Lost in Some Land

When I met Jina while travelling in a North Indian city she was full of her husband, who didn't even show the courtesy to return my greeting when I was introduced.


She left Imphal for Delhi for college, leaving behind a bad picture in which she was brought up ,in its dirt and tensions. All that she wanted to do was to experience a better life after  a better education  and Imphal being never the ideal place for such a place, where education exists for namesake, she looked at it with indignation.

As she had been watching Bollywood films at home , Hindi was never that difficult for her when she was in college. Since she could communicate with most people it was easy for her to mix up with others. Having come from that remote corner of the world and then to mingle up with city-bred people in shopping malls and pubs she knew she had come a long way, unlike her peers who were still struggling with the language as well as with the system of chaos, racism, etc. 


She looked at them with pity and deep contempt , and it was contempt that made her overlook them. To her the men, whom she always found in hordes, from her hometown were just dull and inarticulate in Hindi, people who could express their courage when found in the company of friends, but people incapable of anything alone.

What she didn't observe was that they were Western-looking, heads filled up with nepotism, and they had no grand ambitions; with a university degree the man wouldn't mind bribing couple of millions to get into a clerical position in one of the most corrupt departments, or to be one of the most-sought sub-inspectors. And for those who couldn't afford few millions can be seen literally struggling to get into a call centre with his master's degree.  


Another miracle of Indian education, which lets you walk through a long tunnel for years so that you could become a degreed-person without any skills, just like a highly devalued currency note of large denomination. To be able to get into one of the BPO centres and to be promoted to the level of a supervisor is something, just like the feeling a city-returned man has while sauntering the dusty village road dotted with cow dung with pride, knowing that he is looked up at.

In the North Indian cities where they are,  they have brought the decay from their place and they haven't figured out ways to examine what has layered thick on their minds. If they liked posing in front of the cleanest places, The Japanese and British war cemeteries, they could hug crowded malls and supermarkets just like a monkey would hug a beautiful hand-held looking mirror; to have a photograph taken standing below a life-size advertising picture of Gucci is something like having scaled the Everest. 


But this does make sense, considering the way they cohabit in crammed and cheap areas of the cities where the cattle roam the streets and street hawkers never allowing the inhabitants to know silence, and sitting in a jointly-rented rickshaw wearing Tamu-bought clothes. It doesn't enter their minds ,though, that they left behind a shattered and sinking place and the only way to salvage and to bring it up is to grope for wisdom and  ideas. 

Then again, what would that mean when being able to speak English is considered good education by the two-thirds of the population in a country where people take pleasure in living in a fake system? 


To them this emptiness is to be filled up with slavishly-copied fashion and faiths; the notion that theirs was sabotaged at some point and to revisit the past which is almost gone from the surface of mankind history hardly occurs, believe me they know a more about the Harappan than their own and those nationalists who have been hollering that the region is in danger never feel that this is unacceptable. 


Their hollering is loud and clear as far as there is some Sekmai wine and duck curry; they just can't translate into reality what they have parodied. This bold conduct, which demands brevity from a people, is to be done by others, outsiders, who come to them saying " Oh, you are a brave people, but please finish mopping the floor soon." We say, praise the fool and make him eat charcoal tablets.

There is nothing for them at home and there won't be any, how could you expect food from a kitchen where there is neither fire nor anything to cook? And if the houses stink and the roofs are leaking, whose fault is it, anyway? Other might have sneaked in to cause the damage, are you not prepared for that when you like flaunting your " a brave people" image.

The degreed-people in Tamu-bought-clothes-photographed-at-malls will away be at the periphery in those cities where they are, a pat on the shoulder by his boss is as good as being picked up from the gutter and put in a Mercedes car. And when you engaged them in a mind-wrecking discussion they would turn their heads to look for one Kegeh tree in the entire treeless area and this kegeh man who hasn't lived in the place in the last twenty years dispenses all the irrelevant. 

Jina finds the man who hasn't been home in twenty years too full of himself, others archaic ,let alone those at home without any jobs and eking a life in that nasty playground of malice. There is hardly anyone who can match her in the mastered language, nor any man who can correct her and give her the pictures of some place like London instead of an Imphal man dreaming to get to Mumbai. So, to interact with anyone from her place in her own language is to do something very stupid, but she is compelled to when he does the inevitable, talking to her parents, who have begun to be proud of her, talks in pidin Meiteilon. This is what education has done to her.

In a way her life is perfect and the perfection is revealed when one takes a closer look at certain conducts: when someone from home calls while she is in the company of her "hubby" and his circle,  she answer in English and always says, "I'll call back". She does this because she doesn't have a the confidence to holler on the phone like a Japanese lady in downtown New York. In one gathering she and her educated friends were asked to come in traditional costumes; she showed up in silk saree, since the notion of walking about in striped and embroidered phanek would be look too " out of the place." 


Again in another gathering there was the talk that educated people in her circle of cooking indigenous food. She steamed momos and fried some pasta. She didn't want to lose her face with the smell of fermented fish and colourless Iromba. 


But at times, she secretly craved for them. She would secretly ask someone to do her bidding. In a pink sarong and embroidered blouse in the company of her detached friends she could be that fermented fish-loving-finger-licking-lady while having iromba. Why can't she live her real life in the presence of others?   

When she looks back the past is filled up with Harappan and Egyptian, and if she were to talk about them she would do so in other's language. Her present is to live what has been defined for her and the future is what is already predicted by others through their prisms.  So, she is a mere beautiful body led through other's tunnel and when opens her eyes she is in front of another world. Where is her world, though?