The shattering of lines and identities

We all belong to each other

Pathways cracking the greens of the hills. Countless hills. A few old men in langotis. Women walking everywhere. And my coworker and I zigzagging through the hills, the wind in my face, my arms sun burnt, my hair meandering in all directions, the glistening naked view overwhelming my eyes, despite the shades.

I went to Kolli Hills, Tamil Nadu, a few weeks ago to conduct an art workshop for the tribal children. As often happens when we’re absolutely terrified of a prospect, any prospect, the result left me touchy and vulnerable. In the nineteen years I have spent in my country, a few months might have been spent walking through my nation’s villages. And yet, India is a land of towns and hamlets and villages, if nothing else. My mother says India is also the Land of the Tribals. I am bound to agree with her.

As we spent the four days together in Kolli Hills, my mother and I, visiting a tiny tea shop in the mornings to sip tea (the shop in my mind literally ‘spills’ tea), walking toward a looming shop on the rise of a street to have our breakfast before speeding off to work, she told me quite many things about the similarities between Kolli Hills and the Baramullah village of long ago that she knows. Baramullah of all places. Cold and distant. Exquisitely, painfully beautiful. She told me that, in both places, there is (or was, in the latter’s case), almost no quality healthcare and educational facilities, lack of proper schools, hills (or mountains) alongside roads, a despairing chasm between the genders, and so on. This is the Kashmir of the 1990s I am talking about, and a tiny Kashmiri village of the Baramullah district. If I were to go by what some of the younger Kashmiri immigrants in Chennai tell me (standing vaguely inside malls selling Kashmiri handicrafts and carpets, their glistening faces standing out amid the din of the crowd, smelling of I-don’t-know-what, but vaguely familiar, ironically), Kashmir has ‘changed’. They tell me Omar Abdullah has made our people prosper, that power outages are a rare thing now, that educational institutes are doing well, people have more wealth. I look at them and sometimes seriously begin to doubt it.

Then I wondered whether my sense of a misplaced identity (that tags along like a faithful pet, despite my having hardly ever lived in Kashmir) has something to do with what he said, if indeed it is true. As my mother and he began to acknowledge that Kashmir in fact, does not actually belong to India (the secret, painful talk of most Kashmiris with a sense of misplaced identity), I remember him leaning forward on his chair and telling us ‘But you cannot be biased. The other country, on the other side, is equally responsible for our crisis.’

How ironic it is that a cluster of 300 and odd South Indian villages spread on a range of hills should find similarities with my hometown, my village torn apart by war and casualties, the cold, the hopelessness and tearing apart of an identity (at least that is how I imagine it). The day I left Kolli Hills, the driver of the cab that picked us up from our hotel, a quiet, solemn man, began talking eagerly when he learnt we were from Baramullah. ‘Oh I remember reading about Baramullah in college,’ he beamed, ‘and I was instantly drawn towards that far-fetched piece of land. It’s one of those places you read about and ache to touch. My dream is to visit Kashmir at least once in my lifetime.’ I glanced through the car window at the glowing evening sun and wondered what it is about borders and nations and maps, and the human touch that exists despite them.

I remember walking into a Kashmiri art shop yesterday and striking a conversation with the owner, a Kashmiri himself, amid samovars and silver jewelry and hookahs and paintings and him telling me, all of a sudden, with an intense expression on his face, ‘We Kashmiris are different. We are different from any race, any class of people in this country, in fact on this planet.’ Then I wondered whether my sense of a misplaced identity (that tags along like a faithful pet, despite my having hardly ever lived in Kashmir) has something to do with what he said, if indeed it is true. As my mother and he began to acknowledge that Kashmir in fact, does not actually belong to India (the secret, painful talk of most Kashmiris with a sense of misplaced identity), I remember him leaning forward on his chair and telling us ‘But you cannot be biased. The other country, on the other side, is equally responsible for our crisis.’ Then I began to wonder if my sense of misplaced identity is indeed a boon, if it actually makes me realise that humans or donkeys, we all belong to each other (that’s how ridiculous my thoughts sound to me sometimes).

Coming back to Kolli Hills, watching my mother prepare her report for the NGO that we were both working for, I learnt a few tortuous facts about Kolli Hills. Divorces are common, men (who often take their wives’ earnings) divorce their spouses according to their whims and fancies, by paying them a small amount of money. This is rampant. So is poverty. Men ride bikes. Women walk everywhere, walking miles and miles each day without footwear. The leeches in the forested areas often sting their naked feet, and some say this is partly responsible for the anaemic condition of most women. In a State where plump women are considered an epitome of beauty (thrashing the hard-to-abide-by equally nonsensical Western concepts of good looks), women in Kolli Hills are anaemic and malnourished, stunted and half-grown.

The most overwhelming part of my visit to Kolli Hills were the art lessons I conducted. Art, a powerful means of self-expression, is something many can drown their senses in, especially those of us torn apart by poverty, angst, misplaced identities and anguish. As I taught them about Still Life and introduced colour and impressionism, I found an intensely twisted string of my heart wired to theirs. I drew them, took pictures, ate at filthy, cosy restaurants on banana leaves instead of plates, talked to just about everyone, smoked with my coworker secretly behind gigantic trees.

Toilets generally do not exist inside houses. The local tribals use the forested areas for open defecation. Male children are preferred over female children, as in many parts of India. However, in a place where quality educational institutes are almost nonexistent, the little educational opportunities that any given family is able to afford are passed on to their male offspring. Proper hospitals are almost never found. A nurse visits pregnant women once a fortnight, and that is the extent of the healthcare facilities the government provides. Government schools, dank and smelly, the yellowing buildings decaying on muddy strips of land, are better than the private institutions where students undertaking Teacher Training courses are appointed as teachers.

The most overwhelming part of my visit to Kolli Hills were the art lessons I conducted. Art, a powerful means of self-expression, is something many can drown their senses in, especially those of us torn apart by poverty, angst, misplaced identities and anguish. As I taught them about Still Life and introduced colour and impressionism, I found an intensely twisted string of my heart wired to theirs. I drew them, took pictures, ate at filthy, cosy restaurants on banana leaves instead of plates, talked to just about everyone, smoked with my coworker secretly behind gigantic trees.