Walking With The Comrades by Arundhati Roy - A Book Review

           It is five stars even before I have touched it. I hold the small book like a sacred text. There is an element of fear - what if the writing is not as soul stirring as 'The God Of Small Things'? I worship Arundhati Roy's writing, her madness. But this is non-fiction I remind myself. So Comrade Rahel and Comrade Estha will not drench me in their torrential emotions, the extremely irritable and idiosyncratic Chacko will be missing, Sophie Mol will still be sleeping peacefully and wild Ammu and her lover, Ammachi, Papachi, the Jam factory.....

Hey but there are comrades in this one too - real ones. Comrades of the forest. The Maoist and Naxalite rebellions are one of the oldest in India. This book is the journal of Roy's visit to the dense jungles of the dreaded DandaKaranya forests in Chattisgarh, in central India, home and hub to the Maoist movement where the comrades greet her with ‘Lal Salaams’. It is a presentation, a glimpse into the lives of the revolutionaries, these oppressed, oppressive people, a first hand experience of what they think of the Government, the Police hunting them like dogs and the other part of society; the other part that have a freedom to live – to live freely.

Lord Ganesha agreed to write the Mahabharata only if Ved Vyasa, without a pause would narrate the entire epic lest he influenced his own thoughts in the narrative. It is a crime for a translator to involve her thoughts, to be biased but Roy does extend a small hand of empathy and pulls the rope towards the Maoists. But then she is the very few who makes an attempt, who tries to tell the other side of the story.

Who ARE these Maoists, these tribals? Why are they Maoists, why did they become them? Were they created, do they love to kill, why the revolution in ones own country by these poor villagers? These inquiries are far from getting easy answers but when the government and the papers feign to clarify, the faint line between fact and fiction is ostentatiously blurred. Roy attempts to tell their tale, their version. Isn't it funny when the tribal villagers ask the Naxals to come and save them, but they are the projected atrocious lot, aren't they? Is it only natural to pick up a gun and defend and kill when you are evicted or lured and threatened into eviction by the Government to please the Corporate and earn from their meaty industrial plans? Or does it need the repeated burning down of not only houses but entire villages, rationing food and medicines, raping at will. Would they not have been happy tilling their lands? This is their land, isn't it, their forest, who is the intruder? The hunter has become the hunted. The Government calls this movement ‘Salva Judum’ – the purification hunt! Ha!

It is important to know why they have chosen this homeless life else who would like to walk days on end in the dangers of the wild, man being a bigger threat than the animals. Living in temporary makeshift huts and always being in hiding is not exactly an idea of a great life, is it? Fear isn't good but they are the fearless.

Arundhati Roy, in her lucid and sarcastic statements evidences that Maoists like us, are men and women of flesh and blood, they bleed, they get angry, they laugh, they cry; sing, like to enjoy just like us. They do what they do and have chosen this difficult path for a reason. The bare and basic reason for survival, for existence!

Some excerpts from her beautiful observations and writing:

“It’s an upside-down town, inside-out town. In Dantewada the police wear plain clothes and the rebels wear uniforms. The jail superintendent is in jail. The prisoners are free (three hundred of them escaped from the old town jail two years ago. Women who have been raped are in police custody. The rapists give speeches in the bazaar.”

"The drive from Raipur to Dantewada takes about ten hours through areas known to be 'Maoist-infested'. These are not careless words. 'Infest/infestation' implies disease/pests. Diseases must be cured. Pests must be exterminates. Maoists must be wiped out. In these creeping. innocuous ways the language of genocide has entered our vocabulary."

Of a village, house where she stopped – “There is a spare beauty about the place. Everything is clean and necessary.”

“We will meet a Didi (Sister Comrade) who knows what the next step of the journey will be. There is an economy of information too. Nobody is supposed to know everything.”

“I remember my visit to the opencast iron-ore mines in Keonjar, Orissa. There was forest there once. And children like these. Now the land is like a raw, red wound.”

