Of nonsensical incidents

"Chhoti chhoti baaton ki hain yaadein badi"

- Anand. Bollywood, 1971.

It happens all the time with most of us I guess, that a small incident culled out from the pages of our lives lies ingrained in our memories; we get to live with it staying embedded in our sub-conscience. And such incident, which might sound per se trivial, may still achieve unfathomable importance in the way our lives are shaped.

And it may be any incident, notwithstanding how important it is to the rest of humanity. Something as nonsensical and 'unimportant' as a bus ride perhaps, or an otherwise random college hour.

I have felt this many times, and felt it once more while reading (and falling in love with) Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines. The way the story ends makes you feel that the first thing Ghosh would have thought of while planning to write this novel was its climax, based on an apparently trivial riot that took place in Bengal in the winter of 1964 (on why BENGAL, later). A riot that, in the author's own thoughts, does not find too much of documentation. One has to read the whole story to figure out that the entire novel is centered around, perhaps, this one incident. At least, in all fairness, this is the platform on which the climax is built. And just after having read the novel, it occurred to me that M J Akbar had the same incident in the climax of his novel The Blood Brothers, another favorite of mine .

An incident, that lasted for a few hours on the 10th of January, 1964, in and around Park Circus, Calcutta. Predictably enough, when I asked my father whether he remembered the incident, it took him a while to recollect, and he only ended up commenting, "Ya there was a bit of an incident I remember; but highly localized." Around 14 people had been killed. And the tension had ended the next day with curfew being imposed, and situation being under control.

However, scratching beneath the surface as Ghosh does to reveal the history, the riot was a result of a not-so-important occurrence (in retrospect of course) in Kashmir, whose repercussions were felt in Khulna, Bangladesh, in a most unexpected manner. Riots began, shops were burnt down, and the disturbance had spread to other parts of Bangladesh in no time; and yet none of all this had been considered important enough by the the newspapers in India (as Ghosh points out in the novel) to be given much news space.

And the turbulence had spilled over to the other side of Bengal, howbeit for a day; as if there were no borders separating the two places, as if they were but just Shadow Lines.

In the novel too, it surprises the narrator's friends when he tells them that the most important childhood memory of his was not the war with China, but a stray incident that he had witnessed as a child, of which he gives a first hand account. A happening, which he finds difficult to trace in the papers, let alone books being written on it, unlike the China war. And yet he has witnessed the horribly fateful day; the tension, the rioting, the death that took place in Dhaka where a relative of his was killed. Akbar narrates the same incident as a memory etched out of his boyhood, when he had lost a dear friend in the riot, and how horrible the face of it all had seemed.

And yet, I was told, the riot was for a day. Actually, just a few hours. And in just a part of Calcutta. What makes it the most memorable incident then? More memorable than a war, followed closely by another? As the narrator in Ghosh's novel tells his friends, all the war didn't happen at their doorsteps, this one riot did at his.

Life is not one long unbroken journey, but a string of short, sometimes nonsensical, trips clustered and strung together. An incident thus documented by these authors, which gives a feeling of how deeply it had perhaps affected their boyhood. Even against the weightiest of proofs, I would disagree that the descriptions were a result of mere research, and not a pictorial reproduction of a childhood recollection, that has shaped their lives in a way that they could write an entire novel which would have the event, a nonsensical, insignificant riot as a central point, and not the war with Pakistan or China.

Perhaps I understand the reason why. Because this one incident impacted their lives from much closer than a war which was being fought at a macro political level could have. Perhaps, remembering the turbulent happenings of a day are much easier than of an entire period. Deduction: a shorter occurrence has a harder impact.

Arundhati Roy had perhaps tried to convey a similar message in The God of Small Things, or Jhumpa Lahiri in Interpreter of Maladies. Not just short stories, even novels come out of small incidents I feel. Incidents, to which we, consciously or otherwise, add detail, spice and colour. Incidents which mean different things to different people, and might impact them differently too.

My mother interrupted me while my father was telling me about those riots, of what he remembered of them. She butted in, saying, "Ya, i remember how there was news of women being dragged by their hair and raped in Khulna, and how Nehru had remained silent on the issues of the Bengali women. That year when Nehru had died, pishomoshai had celebrated by having mutton curry. I was a child then, but I remember".

At that moment, I sneered at her, exclaiming how it didn't matter here what her pishomoshai did. As I write this now, I realize how this was her own bit of small, nonsensical, important detail.