WHEN A CITY LOST ITS SOUL

The average urban middle class individual that gave Guwahati much of its character is fast vanishing, whether for good or for bad one has no answer.

Look at Sushil Duara – a very sensitive individual. He felt in his pulses the angst of a city in the throes of violence, corruption, of near breakdown, and anarchy. This was 1992, a significant year in the period when a complete turnaround was being effected in the Guwahati psyche.

Duara was not alone. I could observe, in small measures, a Sushil Duara in everybody in the family and friend circles that I met. Goes without saying I belong to Guwahati’s urban middle class myself. I saw everybody talking about the state of the country, and I heard everybody blaming the government, the politicians, the insurgents and their neighbours for it. Nobody thought they themselves mattered enough to cause anything good or bad in the society. Much like Sushil Duara.

And everybody was tensed, afraid, suspicious.

I was in school, a student of class eight, and I fancied myself a revolutionary. I had had an overdose of political literature – I remember reading nihilistic philosophy behind my social studies textbook in the backbenches. I wrote insurgent poetry on the sly and a small coterie of friends read and admired them. And we all read poet-revolutionaries and dreamed of overturning the establishment.

Revolution abandoned me when school authorities threatened to report to my parents about my annunciation of insurgency. By then, the unreserved support that ‘our boys’ in the ‘xangathan’ (organization) leading the ‘revolution’ had been receiving from all strata of the Axamiya society had begun to dissolve in the face of a highly successful counter-insurgency strategy robbing the insurgents of their biggest strength – their mass support. And especially in the urban centers, the middle classes were persuaded to shed their emotive response to the movement. It seemed too uphill a task to me to try and persuade my parents against the flow – so I joined the flow and left for Delhi.

Scholarship in the time of insurgency did not seem feasible, so I came to a place where everybody from Assam was branded, in the popular imagination, a ‘terrorist’. Silabhadra’s story also uses this term and it made me wonder about the complete turnaround in public opinion and of the resultant literary reflection of a band of boys who had begun a fight for self-determination as ‘terrorists’. What do you call them really? To urban middle class people like my parents and the author, for whom security of life and property is the be-all and end-all, anything that threatens to destabilize their carefully organized lives seems terrifying. Be it insurgents who make political statements through bomb and bullets or the state’s armed forces stationed in the pavements outside their houses, leering at their girls (they read almost daily reports of rapes by the army in villages thought to be insurgent hideouts) or slapping their boys just because they were walking by (we laugh at our cousin now but he still can’t understand why the Black Panther slapped him that day so many years ago in Panbazar).

I have seen my Ma do a Sushil Duara many times when any of us were even a few minutes later than our usual time. The fear was real, palpable.

Guwahati got over it quite fast though. There is just too much money and too many opportunities for Guwahatians to have any reason to complain against the state. The city figures prominently in some of the indices listing highest purchasing powers in the country. Certain places in the city are being developed so that those habituated to places like Delhi or Mumbai or Bangalore might not remember where they are. The crowd at Café Coffee Day on the GS Road, for instance, exudes an air of comfort – they finally feel at home in Guwahati, in interiors that make them forget about the reality outside.

The addas (meeting points) at Panbazaar, Uzanbazaar, and all those places where poets, actors, artists, students or professionals gathered and talked about things other than the latest consumer good they had acquired, have lost much of their vigour. Quite like the Neros of Sushil Duara’s making, most of the younger generation is oblivious to the fires burning today; they are too busy fiddling alien tunes composed for them by unsuspected musicians. And yet, somebody’s dying, somebody’s killing. Nobody seems to care much. Guwahati is on a different road altogether. And these roads are narrow, cluttered with too many cars, emitting too much smoke, its sensibilities fogged over. It is a city enveloped in smog all right.
***

SMOG

A short story by Silabhadra
Translated by Uddipana Goswami

This is a short story I translated that very effectively captures the moment of transition of the Guwahati that I loved to the Guwahati that I abhor. Reflections on this transition to follow soon.

Suddenly, Sushil Duara stopped in his tracks. How can they be laughing in such a carefree manner? A group of young men. Looks like they work in the office nearby; they must have come out together. They are walking this short distance together; once on the main road, they will board a bus, get on to a rickshaw, or if it is not too far away, they will walk it home. It must have been something really funny that had made them laugh so much.

How can they be laughing? They are well-dressed and work in offices. They are educated, so they cannot but be aware of the prevalent situation in the country. Then? Nero played the fiddle while Rome burnt. What use singling Nero out? What are these people doing? Some of them will be boarding the bus at the bus-stop. There could be a bomb-blast that could severe somebody’s leg. And this is not in the realm of fantasy; it is almost an everyday real-life incidence. Despite being aware of these possibilities, how could they be laughing? Sushil Duara stood rooted to where he was in the middle of the road, staring at the young men, utterly baffled.
***


“What has happened to you?”

