:: Farrukh Dhondy

Made it to the tryst, but missed destiny

By Farrukh Dhondy

Aug 15 : "‘Why was the sunset red?’

Oh that was the hue of hell!

‘Why send flowers to the dead?

They can neither see nor smell...’"

From Qs Without As by Bachchoo

On August 15, 1962, my sister Zareen, standing before the full-length mirrors of the almiras in our aunts’ bedroom, was getting dressed in an elaborate sari. My great grand-aunt, "Aalaan Masi", who lived in our patriarchal household, was watching her carefully. Aalaan Masi had been brought from the "Parsi colony" communal housing in Mumbai, where she had lived all her life, to Pune because she was too old to cope with her arthritic limbs and had fallen into slovenly ways.

She was a curmudgeonly old stick, sharpened by a life of petty gossip and intrigue in the housing colony. She looked a bit like the ageing Bertrand Russell, with a shock of white hair sticking out from her skinny neck. She was perhaps 80 years old and would have been quite content to be bedridden had not my aunts, her nieces, forced her to walk up and down the house each day to ward off the arthritic paralysis.

"So whose wedding are we going to then?" she asked Zareen with her bony fingers twisted into a questioning gesture.

"No wedding Aalaan Masi, I am going to college", Zareen replied.

"Ah! So what’s the fancy sari for?"

"I have to give a speech for the Independence Day celebrations", Zareen said, adjusting her sari pallav.

"Independence Day? What’s that?" asked Aalaan Masi.

"Celebrating the day we got our freedom?"

"Freedom?" It wasn’t a sardonic but genuinely puzzled query.

"You know, the anniversary of the day the British left for ever", Zareen said.

"What??? The British have left?? No one told me!" says Aalaan Masi.

My grandfather was passing through the room.

"Leave the donkey alone", he said to Zareen.

For the rest of the day Aalaan Masi kept making wondering gestures and muttering to herself that she hadn’t been informed.

So it was that the affairs of the country, the trysts with destiny, the great awakening to self-rule, had passed the old lady in the heart of Bombay by.

It was characteristic of the Raj, despite the stoical and heroic exploits of their civil service, to remain remote from the population they ruled. And here was evidence that the normal round of existence was unaffected by the affairs of state, even those of historic moment.

In 62 years of our rule, that has been one of the key historical changes. The rule of the people, for the people and by the people has brought those close to the lives of the population into the legislature and into the executive branches of government. The democratic mandate accounts for the relative illiteracy, criminality, narrow self-interest, corruptibility and unmerited swagger of a great number of our legislators. They are given "tickets" by one party or the other not for ideological reasons but because of the bank of votes that they can presumably command.

The closeness of our politicians to the grassroots or even to the rice-stem roots makes them experts on the difference, for instance, between Basmati rice and coarser varieties. Unfortunately, this same closeness to the soil means that very little attention was paid to their geographical education and they are very prone to not being able to locate "needy" countries on the globe. It leads to small slips of the export order and Rs 2,500 crores worth of export rice landing up in the wrong country where it can make a fat profit. (Note to education ministry: Make geography compulsory. It is essential that future commerce ministers know that Wagadugu is not in Texas.)

And of course the geographical confusion leads to anthropological chaos. The ubiquity of turbans, beards, flowing shirts, automatic weapons and spare motorcycle parts in a place called Balochistan may have deceived some innocent in our secret services into believing that these people were some variety of sardars worthy of support and supply. And then came the "dossier" handed over by Pakistan’s Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani to our own Manmohan Singh pointing out the absence of bangles and combs amongst the self-same Baloch and requesting Dr Singh to stop Sikhs disguised as Baloch descending down from Afghanistan. Dr Singh agreed and made his agreement public. There would be no more shipments of spare motorcycle parts from Afghanistan. The Indo-Pak joint statement was clear. In return Mr Gilani (who is a "feudal" — every politician in Pakistan is a "feudal" and not close to the people, unlike our politicians like Varun Gandhi and what’s-his-name? In India, we are not feudal. We gave it up when our Maharajas and their mothers-in-law got chosen by the people as their past and perpetual rulers) agreed to ban the Taliban from everywhere, while pointing out that the word Sikh means the same thing as the word Talib.

In Gujarat, this closeness of the politicians to the people has made sure that the number of deaths from illicit alcohol is far fewer than the natural deaths that occur in the occasional religious riots. In Maharashtra, this intimate knowledge of the tastes of the people has led the patriotic party to sponsor vada stalls as a means of employing the unemployed which in turn has generated a handful of vada-stall millionaires and a few million obese people.

The leaders of the world have recognised this dynamism of Indian politics. Here is a document that has fallen into my hands. It proves the international acclaim our democracy has won.

"My Dearest Mr DMK Karunanidhi,

Very much congratulations fall on you for the great victory of your son M.K. ‘Lenin-Marx-Mao-Zedong’ Azaghiri. May Allah grant you many more sons (who could be named Khomeini). The electoral tactics used in this great test of the will of the people have been carefully noted in our own great republic. I am always one to give the devil his due and so will say of the Great Satan George Bush that he must be given credit where credit is due for being the first to implement these earth-shaking ballot-rigging electoral processes. You must inform me if the Electronic Voting Machines can get us even more of our type of democracy as they tell me you are master of the Rigg Veda!

Your close neighbour when we swallow Balochistan,

Mahmood Ahmedinejad"