E-Book, Englisch, 448 Seiten
Shree Our City That Year
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-917126-12-0
Verlag: Tilted Axis Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
E-Book, Englisch, 448 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-917126-12-0
Verlag: Tilted Axis Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Geetanjali Shree is the winner of the 2022 International Booker Prize and of the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, along with Daisy Rockwell, for her novel, Tomb of Sand (Ret Samadhi in the Hindi original.) The French translation, published as Ret Samadhi: Au-dela de la frontier was shortlisted for the Emile Guimet Prize, 2021. Geetanjali Shree is the author of four other novels: Mai, Hamara Shahar Us Baras (Our City That Year), Tirohit (The Roof Beneath Their Feet), and Khali Jagah (Empty Space), and five collections of short stories. Her work has been translated into many Indian and foreign languages. Geetanjali also works on theatre scripts in collaboration with a Delhi-based group, Vivadi, of which she is a founding member.
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So this is the place. Our city.
Into this city the three of them came forth. Panicked. Determined to bring everything to the fore: the crime and the criminal; the wounded and the dead. All of it. They would see clearly, and clearly they would reveal whatever they saw. Sharad, Shruti and Hanif, who had resolved that they would write. That this time they could not remain silent. That everything must be brought out into the open. That the blowing wind was no breeze but a gale. That they could not allow it to uproot them.
It’s raining. Shruti has stepped off the train and stands on the platform. A vibration. A trembling agitation passes beneath her feet and departs with the train. People run stumbling, soaked, searching for passengers outside. The city’s cows and dogs have ambled in to laze on the flooded platform. The water flows towards the tracks. A wasteland.
There was a time that year when such rivers flowed in the streets, but they didn’t come from the rains. They came from the neighbourhood water tanks that were emptied into the streets for fear they’d been poisoned.
Sharad recognizes her from afar and approaches. She stands alone, waiting. They come face to face; their faces bound in an inhibited silence. They exit with measured steps.
The three of them understood that everything making us restless and frightened was right there, outside. They faced the same fear that filled me. I, too, began to panic. They’d try to write, then stop midstream. They’d find their writing hollow and say, all these words have been written before, nothing will be accomplished by recording them; the words have become utterly useless, grown empty, like government slogans.
It was then that I realized I’d have to do something, somehow or other. I’d have to write, whether I understood or not. If it couldn’t be the three of them—a professional writer and two intellectuals—it would have to be me. Me, who knows only how to copy down words.
At that time, it was barely possible to string together two words of sense. Nonetheless, I, who had neither the experience to string words nor the tenacity, could write. If you call copying down writing, then that’s what I was doing. That’s what I could do. I would pick up the fragments that flew up in their wake. Whatever caught my eye, wherever.
Before my eyes is that house, that gate, that letterbox. The flap of the letterbox hangs open, shivering in the rain. Shruti hesitates at the gate. Her sandals are soaking wet, as are her feet, up to the ankles. Sharad opens the gate. The front yard is overgrown with wild grasses.
Once a madhumalti vine had climbed here, and the sight beneath that vine, of a row of white teeth in pink gums, had sickened me. The pen had slipped from my hand, ink splattering. Later, I’d wonder why I hadn’t recalled the pink and white blossoms of the madhumalti vine when I saw the teeth and gums. Instead, madhumaltis now always remind me of those gums and those teeth. They nauseate me. Nor do I recall the rest of that face that used to blossom with laughter. That beautiful, hearty laugh. Instead, the face becomes a repulsive shape lying in the dust, its individuality erased, defiling all the beauty of the laughter, wiping out the entire existence of the person to whom it had belonged. Daddu used to say that if you recognize a thing by only a fragment of the whole then it becomes trapped in its own contour, a useless, lifeless caricature. True recognition bursts forth, spreading and wandering about in the open, enveloped by all things, melting into everything. It is light. If you trap it within a single fragment to purify it, you’ll simply extinguish the light. The shape will be rendered lifeless. A repulsive lump of flesh.
