Hands Full of Fire

Chained and tied

Object of contempt

Slave and chattel.

You do not know

Your own strength, but

Nor do they.

Wipe the tears away

Wipe the pain away

The day is new.

Break free the chains

Let them fall from

Your human wrists

And run wild through

The black stone streets

With hands full of fire.

Copyright B Purkayastha 2015

Haider (Review)

 - A masked man sits behind the wheel of a vehicle, while soldiers parade the residents of a village before him one by one. If he motions them on with his head, they live. If he blows the horn, they are arrested, tortured, and then summarily executed when no further information can be squeezed out of them.

- An old man’s son is missing, presumably arrested by the army. A human rights lawyer advises him to get a false criminal case lodged against his son with the police. The logic of this is that once the case goes to law, the police will have to get the custody of the young man from the army and produce him in court. Once he’s in the legal system, he might be locked up for years for something he hasn’t done, but at least he won’t be killed and a bounty claimed for eliminating a terrorist.

- A man stands outside the door to his own house, unable to make himself enter, despite the pleas of his wife, until someone with an authoritative voice demands to see his papers, pretends to frisk him, and gives him permission. He’s just too used to being searched and ordered around at every step to do anything at all of his own volition.  

- Outside an army camp, women gather in large numbers, holding placards identifying themselves as “half widows”, because they have no idea what happened to their husbands who have been “disappeared”, whether they are dead or alive. And while smooth-talking military officers assure the media that the army doesn’t torture prisoners, in the depths of the detention camps suspected militants are beaten, given electric shocks, or castrated, all in the name of “fighting terrorism.” It doesn’t matter what’s done to them since in any case none of them will be released alive again.

Welcome to Kashmir in the mid-1990s, where the wind blows through the wintry landscape, and everything is fog shrouded and grey; where the only colour is the green-brown of army uniforms and the red of blood on the snow. Welcome to Kashmir in the mid-90s, when India turned much of the state into a gigantic prison camp rather than let it go. Welcome to Kashmir in the mid-90s, when the indigenous Kashmiri rebellion had not yet been crushed to pieces and supplanted by a far more dangerous jihadist incursion from abroad. Welcome to Kashmir in the mid-90s, when you could survive by working for the government as an informer, or join a militant group, but staying neutral was just about certain to get you killed. Welcome to Kashmir in the mid-90s, when if you get half a chance to leave the state for some other part of the country, you made damned sure not to come back.

That’s the setting for one of the best films produced by Bollywood in recent years, Haider. It came out about six months ago, which makes it just about the right time for me to finally get around to viewing it. It’s also one of the better films I’ve watched in a while.

Let me tell you something about Bollywood before I go further: it’s changed one heck of a lot from the films of the 1960s to early 90s, which invariably stuck to a formula; there was the (pure, good) hero, the (pure, good) heroine, whose families often had a feud; the hero had a widowed mother, the heroine had an (evil, villainous) suitor, and there was a cringe-inducing comic duo. The hero and heroine weren’t allowed to kiss, let alone sleep together. They would however sing perfectly while dancing around trees with a choreographed set of background dancers mysteriously appearing from nowhere. The climax of the film would be a huge fight between the hero and a phalanx of villains led by the main villain, in which the hero would “bash them all up”. At the very end, a line of police vehicles would turn up, with the hero’s widowed mum in the lead jeep along with the girlfriend. The hero would drag the pulped main villain to the mum and throw him at her feet to beg forgiveness for his misdeeds.

I’m not kidding you – just about every film was based around this story. And each of them was something like three and a half hours long, because, as someone told me once, “English” films were only an hour and a half long, but Bollywood gave value for your money.

If, that is, being bored out of your mind in between bouts of having your intelligence insulted counts as being given “value for money”.

But that was then. India moved on in the last twenty years, and Bollywood had to adapt. People’s attention spans shortened, and nobody had the patience to sit through two-hundred minute-long snorefests. So the films cut themselves short, too, to two hours or less, and were much the better for it. Socially, too, things changed. Virginity ceased being something Indians cared about, so Bollywood began showing – at long last – premarital sex and relatively normal behaviour between young couples. The Evil Villain virtually disappeared, as did the Pure Hero; if there were heroes and villains at all, they were examples of what the website TV Tropes and Idioms calls “Gray and Grey Morality”. And instead of the one-size-fits-all stereotyped plot of all the old films, producers and directors finally actually began to experiment. Of course, the results of these experiments were mixed – and I’ve mocked several of them unmercifully on this blog – but some of them succeeded beyond all expectations.

