Luit On Our Tongues
We were five or six, men and children
in a tempo, that rackety raucous vehicle
With three capricious wheels heading
towards Sonitpur, our vacation, where
Mangoes had ripened summer’s belly with
the monsoon’s heavy showering grace
The usual route was flooded, abandoned
Luit had licked it wet, fungal, even after
The water receded; this was our Old Luit
father kept telling me how the Red River
Has its liquid name from the colour red
after a battleaxe washed itself, lots of blood
Now there are bridges that drown currents
hurrying us in buses and cars in a riverine flow
The Bodo teacher sitting just next to us said
the river does actually speak the curious hue
In gurgles by his village sweeping in a chant:
Bhullum-buthur. He smiled. Bhullum-buthur
Bubbles in the head, the mad water’s dance
the Brahmaputra in news and TV he knew
It still gurgles day and night, another man said
like human voices when slashed, when spent
Gasps bhullum-buthur in river tongue, the dead
so did our Luit, took stories along and lives
Between conversations from the diverted route
we saw the faraway river gone red-eyed with mud
The blood all faded, perhaps the colour of the red-
ness entrenched like the leftover evening sun.
The other titles published in IL are: "No Country, No Names"; "Gandhari's Eyes", and "A She-Ghost can only call Names".
Image from my computer: Setting sun on the Luit (Brahmaputra), Assam.
Quite a few movies this last week and the weekend. Not a binge, but it is something that happens once a while. You need the wide screen of human happenings to take over your senses. There was a time when I used to sit down and write about each and movie I'd watch, whether at the cinema theater or on the TV screen. That urge has become selective. And after this recent movie-melange, the two that stuck to my mind are THE KITE RUNNER and DISGRACE.
"The Ferris wheel sways up and down in a maverick fashion. Faces bob and bait me. Men in kurtas, humid tees and even unwashed shirt collars. Women a multitude of colourful heads – pink, red, ochre – covered with sari pallavs or transparent salwar-kameez veils. Kids walk between adult knees. Flower petals fall down crushed in fervent hands and the invisible vermillion powder in the hot air suffocates me. The auto sputters, barely moves.“I need a smoke,” says my driver. “But someone might be offended.”
I contemplate walking down but remember what happened once. Devotees pushing; someone’s hand in my pocket quickly scrounging for material items; another hand even on my butt, pressing and persuasive. But all this should be Maya. Or magic. You can’t see who does it and how."
"The book has a very assured beginning that draws you into it rapidly. The very first image where Muskaan ‘swats my (Nora’s) attention as though it were a distracted fly bumbling over a new odour’, gives ample evidence of the writer’s confident craft as she adeptly thrusts you forward through the sharp turns in her story. Set against the backdrop of the bajra fields for a large part, these fields become a major multi-faceted character in the story – with a singular voice, mood and an eventful terrible history. While the bajra provides nourriture, it also hides death. It is life-sustaining; it is treacherous. It harbours miscreants and also gives refuge to the wounded. It is green; it is blood-stained. It is ‘verdant’; it is ‘murky’. It is ‘a sea of murmur’, ‘a dark green flood.’ It is alive – it breathes ominously; it murmurs, whispers, rustles, speaks of bloody insurgents, their unrelenting armed struggle, killings, and equally heinous reprisals by the landowners. Yes, it is ‘the bloody bajra fields where life and death overlap each other’, collide with each other.
The bajra field is a ghastly ‘womb’ which brings forth only noxious fruit. Yet, it will change. It has footprints of those who chase, hunt out and those who fall prey. Yet, it will change by and by. It will bear other footprints (not traitorous ones) and yield a more wholesome harvest, we hope. Nabina Das delineates all this beautifully in the complex symbolism of the bajra fields. There are other fields of action too – New York, Delhi, Patna, and two or three villages – and in each of these the characters leave their footprints. Hopefully the ugly ones will be effaced. The Delhi chapter is called ‘Footprints in the Sun’ – a fresh, evocative image.
Footprints in the Bajra is a serious book that moves at a smart uncontrived pace. It voices deep concerns about how and why the deprived and the marginalized in certain parts of our country join the Maoist ranks; how they adopt desperate and often terrible measures to wrench justice and to make their voices heard. And this sets in motion other reactions, often violent and punitive. Personally, I liked the first half of the book better because it is more imbued with atmosphere. The second half is more theatrically eventful. Dialogue is Nabina’s forte. Written with relaxed ease, it is true to life and character. This novel will lend itself wonderfully, readily, to a script for a movie, serious and engrossing at the same time, with the right mix of ideology, romance, friendship, murder, retribution, artful scheming and social welfare, to make it a good watch."
