The staggering weight of his words banished frivolous realities. 9/11 That is what my son would mutter every time I loosened my waist belt to hammer some sense into him, discipline him to study not some drunk poet’s words, someone called Dylan but two plus two so he could take over the drunkin, I mean dunkin donut for sale in our backyard. 9/11! At first I thought he was going to bomb the house like those bastards that rammed into the WTC; then I figured hee might mean the town cops, 9/11! but I never knew for sure and that is why I hated words, they were my enemy, I preferred silence in the house just the clicking of the clock and the natter of television’s talking-heads. But then! The Chest came along and I knew that cosmic energy emanating from his being and I was transported into an arcadian bliss walling myself with his words into a world so much better than this truth of a boy, this land of black and white shit that I condemned for its un-realness till I found enchantment at Howston. I was mortgaged to Words!
Next morning no hangover; just sweet remembrance and resolve to live up to the Words I had heard the night before. I looked for into the chest. I beg pardon….cupbboard…for the Words. They were still weighted and loaded, burdened with post-truth and I caressed them like a lover would the downy cheeks of a beloved I never had, married as I was for twenty long years to a dog lover from Edison, NJ and a manic depressive who talked politics to plants, the mother of this brat of mine. I turned those words over and around, looked under them for hidden meanings but we adore beauty as skin-deep, and the more polished the better, and I knew.
My Pitru-bhumi that I had not seen for years but mobiled and sent Benjamins to, had at last moved into the light. No more an area of Darkness! I held up those gold-sheened words that had turned my head with their heady ambrosia perfumes: Article 370 gone! Kashmir is With Us! India is One! Is Won!
Everyone in India, mainstream papers said it! Even Pratap Bhanu Mehta trumpeted! “Triumphalism has won” “Modi is Triumphalism” Of course the Chest is not defeatism! Compromise! These words join the others like Secularism, Nehru, tolerance in the dustbin of pre-History, to BC! Before Chest!
Under the Chest’s bootstrap-Words we feel protected! He asks for our souls…I give it to him! To him, the very epitome of resolve, determination, will to power; he is their metonym and we love him for that will to power because we know that when he wills, we will; when he wins we win, the country wins, because he is India. Long ago, before we were born, in BC I think, some French king used to say the state is me and he was toppled. But our Chest is India and that makes him invincible because we are invincible! We wanted Article 370 abrogated because Kashmir is ours and he knew that and did what every Right thinking Indian has wanted for 70 years. But did any leader listen? That pandit? The Chest did! Why? Because he is India, like Bharat Mata! We wanted the Kashmiri subjugated, I mean the subjects to feel Indian! To behave when our gallant soldiers point their guns at them occasionally fire, (in the air of course.)
That is why Trump holds aloft the Hand of India, Made in India! Of the People, From the People! Not some namby-plumby from Oxenbridge or France like that king I told about. See his words. Weighed in gold. After Phulwama! Pakistan will pay a heavy price”: priceless Words that struck terror in the heart of the terrorist, the government and peoples across the western border and warmed the cockles of our hearts and reassured us that land, our women, kitchens, vegetarianism will be safe till the cows come home from eating plastic!
His words ring across the heart of our darkness lighting it up! Indians respect diversity, the Chest thunders, his words falling like hail on the heads of the quivering fools who think diversity means hugging skull caps, slaughtering our sacred cows! Diversity! We know what that means; respect for bovine life as much as human. Excited beyond measure, my heart thumping as wildly as that damn music blaring loud from my son’s room across the thin partition tremoring with the silly words about desolation row that Dylan fellow was bleating I decided to visit my patru-bhumi, Bharat mata if you know what I mean.
I asked my elder brother, a security guard at an Amazon warehouse nearby to baby-sit my 7/11 and my son. He was perfect for both the jobs. He would make sure that brat worked his dim wits off to make two plus one equal three not one as he kept telling me patiently as if I were the dim wit! I packed my words that I had collected at Howston and others to remind me of the New Age dawn. Memory as time Past was useless, we were now in a present fenced in by the words of peace as war, harmony through oneness, uniformity. At the airport in the capital of Hind-Sindhu, I heard and saw some more magic this time in acronyms that were far easier to pack and cart around as symbols of our greatness. Though weighty, they admitted of a clarity that was unmistakably Bharatian, not Indian mind you. I too am a wordsmith; I learn, absorb the Leader’s words as my passions; mimicry is the best form of obeisance, aver scholars from Harvard.