But I kept picking up the fragments. I didn’t have the time, let alone the ability, to fill in the middle parts, to search for fitting links. There was no time to act deliberately. Fearfully, quickly, I simply copied it all down. I wrote of here or there, scribbled down unnecessities, pasted the fragments willy-nilly. When life itself had become a collage in which slivers and scraps floated about, sticking hither and thither as in the aftermath of an explosion, forming and deforming shapes, how could we escape the incomplete, the scattered, the broken?
Who’s ever heard of a cauliflower crop growing in a field of corpses?
But listen:
There was such a crop in our city, that year.
Who’s ever heard of a crop of fresh plump white cauliflowers that can’t be sold for even a handful of cowries?
But that, too, happened in our city, that year.
There were many such things that made no sense at all, and I was incapable of gathering all the bits and pieces to create the true picture. For they were mere scraps, whose proper worth I could not gauge, nor did I have to. It was none of my business. I just had to copy.
I am copying down from the beginning.
From the beginning…or maybe not? I don’t really know; because no one knew where the beginning was. But from the moment, whenever it was, that I jumped up, frightened of their panic, grabbed paper, uncapped pen, and set to work in that dusty smoky season; because if you won’t, then I will; I’ll write it myself, that is, I’ll copy down whatever you say, whatever you see, whatever I can grasp; and if I don’t grasp, I’ll write anyway, I’ll write without comprehension.
Because someone had to write about that year, and that city. Someone had to bear witness.
And who knows, there could be some essence to be distilled from the unhinged language of incomprehension, and who knows, there could be other years after that year.
For example, the year in which Shruti stands, and Sharad pulls her inside and locks and chains the door.
‘Come in. Do look,’ he says.
‘No, no need,’ she refuses.
‘Look.’
‘No need.’
But Sharad walks ahead and opens another door. A bundle lies on the bed inside, its back to them. Two skinny stick-like things protrude from under the sheet.
Shruti does not walk through the door. She stares from a distance at the items set out on the small table next to the bed and turns to enter the hall directly. He who used to bask in the light that radiated from his body has shrunk to a tiny bundle. His spark has gone dark. Now all that remains is a contour, a shrunken caricature.
Sharad wishes to mention Hanif.
‘Hanif …?’ He falters and falls silent.
‘He’s writing,’ Shruti tells him. ‘And you?’ she asks.
Sharad shrugs.
I open my bundle of writing paper. Flip quickly through the sheets. Then slowly lay them out like rummy cards. But who will become the pairs here and who the sequences? The cards lie scattered, my pen uncapped.
No one’s listening.
They sit quietly, gazing at the rosewood divan from that year.
?
That year, in our city, Hindus abandoned their pacifism. , they proclaimed. they screamed. They climbed atop mosques and waved the flag of Devi affixed to their tridents proclaiming, Holy men abandoned their meditations, and angry cries echoed in place of prayers:
And out poured gangs upon gangs to tear the mosques in our city down to their foundations and erect the idols of goddesses and gods in their place.
The air in our city began to pulse. It echoed with their feelings of helplessness: . The gangs emerged with a clamour, raising clouds of ash which could turn to dust at any time and sting our eyes. They released fountains of Ganga water which could turn to blood at any time and splatter our eyes.
It was like a rollicking festival. So many hues, it could have been Holi in a storm of coloured powder. They held sacrifices and threw into the flames the cowardice that had been nurtured in the name of dispassion. They marked their brows with a tilak of ash, hurled sharp bits of metal at the sun, slicing it to ribbons, skewering the brilliant sun-scraps and waving them in the air as they fanned out into the streets, over the moon to discover in their clutches the joyous sun.
We shivered when we saw how the sun danced in their hands.
?
‘Should I write from the perspective of a child?’ Shruti asks. Her hands drip red from peeling beets. ‘Of our unborn child? Who will see this, hear this, tell this?’
‘No,’ Hanif vetoes the idea at the outset. ‘For one,’ he says, ‘that narrative style is very old, it’s been going on since the time of the Mahabharata. For another …’ his voice is severe now, ‘we don’t even want a child. Who would want to inherit these times?’
Even the glancing thought of an unborn child’s testimony fills me with dread. But why?
If I just shadow them and keep copying, what do I have to fear?
?
‘Why should we be afraid? We live over here. Your friend has no right to spread the psychosis of fear. He enjoys it even,’ frets Shruti.
They sit in...