One of them is this flick, Haider. It is, actually, a “remake” of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and one of the best adaptations of the play I’ve seen. Actually, I’ll make a confession right at this point: I don’t think much of Hamlet. I found the original play far too melodramatic. Give me Macbeth any day; I love that play to pieces. But if you’re going to adapt Hamlet at all, you could certainly do worse than Haider. Much, much worse.  

If you don't know anything about  Hamlet, I'm going to be kind and leave a link to the play here.

Alas, poor Kashmir. I knew her, Horatio. A land of infinite wonder, of most excellent beauty; she hath borne me on her bosom; and, now, how drowned in blood and misery she is! 

The Kashmir insurgency is a personal favourite topic of mine. It was something which I saw develop right from the start; I was eighteen years old when the armed rebellion broke out, and young men began ludicrously sending letters signed in their own blood to the government of the day pledging to give their lives for the nation. I can assure you that not one single one of those whom I saw sign such letters actually ever joined up; any action which would have resulted in real bullets being fired at them, of course, was something they’d never countenance. But writing blood letters made for great theatre – very much Bollywood, in fact.

Meanwhile the dirty war in Kashmir went on and on and on, and still sputters on to this day. I’m not going to write a history of it here; I have written a novel on the subject, which may or may not see the light of print at some point in the hypothetical future. Instead, I’ll just say that it wasn’t just Kashmiri versus “Indian”; it was Kashmiri versus Kashmiri and Indian, because a fair number of Kashmiris fought for the Indian side. Among them were bands of former rebels who changed sides and turned their guns on their former colleagues, often with greater success than the conventional armed forces had. [The movie calls one of these groups Ikhwan ul-Mukhbireen, a somewhat ludicrous name translating to Stool Pigeon Force.]

So. We begin with a militant group leader with acute appendicitis, whom King Hamlet...um, Dr Hilaal Meer...takes secretly to his home for emergency surgery. Meer isn’t a supporter of the insurgency; he just wants to save lives. His wife, Ghazala (Gertrude) isn’t happy about this but can’t do anything to change his mind. Very early the next morning, the army raids the village, and the aforesaid masked man in the jeep fingers Meer as part of the insurgency. He’s arrested and dragged away, his house blown up with rockets, and the insurgents holed up inside (including the appendicitis victim) killed. His wife, now homeless, has no option but to take up residence with his brother, Khurram. Can you guess where this is leading?

Only if you’ve read Hamlet.

Meanwhile, Hilaal and Ghazala’s son, Haider (do I really have to point out that he’s Hamlet?) had been sent away to university in the plains, where there’s no daily curfew and people aren’t stopped and searched at every corner or shot on the slightest provocation. Hearing of his father’s arrest, he goes back to Kashmir by bus, only to be stopped and arrested at the first checkpoint after smart-mouthing a sentry when insulted once too many times. He gets off pretty lightly, though, because Ophelia...oops, Arshia...who’s a journalist and the daughter of a senior police officer (Parvez, alias Polonius) comes and springs him. She tells him that his house is destroyed and his mum living with his dad’s brother. A run-in with Arshia’s brother Liyaqat (Laertes) later, he finds his mum singing and dancing with his uncle and apparently perfectly happy. Running away, he again is about to get picked up by the army when rescued by two old friends of his, both called Salman (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern). Salman and Salman are police informers, and Pervez ordered them to find and save Haider, though of course Haider himself doesn’t know this.

From that point on the film follows the plot of the play fairly closely, though of course it’s been thoroughly adapted to Kashmiri circumstances of the time. Haider searches fruitlessly for his father, though his efforts are seemingly doomed to failure, until a stranger, a militant leader called Roohdar (played by Bollywood great Irrfan Khan) arranges a meeting with him. Roohdar reveals that he had been in prison with Hilaal, and that it was Khurram who had arranged for the doctor’s arrest so he could marry Ghazala. Hilaal and Roohdar had later been shot by Ikhwan ul-Mukhbireen men and dumped off a bridge, though Roohdar was rescued; he knows where Hilaal is buried. He tells Haider that his father left him a message: he should take revenge on Khurram by shooting him through his treacherous eyes.

Meanwhile, of course, Khurram has married Ghazala. Haider, in order to discover if he’s really guilty, puts on a show for them. Only instead of a play, he sings for them, and Khurram’s reaction assures him that Roohdar was correct. He’s unable to bring himself to murder Khurram while he’s praying for the exact same reason as Hamlet couldn’t kill Claudius; he doesn’t want the villain to go to heaven direct from prayer. But he’s captured before he can escape, and Parvez orders Salman and Salman to bump him off. Instead, of course, Haider kills the duo, and in a confrontation with Ghazala also kills Parvez by accident. And you know what happens to Arshia if you’re familiar with Hamlet, the play, at all.