I landed in the midst of a righteous call to democratic norms by the guardians of our identity! How else could the purity of our culture be ensured other than by keeping out the dirty unwashed refugees with skull caps? Welcome the Christians! Parsis, Buddhists, they are Hindus at the end of the day aren’t they? I remember a Parsi bootlegger in my college days would swear by Ganesha and eat Puran-Poli instead of custard pudding. That’s democracy for you! When all become one! Uniformity, homogeneity, all tigers or rabbits I say. No pussycatting around. Bengal tigers are we Hindus!
But what is that I hear? A roar of unrighteous protest from behind the grimy walls of treacherous slummeries! Dens of iniquity in every hostel of pampered universities, filthy dark-hearted over-indulged, sex-crazy bare-legged, head-scarfed women exposing cleavages and hatred for our Right to confer entry into the gates of pearly paradise that is Bharat! Why let any rough-raff pleading persecution in? But no! These youths, so much like my son I wish I didn’t have and daughters I thanked Ram baba I did not have, nasty brats, camping out in the streets instead of fighting the enemy across at Phulwana or pledging to take Lahore!
Every night I’d return to my hotel room and find those magical words thundered from platforms across our heartlands with a devastating dramaturgy of the pure gesture, now flaking off at the edges. I talk to them soothingly, words of passionate belonging, of die-hardy allegiance, I croon to them. And every night they crumble a little more as the reverberations of the chants of those unholy roistering crowds, shameless ill-bred unpatriotic, unlike those smart uniformed officers keeping the Valley’s people safe from themselves. I always said, the people do not deserve what they got; what our masters give them. At times I feel our masters should dismiss the people and look for new ones; perhaps that is why the CAA and NCR; a nation of obedient non-skull-capped refugees would be preferable to those spoilt brats from Bihari villages reading dirty books about freedom, swearing by their book, the Constitution they shout, as if they were Kitaabayas like those jihadis. Could they be jihadis? Must investigate…
Then there’s Kashmirr. After seventy years of pussyfooting, cajoling those spoilt brats, our Leader and his pack, I mean his team, took the decision that only tough guys who don’t dance, can. Abrogation! Who put that article in that book anyway? And it is just an article right? Three numbers…370. You need a clean hand to sweep away the history of pampers! And with that abolition India gives those brats a chance to throw away the stones where they belong, by the roadside, the stones I mean and join the holy project of Akhand Bharat. Be with us! Become like us…bhakts of a Hindu modernity fueled by reliance on capital, a Nation-State called Akhand Bharat fueled by warriors. Get to be exam warriors! Study and get put on the day shift when factories come and pollute your rivers. That’s development! Someone has to pay the price, why not the rivers and the trees? Build swimming pools! Manicure lawns! Better than those mosquito-infested ravines, I can tell you! Always whining! And now whining…No Internet! What did we do before Internet I want to ask them? Did we not study? How did I buy that 7/11?
As the walls shake with the revelries of the misfits, the outcasts and the anti-national and I smell the fragrance from the street langars, scandalously offering up free food instead of charging them a bomb and helping our nationalistic economy gather pace, I wonder how our enemies across the Radcliffe lines would be feeling; gorging on beef biryanis, sitting atop missiles while we scream freedom, dignity, and dance on the streets! We should be readying to spread the idea of Maha bharat across the Khyber Pass so Max Muller’s ghost can hear it across in Germany and smile! Germans are Hindus, I tell you. Why else did Goethe write Shakuntala? Why do so many leaders in the West hug our great leader like long lost brother-in-arms? The only ones who do not hug are the beefeaters across the border!
