WHEN A MUSLIM DRIVER SPITS ON THE FACE OF HIS COLLECTOR

WHEN A MUSLIM DRIVER SPITS

ON THE FACE OF HIS COLLECTOR (District Magistrate)

The Sacred Grove, a novel  by Daman Singh, HarperCollins, 2010

Reviewed by M Hasan

for Manushi (an English International Magazine for Women, dedicated to democracy, gender justice and freedom of expression). Founder editor Prof. Madhu Kishwar

Six years old Fatima, a High Court Justice’s grand daughter, cautions him on Diwali:  we shouldn’t buy crackers   from a Muslim shop! Puzzled, he asks why? She explains:  they  (Muslims) fire crackers can be bomb to kill us. We must be careful!. Now  annoyed, he asks, ‘Who told you this?’  ‘My class teacher!,’ she answered with triumph. She studies in an old elite school, affiliated to CBSC, in a state capital.  Its branches are in many countries. 

A District Magistrate(DM) blurts out a communally loaded statement in a meeting, only to be terribly mortified noticing a Muslim officer. The outspoken officer laughingly told me: ‘for a while forgetting my indignation, I enjoyed plight of the self-crucified Collector!’

Disregarding BJP home minister (HM) of his state, a Superintendent of Police (SP), following standard operating procedures, fires at a mob saving lives and homes of horrified Muslims. The mob fled, some with leg injuries. Angry HM immediately replaces him with an ‘obedient’ SP who, ironically, lands in jail joining fellows from his tribe for fake encounter killings in Gujarat and Rajasthan. After a few years, in the same district, their successor SP herds up Muslims of the same town in a police station for ‘protection’ from attacking mob, but allows looting and arson of their houses! He is promoted! In another district an SP and DM allow communal tension to build up for good thirty  hours. They take no preventive measures. Ultimately, ten Muslims are killed or fatally injured.  During curfew hours lynching, burning and throwing of bodies in a well are allowed. Bureaucratic procedures are orchestrated and delayed sabotaging justice, ensuring poor victims give up chasing illusive justice. Innocents land in jail, thanks to eclectic investigation by CBI. These aren’t fictions.

These facts must be kept in mind while reading and reviewing The Sacred Grove (SG), a novel by Daman Singh. Because, the novel bridges the gulf between facts given above and fiction she creates.  This is her third novel. Singh is a realist, acutely aware of her macro ethnic and administrative ambience. The story she tells gets credence and luster of innocence through the discerning eyes and non-challance vocabulary of a teenaged seventh grade ‘reporter,’ Ashwini, son of a DM. Our ‘journalist’ spares none, father or mother. His analysis is as transparent as facts are. He follows the best traditions of journalism: facts are sacred and analysis unbiased. That is why his father feels guilty before a child. He distinguishes between a professional and perverse SP who work with his father. The world he lives in has characters, school boys, middle women fawning of DM’s wife, politicians,  subtle palm-greasing ‘Agarwal’ businessman and drivers. Through these characters and their functional behaviors, we learn where we are heading for and what our educational system has produced as bureaucrats.

Adults and bureaucrats may tell lies. Not a child, an embodiment of innocence and truth.  He doesn’t recognize created ethnic, economic and racial differences. Like a flower bouquet or tossed salad bowl (shapes, colors, tastes, texture, fragrances and flavors), the social heterogeneity, he seems to convey, is part of a cosmic order. God (Truth) resides in him.  He is taught these differences at homes, schools, places of worships and streets, despite his why and how. His questions and puzzlements are bulldozed, ignored or, at best, as in SG, are rationalized apologetically by Aswini’s parents, accumulative and insecure mother and ambitious but coward father.  Only a shepherd like Ashwini can tell us how a young pristine stream in wilderness dances meandering boulders, rock dams, and irrigates small terraced fields in remote mountainous region.. So does our protagonist ‘reporter’ Ashwini  about the life and dynamics in a fortress, Collector’s  bungalow.

The world of civil servants has been subject of intellectual biodiversity for fictions like English, August (1988) by Upmanyu Chatterjee and Riot (2001) by Shashi Throor. Chatterjee is an IAS officer and Shashi Throor a former UN bureaucrat and now Member of Parliament and a central minister. Singh, a Stephenian, weaves the story of SG with ease and imagination around the weltanschauung and life of a DM and his family, his ambitions wife and skeptic son. Singh has son too, and has access to his world! The mundane life of the DM in SG, in some ways, finds reflection in dilemmas of the DM in Throor’s Riot, minus dalliance of a married Collector with Pricillia Hart, a young American community volunteer, in the latter. The commonality between SG and Riot are communal clashes, deaths of innocents and hovering of shadows of doubts about the professional integrity of Collectors in both the cases.

