Glimpses incognito of India

It’s a story that you haven’t heard yet

The pyramidal social structure. Our unique, orgiastic eyes. Laws that resemble chickens; they keep getting hatched, and we keep eating them. Oblivious traditions that incarcerate our obtrusive efforts to break them. A history that has irked, bludgeoned, shattered us. Children and people that keep tumbling from the sky. Our obsession with fairness creams.

But these are just a ludicrous, non-intensifying way of describing what could possibly be one of those wrinkled, unhurried first glances. Like a smudged shirt you chose to wear to the grocer’s on an aimless, degenerating Sunday. Because a nation is so much more than that. A nation is a womb. A nation is history. A nation is the sound of smoked rain on a twisted roof while you stood smiling at its broken, octane-filled chimney.

A nation is more, always more; misinterpreted, misunderstood, or simply ineradicable, like our scriptures. But the facts always get curtained. And today, while I walk on one of the many thousands of streets in my country, the facts lurk in the background, they snake through the bridges. Today, I watch the road swallow the endless litter. I watch the people sweating under a gargantuan burden of crumbling self-worth; jobs to be held on to, exams to be taken, deadlines to be met. The sweat under that burden mixes with the smog. Cars and auto-rickshaws honk constantly, a metro is under construction behind standing metal planks, people push and shove amid the yearning space crisis and lack of time, women are groped.

There is never enough time. Trees are replaced by malls and apartments. Ancient homes, straggling untidily behind wells and mossy ledges, once the playground of get-togethers and memoirs confronted, have been handed over to builders who break down the rooms and snatch the little bundles of space and stuff it with high-rise apartments. Posters of politicians rise up like the ripe, laden yellow noon sun; women and men that are an astonishing contradiction of the traditional and the modern–their conservative attires smash about the ever-knowing, almost smirking faces. Brown labouring child-like bodies inside miniscule eateries that startlingly, still exist; are overlooked, like heckling hijras and the clanking, gong-like ring of their laughter. Black amorphous patches creep up on the roads. People move about.

What our textbooks don’t tell us is that our nation would be better off without most of us. That Indians give birth but forget to create jobs. That we are the proud patrons of enormous wealth and yet (mostly) do not receive any of it. That every third hungry child in the world sleeps in our country. That some families make do with 15 rupees a day. (Or like in the capital, about 600 rupees a month). They forget to tell us that our skies won’t always remain pink and guileless. That some of us will be forgotten. That we might flip out of college like shining bumblebees only to spend our lives struggling with salaries and taxes. That dreams and sighs will be experiences thrown into the gutter. That we might construct highways and have bridges cluttering every corner of our streets but forget to repair the damage that throbs our souls. That no matter how much we polish our remarkable fashion sense and tombstones, we all carry a devastated, old, timeworn spirit within. That our movies and culture will just remain a washed reflection of our minds.

Our nation is sprinkled with rutted constructs that create dents below the surface. Sometimes above it. Constructs of gender and identity, of class, religion, belief, faith, family and caste. They create scars from whence, no matter how much agents of ‘development’ and propaganda may choose to cover up, bulge out timelessly. These constructs break us, mould us, and peep out at odd hours. These constructs map out our whole lives before us and, if we choose to discard these maps, haunt us more fiercely than the night shadows.

And yet, there are glimpses of hope. Hope, when one woman decided to fight when six men brutally injured her on a bus. Hope, when she decided to live. Hope, when a rape survivor decided to reveal her identity at a time when politicians made slanderous remarks against her. Hope, when after being declared criminals, thousands of homosexuals took to the streets to protest. Hope, when one female journalist decided to sue her boss for sexual harassment, a man of great and unyielding influence. Hope, when day after day, moment after moment, people decide to disregard the constructs that bind and choke them. When they throw away the masks gifted and thrust on to their faces by society.

True, a nation is not a banner or a map. A nation is not an announcement but a whisper, the after-tale that you stored in your heart and took home. A nation is not about all those guests invited to a banquet, but all those who went away, or forgot their way half-way through. A nation is always about what we ignored, or what we mumbled. A nation is about the womb, and all its secrets. The revelation about a whisper, and all its moments. A nation is an enchanting, tiresome story. But it’s a story that you haven’t heard yet.

Prerna Kalbag is an independent journalist based in Chennai, India. Words, art, feminism and people are some of the things she is passionate about. An odd soul, she often lives in her own world of oddities and quirks, but has a sensitive approach to things outside it.