“We are approaching the ‘Border’. ‘Do you know what to do if we come under fire?” Sukhdev asks casually, as though it was the most natural thing in the world. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Immediately declare an indefinite hunger-strike;”

Arundhati Roy

Patriarch Run by Benjamin Dancer – A Book Review

I get up in the morning. Groggy, I pull the curtains. The sky looks messy; dark angry pregnant clouds drift, promising the delivery of a torrent. Doesn't matter, rather can’t matter; I brush my teeth unwillingly and get ready for another day to the office. In the other room, my nephew, half dozing half awake looks blankly at the effort of an omelet in his plate while turning a deaf ear to his mother’s hurried lips; it’s time for school. My young neighbor might finally go to sleep now having practiced Deep Purple’s ‘Smoke on the water’ the whole night on his guitar. On the road, hurried umbrellas and rain jackets wade the streets to get to their destinations. And life goes on…

But there are bigger and heavier things going on; somewhere. Wars are being planned, genocides are being sketched out. Maybe the soldier standing there on the border, under inhuman conditions, with his attentive and piercing eyes and armed gun may get a role in this movie of killings, maybe the role of a dead soldier. How much do we know and how much do we care? Spare a thought for the soldiers who follow orders, kill, against their conscience.

Would you believe that a mass extermination of the race is sometimes not as inevitable as much as it is necessary? In ‘Patriarch Run’, Jack, an undercover agent of the US Government is a thinker and an observer and what he discerns scares him as it would scare me and you. He explicates why killings are a requisite for this spiral viral reproductions of the humans, else the people dying of hunger today due to lack of resources would be much greater in number than the people existing and it won’t be very long while we ride the dinosaurs in a different world. As Jack quotes,

“The number of people without enough to eat in the world today is equal to the entire human population of 1810. Where is the pressure, the competition, the predator to check human civilization?”

Aren't the deadly tsunamis, cyclones, forest fires, earthquakes then a worthy attempt, a natural course of Mother Nature to restore the balance? It reminds me of the Pink Floyd song, ‘She will take it back, someday…’

Jack, a mercenary, has stolen a device from the Chinese, that has the power of destroying the world and he is on the run. As he is hunted down, his abandoned wife Rachel and son Billy inadvertently get into the crossfire. And Jack beyond the bombings, remembers nothing. So how does he chance upon his wife, child and ‘Yan Shi', the device? Will the world be saved or do we find ourselves at the crossroad of Armageddon? Read this fast paced novel to find out.

Written with a purpose, the author builds up a lost relationship and longing between father and son; he intricately enumerates the consequences of lying on the altar of sacrifices, of making choices with no getaway to repentance when you have a larger role to play. This one is a page turner. Though at some places I thought the story could be a little tighter, overall it was a very interesting read, especially for the message that it conveys.

My rating : * * * * * * * * * * - 6/10

Benjamin Dancer

In the Country Of Men by Hisham Matar – A Book Review

          Betrayal. A stab in the back. If devoid of conscience, it is free of hurt; else you can never free yourself from the crushing ugly rock of repentance, of self pity.

            

          Did little Suleiman, a mere nine year old child know that he was betraying the ones he loved the most, murdering the hopes of a rebellion, a fight for a cause, a secret mission, a revolution to eradicate another? Was there a realization, even a tiny bit of shame when he did so?

            

          And for what, this heinous misdeed? It isn’t easy for a child to cope when the fatal realization dawns on him that his small world that he breathes in is built on a plinth of glorious lies. Is his Baba what he veritably knows him to be? Why does he leave them so frequently when he knows that Mama falls ill whenever he abandons them? Why can’t he be a simple man like Ustath Rashid, his best friends’ father? Left alone to be the man of the house, he is laden with his incapacitated Mama’s impressionable stories of her past, tales of woe and oppression a child should never discover. A boundary of hatred engulfs him when he realizes that his Baba has lied to him, to his Mama; what is this secret he can’t be told about? The internal turmoil lurking in a child’s mind can turn him into a monster, a fire breathing deadly ogre surpassing all confines of treachery.

            Hisham Matar’s story is based in Libya, during the trying times of Gadaffi’s revolutionary regime. It is a crushing tale of clandestine rebellion against this regime by a handful of comrades who strive for a better Libya, a free Libya lacking in oppression and dictatorship. It is the story of young Suleiman’s ugly and blatant utterance of truth, his gruesome effort of disentangling himself and breaking free from the cosmos of lies built around him. But truth comes at a price, at a devastating price.

           

            The writing lacks poetry, in fact is bland. It is plainly evident that the author thinks in his native language and what you read is a literal translation. You will inadvertently compare the story with Khaled Hosseini’s ‘The Kite Runner’. The stories from this part of the world are turning out into cliches but where the writing lacks in color, it compensates in its horrific simplicity and grotesque threadbare incidents of cruelty. Not for a moment did I feel any sympathy for the child; in fact I have to vulgarly admit that I hated him.

            Throttling freedom and strangling views under the veil of ideologies isn't manly, at all!

My rating : * * * * * * * * * * - 6/10

Hisham Matar