I’m not going to say what happens in the rest of the film just in case you want to watch it, but there’s really no such thing as a spoiler in a film based on a Shakespeare play unless it wants to stop being a film based on a Shakespeare play. The last bit could have done with a bit less melodrama, but by Bollywood standards it could have been much worse.

This being India, of course, there were immediate protests that the film was “maligning” the army. My own college alumni group rang with demands to boycott the film. This is the same college alumni group which attempted to pass off a photo of Chinese soldiers forming a living bridge for civilians in 2007 as one depicting Indian troops in Kashmir in 2014, so I didn’t exactly think much of these demands. But the protests were enough to force the filmmakers to include a disclaimer at the end extolling the Indian army and saying that all events in the film were fictional.

Fictional? The interrogation centre where the prisoners were brutally beaten was called Mama 2. In real life, as a read through any book on the Kashmir insurgency will tell you, said centre really existed and its name was...Papa 2.

Something is rotten in the state of Kashmir, even if they don’t want to say so.

A Tin of Tobacco

It was a quiet night in the middle of a brutal war. It was a bitterly cold night, the cold so severe that it was as though the sound had been frozen out of the air, and all that was left was silence.

It was a cold so severe that for this one night, the two armies had decided not to fight, but to draw back their forces into the warmth of underground shelters, and to resume the fighting and killing on the morrow.

They left sentries out, of course, because neither side trusted the other not to break the de facto truce.

High up on a rocky mountain ridge, two soldiers sat in the darkness, in trenches a short distance apart. The soldiers were from the two opposite armies. One wore a grey-brown uniform, the other one which was sand-yellow, and they had differently-shaped helmets on their heads. It didn’t matter, however, because neither of them could see the other in the darkness.

One of the soldiers was called Kasen. He sat in the trench, his rifle propped beside him and his hands thrust inside his uniform coat in an attempt to keep them warm. He was missing the distant green plains of his southern home with a great yearning.

The other men in his unit had told him he was lucky to be given guard duty all night, because that would mean that he didn’t have to take part in the fighting in the morning, when it would start again with even greater savagery to make up for the night’s break. But he didn’t feel lucky. He felt merely cold, hungry and miserable.

Suddenly, he heard a sound. It wasn’t much of a sound, and if there had been any other noise he would probably have missed it completely. In itself it wasn’t much, and yet it made him jerk up and frantically fumble for his gun.

It was a clink, as of a rifle barrel lightly striking stone, not far away.

There was nobody on Kasen’s side of the line, close enough for their noise to be heard by him. Therefore, the noise must have come from the other side, where the enemy with their different-coloured uniforms and differently-shaped helmets were.

And even as his fingers flinched from the freezing metal of his rifle, there was another noise in the darkness. Quite unquestionably from the other side, it was a soft sound like a cough.

The darkness was so intense that he couldn’t even see the barbed wire coils outside his trench, almost close enough to touch. Suddenly every patch of night, every hump of shadow, now looked like an enemy soldier crawling across the ground towards him in a sneak attack.

His hand fumbled towards the whistle hanging on a cord round his neck, which he was to blow if he had to summon the other soldiers, and then groped fruitlessly for it. The whistle was no longer there. The thread had broken, and it had fallen off somewhere.

A shadow that he could swear was a man seemed to shift across his sight, and he raised the rifle, but the shadow had already disappeared. There was only the darkness.

And then the sound came again, the sound he’d thought was a cough, and there was no mistaking it this time. It was a sob, a liquid sob as might be uttered by someone whose heart was about to break.

Kasen listened to the sobbing and put his rifle down slowly. “You there,” he called softly, in the enemy’s tongue. “Can you hear me?”

There was a brief pause and the answer came back. “Yes.”

“What’s wrong?” Kasen asked. “Why are you crying?”

“I don’t want to be here,” the enemy responded. “I’m freezing and hungry, and I’m frightened to death sitting alone on the mountain.” He sounded very young, perhaps younger than Kasen himself.

“What’s your name? I’m Kasen.”

“Nibrud.” The other soldier had stopped sobbing. “Are you alone?”

“Yes. Did your mates tell you you’re lucky to be up here?”

“Yours did too?” Nibrud was silent a moment. “Where are you from, Kasen?”

Kasen told him the name of his southern village. “It’s very far from here.”

“So’s my home,” Nibrud said. “Tell me about your village, Kasen.”

So Kasen told him about the village, about the thatched huts standing amongst the green fields, so green that it soothed the eye to look upon them, under a sky in which the thunderclouds gathered like crumpled sheets piled together. He spoke of the palm trees that nodded like royal courtiers before the wind, the river which flowed silver in the winter and brown and swollen when the rains came. He told Nibrud of the village girls, lissom in their flowing dresses, who danced at the harvest festival and livened the warm evenings with their song.