The novel tells us how growing and professional survival take place in troubled times shaped by political conspiracies, bureaucratic conveniences and convictions, business sharks lurking outside the Collector house, communal biases children learn in homes and valiant efforts of a teacher in vain  to encourage her students to inculcate secular values and learning. Collector’s bungalow is a periodic conjugal war zone of greed and caution, hot debates between a non-sense  police officer and a worldly wise DM. The DM’s wife remains in tears and depressions when denied worldly temptations by her cautious husband reminding her of his modest background and hard-earned status at risk if he allows her to follow her whims. Their child is unaware of social boundaries. While the DM harbors inside his unspoken world of better posting and faster promotion somehow, outside his bungalow is a spoken world of carpetbaggers and ambitious politicians furthering their political clouts by engineering communal tensions.

The  author oars the boat of her story in a serene Dal Lake, raising small concentric ripples and showing a tapestry of psychological, social and physical landscapes. The texture is smooth and the weaving is unobtrusive. With the inquisitive scalpel of a child, the unseemly facets (myths, communal conspiracies, bureaucratic ambitions on the graves of expected efficiency and accountability, rumors, communal biases, adolescent pranks and zests) of society and system are upturned voicelessly, as well as a Muslim driver’s anger shown by  spitting on the face of a Collector in public in front of police.

Often reader walks through  miles of a uniform Prairie plain, wheat and corn belts (worldviews and children’s pranks and zests in school and sacred groves; middle class women surveying DM’s wife’s kitchen decoration; ecology of a Muslim neighborhood), occasionally disturbed by sudden ‘twisters’ (tensions between the DM and his wife about jobs and iPhone gift from a go-getter businessman; discussion over dinner between a tough SP Mishra who wants to arrest the ‘Tarun Mandal goons’ lorded by a local MLA and a compromising DM who is overwhelmed by political clouts of communal elements (107-8). Hindu-Muslim social and physical boundaries; processions and riots; the rise and motives of the Trun Mandal; death of innocent Rehan, brother of driver Rafiq, in a riot; ‘confrontation’ between the DM and his arrested driver in police station keep readers glued to the story. SP Mishra bites a hot green chili during dinner with the DM. The act captures a subtle symbol of his firm approach to law and order, willingness to take risk as does the  SP who fires at a mob ignoring instructions of HM.  There are interludes of lighter in nature, only to be provided by ever exploring children. We are given a quiet tour of children hawking slogans selling vigor and humor in life: ‘Have some zing, do your things!’ (83) Or, when they test intelligence of each other, they pose question about the most ‘easiest thing’ to do in the world (153). The improbable answer, an exclusive territory of children,  makes you bursts into laughter. 

There is no hawking of fictional journalism in the novel. We learnt about mysterious and public places, streets, hedges, discussions and arguments, resentments and reasoning, the ordinary and the extraordinary, through the unalloyed eye of a teenage ‘reporter.’ In Ashwini we see a slightly ‘grown up’ version of a doubting Agtsya Sen, an IAS probationer, in English, August. With gentle humor and skepticism, Agtsya views life and landscape of a small town as an absurd entity. Our protagonist in SG also tells us about the quiet indicators of his father’s anger and annoyance: widening of  nostrils and violent whirling of hair inside! Children read faces authentically and intimately. Except Ashwini’s lively engagement with his driver, Rafiq, for cricket learning or surreptitious search for zing and joy driving. For him his parents’ routine lives, engagements, worries, priorities and preferences are dull and boring so much so that he dismisses them contemptuously as questionable and irrelevant. So what if his mother dies during delivery or  she delivers a dead baby. He is detached to all. There is asymmetry between his world and those of his parents. The only person who has access to his world is his driver Rafiq, initially  not trusted by his mother.

 Ashwini is deeply attached to Rafiq for his skill in cricket, car driving, resourcefulness in searching ‘zing’ and the way he loves his poor family members, particularly his handicapped younger brother Rehan. When Rehan gets killed in riot, Rafiq is devastated. His grief is quietly felt by acute observant Ashwini who, unlike his school mate Harsh, doesn’t understand religious differences, despite his mother’s reservation about a Muslim driver. Since most Muslim urban neighborhoods are redlined with no school, hospital, playground, light and sanitation, Muslims accept reality with resignation. They don’t expect anything from government (56). Rafiq laughs and tells about relationships between his community and government: ‘What does government has to do with us?... Our bodies  are graves for police bullets.’ (56) Does it sound from Sachar Committee Report? Novelists like Singh are more truthful than judicial activism or convoluted commissions of inquiries for governments which mostly ignore them. Singh spares none when it comes to her scalpel of truth in dissecting social realities she narrates. The unfolding of the architecture of the story is subtle, slow-paced and elegant made by lucidity of language. There are revelations in short sentences, demonstrating linguistic depth and craftsmanship of the writer. The shock is kept for the climax at the end, a terminal relationship between perverse power and hope of the vulnerable. 