I am now confined to my room. Locked down. Locked in. Late February I had moved to a dharamshala in Allahabad, I mean Prayagraj, I wanted to flee the echo of those freedom songs falling like pellets of poison in my ears through the hotel room’s air-conditioning. Then the dastardly covid hit! Yes! And from the way they have been nibbling away at our border-areas, which I am sure many of us never even knew existed before their troops walked into them with a determination, that, I must admit is admirable, if only we could do the same to you-know-which territory, yes, that dastardly act our leader, the master of the pure gesture grandiloquently aired away with words that I continue to value even though in my airless room by the sangam I am starting to feel lonely. The mobile I am dictating this precious memoir that you, dear Raeder will soon have in your hands for your edufication, is Chinese. I get Chinese noodles from a takeaway run by an RSS wanna-be hotelier who wants me to adopt him so he can inherit my 7/11, though I wouldn’t mind passing on my son in its stead. We must boycott the Chinese! But where do we start? That probably explains the great leader’s dismissiveness about territorial expansionism of the Chinese who he would like, particularly their leader-for-life to take into his arms and say, “Whats a bit of territory between us great dictators my dear Sir!” No Hindi-Chini bhai-bhai! That weak-kneed Oxenbridge so-called Pandit sold us short with his slogan and I say, now, watching those words flae away daily as I think my thoughts out to them, that we have no friends left; we are self-reliant!
That is why the great leader called for “Atmanirbhar Bharat Abhiyan.” Magical! Those words sit with all their gilt-edged ponderousness lending me succor in times of increasing depression and uncertainty and loneliness. I have all the time now to think through the pure gesture of those words. Nepal hates us, China does so too; both want to nibble away at our areas and I say that’s not true! Nepal is a Hindu kingdom so it is ours anyway; Bangladesh matters little since most of their cooks have fled to Southall or Jackson Heights New York. Bhutan isn’t a nation, it’s too busy chasing happiness. So we are on our own! Our only friends are the seas around us though I should not be certain of this cordiality considering those typhoons that wash away the dirty and unwashed to be sure but also property and beachfront hotels. So we are self-reliant! We are getting strong! Weeding out the weaklings. Those migrant workers needed to have become self-reliant! That’s what Makes India! Strength! Discipline! Sometimes I wish the entire nation of Hindus of course was an army in uniform! Graduating from khaki shorts and sticks to camouflage dress and automatic rifles! Why did those migrant families sleep on the tracks? They were weak! They were like those farmers, tired of living, willing death! Not strong like our operatic leader spinning paradise on earth in this narrow here-and-now. Yes, his words have narrowed our Present to a paradisical estate of the strong and believers in self-reliance, Make in India dreams with the supreme reliance on ambitions to morph into the googled facebook of Prosperity!
I grow old, I wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled…to stave off the muck slowly seeping into my room. I can hear the fissures in those words of pure magic that held me together, defined my destiny, created passions through quotable quotes.
Alone in a room the dim light narrows to a pin point focused on the inner wall; at the window I look across the confluence of our mother-rivers and hear the ghosts of Malkauns faintly presaging some unfathomable end. I speak into my phone rapidly, perhaps incoherently, to you my dear reader, my last few notes on this mournful reality that this soul mortgaged so willingly to the magic of the master’s words and to the End-of-History as maha-hindu-ka-sthaan fears approaches its apocalyptic end. Or is it the beginning? Every end is a beginning. Death is only a passage to life. Mists, the exhaled breath of the ghosts spread over the water’s turbid blackened ripples. Then a tiny ray of light falls on a boat…an ark?…in a flitting chiaroscuro on two old men at either end, a poet and the prophet at bow and stern and in between waving their arms open mouthed, a million mutinies.
The light flickers, dies abruptly; in the darkness nothing but sullen silence.
“ ‘Get back, get out of here, filthy ghosts,
Return to your old night’.
But no one replied, and instead,
All in a circle took a step forward.” (Primo Levi)
******
Note --This essay was written with a deep bow to Sigizmund Krzhzhanovsky, in particular his story “Autobiography of a Corpse.” See his collection of short stories by the same name. Introduction by Adam Thirwell. Translated by Joanna Turnbull with Nikolai Formozov. New York Review of Books. New York. 2013 --Primo Levi: The Sixth Day. Translated by Raymond Rosenthal. AN Abacus Book. 1991. (Quotes from the epigram by Levi). Also read in this series: Weeding Out The Weak: Ways of Living Colouring Within the Lines: Press in the Hall of Mirrors
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