Then Nibrud told Kasen of his city, ancient and stone-walled, where the golden domes and spires rose towards the heavens, of streets paved with cobbles which were old when their two countries had not yet been born, of ancient halls where symphonies played music by composers long turned to dust. He spoke of universities so famous that people from all over the world came to study in them, and stayed back to teach and work. And he spoke of the dark-eyed girls who would disport themselves of an evening on the promenades and bridges over the river that never seemed to change, whatever the weather, except that its colour turned from sparkling blue to leaden grey and back again.

“So,” Kasen said at last, “it would seem that both of us are fighting in a place we hate, far away from where we live.”

“That’s so,” the unseen enemy from across the wire said. “What did they tell you when they sent you to fight?”

“That your side was looking to steal our land,” Kasen replied. “What did they tell you?”

“That you were out to take by force the lands that were always ours,” Nibrud replied. “And yet do you think this mountain is yours?”

“No,” Kasen confessed. “And I wouldn’t care if I never saw it again.”

“Exactly what I think,” Nibrud replied. There was a brief silence. “What do you want to do with your life...you know...afterwards?”

Kasen was silent a moment, considering. “Once upon a time I’d wanted to be an scientist,” he said at last. “But now it seems to me that the only thing scientists do is prepare for war, to prepare even more destructive weapons. I would like to be a farmer, and grow things from the soil to feed the people.”

“And I,” Nibrud said, “wanted always, to be a lawyer. But it seems to me that the only thing lawyers do is prove, at any cost, that their side is the right one. Now I would want to be a teacher, and tell the children that there is nothing holy about a coloured piece of cloth called a flag, and nothing glorious about war.”

They fell silent a long moment. “If you could see me now, in your rifle sights,” Kasen asked, “would you shoot me?”

Nibrud was silent for even longer. “I don’t know,” he said at last, honestly. “I would try not to, if I had the choice.”

“I have a tin of tobacco,” Kasen said, remembering. “Shall I throw it across to you? Would you like it?”

“Please do,” Nibrud replied. “I’ll find it when it’s light enough to see.”

So Kasen took out the tin of tobacco and hurled it across the wire. He heard it clatter on the rock.

“I have nothing to give you in return,” Nibrud responded. “But if I had, I would throw it across to you.”

“I know,” Kasen said. “It doesn’t matter.”

They fell silent. “It will be getting light soon,” Nibrud said at last. “I will soon be relieved.”

“So will I,” Kasen said. “I suppose this is goodbye.”

“Yes,” Nibrud agreed. “Thank you for spending the night with me. Goodbye, my friend.”

“Goodbye,” Kasen mouthed, and tasted the words. “...my friend.”

And so the dawn came, and Kasen went back to his unit, to the men with the same coloured uniforms and the same shape of helmet as he had. The battles started anew, and he killed men whom he saw in his rifle sights, men with the wrong-coloured uniform and the wrong shape of helmet on their heads. And blood flowed over the mountains. Kasen shot men without knowing whom it was whom he was shooting, and if perhaps one of them was Nibrud, or whether someone else had shot him. And he never knew from moment to moment if someone would shoot him, and if it would be Nibrud whose finger squeezed the trigger.

Then time passed, and with it the war finally ended. Perhaps the brown-grey uniformed army defeated the sand-yellow army, or perhaps it was the other way round, or perhaps the two sides decided to split the mountains between them. But the war passed.

And so Kasen returned home, threw off his uniform, put away his gun, and became a farmer. In time he married one of the lissom village girls and began a family, and even later he became a powerful voice in favour of farmer’s rights and the importance of the land.

And the years passed, and Kasen grew old, and then one day he began to yearn to visit the mountains again, where once, so long ago, he had fought and killed and seen his fellow soldiers die. He had seen them in war, and now, while he was still able, he wished to see them in peace.

So he and his wife and his daughter and her children travelled once more to the north, where the mountains were. Perhaps they had to cross a national frontier which had not once existed, perhaps not – it did not matter. And then one day, a warm spring day under a porcelain-blue sky, Kasen and his family stood looking up at the ridge.

“I’m going up there,” Kasen said. “You’ll wait here until I return.” And such was the tone of his voice that nobody attempted to argue with him.

So Kasen walked up the ridge, past the remnants of trenches and fortifications crumbled and filled in with the weight of the years, until he stood on the crest of the ridge looking across at the other side. And there was another very old man who stood there looking back at him.

“I’ve come back,” Kasen said to the other old man. “After all these years, I’ve come back.”

The other old man nodded. “I’ve brought you a gift,” he said, and held out something. “I told you I would.”

In his age-spotted, gnarled fingers, he held a tin of tobacco.

Copyright B Purkayastha 2015