Sushil Duara is irked by his wife’s question.

“What is there to happen? Nothing.”

“Well then, get up. Go to that room.”

“Why?”

“I have to clean the cobwebs. Don’t you see what state this room is in?”

Amazing! While the country is in such a desperate state, all she is concerned with is cleaning cobwebs. It was today’s newspaper that carried the news: 10 killed, 90 injured seriously in bomb-blast at New Delhi bus-stand. Her elder sister’s son lives in Delhi. She has taken it for granted that he is safe, but something might as well have happened to him. Waiting for a bus at the bus-stand is not an improbability. Sushil Duara’s wife is not illiterate; she too has read the papers.
***


The nerves remain strained twenty four hours a day. There is always an agitation, endless tension. What if there is no water supply for three days on end? How will so many people bathe, what will they drink? What if there is no power? What if the gas is exhausted before the new cylinder is delivered? There is no saying when you will get one. How does one cook then? These are not mere possibilities, they happen in real life.

All bonds have grown loose and unsteady. One cannot say when they will actually collapse. And why not? In the present state of affairs that is just what one can expect. These anxieties are always there. Over and above that, if any member of the family leaves home to go somewhere, there is always that same uneasiness. If you could at least return home alive, even with an injury, consider yourself fortunate. Who knows what could happen and when? You do not know where there will be a bomb blast or when a minibus will run you over. Such incidents occur almost daily. Wasn’t Mahanta killed by a truck the other day when he was on that rickshaw with his grandson? The grandson was thrown off and was somehow saved. What precautions can one take? They will chase you and run you over even on the footpath.

And then, on the one hand there is the dance of death orchestrated by the terrorists, on the other, the brutal atrocities of the armed security forces. You cannot stay detached from these even if you wanted to. Sushil Duara’s elder brother is a Congress worker. He has been a Congressman since the days before India's independence. A good man and devout worker, he has never tried to avail of any political privilege. Everyone in the village respected him. But so what? Was not Manabendra Sarma shot down? And everybody says he was a good man. Sushil Duara always remains apprehensive; anytime now, the news of his brother’s death might reach him. Let him die if he has to because he is quite old now, it will not be a matter of much bereavement. The only relief for Duara will be if he does not die a violent death.

Now Sushil Duara firmly believes that one of his nephews has links with the terrorists. A good boy, quite intelligent. Being the first son born to the brothers, he was everybody’s pet. However, once he fell into their hands, the security forces would not lavish love on him. Nah! Cannot think of such things anymore. Impossible, unbearable. What days, what circumstances!
***


Thinking of the country makes your head reel. You shiver in terror seeing what you do of the political leaders. These are the very people who have been governing the country and will continue governing it. Imprudent, self-centred Liliputs! How can they afford the time to think about the country? They are ready to destroy not only their parties but also their own country for the sake of the gaddi. Not one of them has a modicum of morality. Sky high avarice, lust for power, for affluence. Otherwise, how could Chautala be unanimously elected leader of the party?

What is the use of talking about Chautala alone? The more corrupt a political leader is, greater is the number of his supporters. Political Science has today become a full-fledged criminal science. Murderers, rapists, have a field day now. And politics now informs every aspect of national life. Even art and culture are today under the control of these politicians. If you can keep the right connections, you are a famous musician, a reputed artist; if not, your talent remains unheeded. Being cheated over and over again, Sushil Duara has lost the stamina to keep alive his slight hopes. Maybe this one will be able to do something. Fruitless hope, illusory belief.

Death of your son, gruesome death of your kin, all these are normal occurrences. There is no guarantee that anyone leaving home will return. Explosions in the bus-stand, explosions at the market place. You have to wait at the bus-stand, you have to go to the market. Even at home, there is no escape. You have to accept these as normal occurrences.

Then would we not have to re-assess our feelings, our emotions? A new species of people will have to evolve; a people who know not how to weep even at the death of their loved ones. What kind of people will these be? People or robots?
***


No one knew exactly why Sushil Duara suddenly went mad. He was a good man, an accomplished man. What happened all of a sudden? Was there anything like this in his family?

No?

Then?
***

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Silabhadra is a Sahitya Akademi award winning writer from Axam. This story is taken from the anthology Madhupur Bahudur (Madhupur is Far Away) (1992: Barua Book Agency, Guwahati). It was for this book that he won the Sahitya Akademi in 1994. Interestingly, Silabhadra took up creative writing only after his retirement. He used to teach mathematics earlier.
***