There are sample of rich nuggets of social worlds, telling images of alienation, prejudices and boundaries and redlined zones: ‘Old people got tired easily. (51) Children have an elegant way of describing their situations: ‘Ravi smiled. His moustache smiled too.’ (87) When stopped to eat chocolate before dinner, Ashwini concludes that his papa had an ‘official voice.’ Whereas his ‘Mother had executive manners.’ Because she didn’t shout at him before Masi…’ (74) When Ashwini is in fever, he finds his ‘tongue as fat sausage,’ and noisy Masi ‘exploded’ in his head. (79) While hiding under bed, Ashwini’s ‘stomach growled’ and then ‘It shut up.’ (129) Ashwini believes that ‘If he (Rehan) was in school, he could have been alive.’ (137-38)

The seeds of communal hatred, misinformation and stereotypes, causing divisiveness, are sown at an early age, threatening the very foundation of a secular state. I may remind the reader about the bombs and cracker above. School teacher Mrs. Kalra is shocked when half of her students opted for a sectarian (Mangal Nath Temple) rather than a secular space (sufi shrine or museum)  for their summer projects. Children learn to choose to walk on a green grass lawn (monoculture) than stroll in a rich jungle of cultural biodiversity. Fareed Baba’s shrine isn’t ‘ours’ it’s ‘theirs,’ believes Anamika Shukla.(71). A brutalized child like Ravi, friend of Ashwini asks: ‘What is the difference between a dead horse and a Muslim?’ Before the question is asked, Ashwini says his lips were ready to smile. He did smile but thinks that had to do with something dumb. Seeing no response, Ravi explains:  ‘It’s no fun in beating a dead horse.’ (154) Some giggled. Humanist Ashwini ‘didn’t know what to do with my smile.’ 

 In an ambience of distrust and fear, Muslim youths live with a sense of insecurity. A false ‘call’ from station house officer on phone, a prank played by insensitive school boy Harsh, sends chill in Rafiq’s bones. When he discovers, he doesn’t protest. It doesn’t matter even if he happens to be a DM’s driver. Being a Muslim youth, he is vulnerable to police and prank any way. He knows police can call any Muslim youth to the police station and arrest him, even if he is innocent. Terrorizing and torturing of Muslims, as evident from Harsh’ joke, is a game for majority community (86-70).

Ashwini bonds with Rafiq for his several qualities, but cricket bonds them most. In an engineered riot Rafiq’s brother Rehan is killed. Rafiq is devastated. He knows connivance of administration. Nevertheless, later on when Ashwini strays into a Muslim procession for Fareed Baba shrine, Rafiq, risking his own life, whisks away Ashwini from the procession which ran amok and saves his life. Police arrests Rafiq and threshes him brutally. Ashwini tells the truth. To thank and get released Rafiq the DM goes to police station with Ashwini who narrates graphically: ‘…(Rafiq) came forward slowly, limping a little. A bruise below his left eye was turning purple at the edges. His trousers were filthy and torn in several places. There was blood on his shirt. My blood…Last night Vishnu (the new SP who replaced Mishra) said that Rafiq had no injuries. He couldn’t have lied to the collector (!)… But he hadn’t told his cahps to keep their hands off him. Because if he had, they would have obeyed. Police were like that. Mishra uncle had told me this long ago. I wished he hadn’t been transferred…I knew what he (Papa) would do. He would thank Rafiq over and over again…. But he didn’t. Helpless and lost. Finally, he shook his head slightly and put out his hand…’(234) ‘Rafiq did not reach out and take it. Instead, he spat. He spat right in Papa’s face. The spit splattered on his cheek and dribbled its way down. Papa wiped his with his hand. He didn’t say anything at all. I didn’t look at Rafiq. Only at Papa.’(235)

When helpless desperate people, typified by a Muslim car driver of DM, who loses faith in bureaucratic system, their resentment spills as spite and spits on icons of power, whipping a stronger message than a bullet. SG  is a faithful narrative from the corner of our street and preserves protected by commandos. India of today needs several novels of this genre to cleanse our front and backyards of prejudices and inefficiency in governance and social  harmony. I hope Indian bureaucrats, fabulously paid and given perks and are given security of job, read this testament as mirror image of the opaque greedy engagements of many of them today obliterating the democratic and constitutional face of India. As opposed to politicians, they can afford to be fair and firm in protecting Constitutional rights of the vulnerable groups. Otherwise, as Franz Kafka acidly concluded: Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind a slime of bureaucracy. Remember Rafiq’s spit, a silent sea of anger and retaliation!