Invitation into writing does not come from the real, the imaginary, from thought, from concepts. These are always connected to one another. The conversation between them is what brings us into writing. Nothing can create a puzzle about itself on its own; it can do so only when it forms a relationship or comes to be joined with something else. In everyone's life, there are things which are beyond the visible, which are enigmas. Writing is neither about explaining an enigma, nor about making it explicit. Rather, a text is created by how far, how deep into the enigma one can go, is willing to go.
What is the relationship we are forming with that enigma? When we bring that relationship into our thought, many questions arise. It is from this that a text gets its form.
Things are never already fixed in a state of being settled or unsettled. Things are always already in movement in multiple directions. They are in a process of carrying many things along with them. They are not alone. They are in polyphony. It is when we extract them out of what we see and experience that the question of the weave of a text emerges.
What is being woven?
Writing is not about putting things into a defined orbit. Writing is about piecing together a “where”, and this propels the “self” into a search for a “where”. In writing, the “where” and the “self” can be found in the interstices between reality / experience / imagination. But here one has to think about and make sense of what each thing opens out as it appears. When we make the everyday collide with imagination, what force of life emerges? Not to give fixed form to life, but to be open to what this collision is giving rise to.
A cup of tea is part of everyday life for all of us. One drinks tea everyday. Often at home, and also outside, and alone. Why do I bring a cup of tea into my text? What does it mean to do so? It doesn't mean that a scene is in need of an environment in the text within which it may unfold. Rather, the tussle is in figuring out which thought a cup of tea is going to strike and trigger. And also, which thought made it appear in one’s mind in the first place. That which struck you is an anchor. In accepting this anchor as a riddle with which to move ahead, more things strike you and a direction appears.
What is this “strike”? A place holds within it an extensive scene; the eye takes flight through it. You take flight by drawing the ambience within you, and you write not the effect of what happened but, rather, you try and read, make sense of where your expression will reach or be made to reach if you narrate that which has happened. When you are in search of something, collisions are inadvertant. These collisions open out the possibility of thought.
Through our text, “It made news” (Trickster City, Penguin India, 2010), we would like to think about the decisions the writer would have taken while writing it.
It Made News
By Lakhmi Chand Kohli
That morning, newspapers disappeared the moment they reached the vending stalls. Wherever one looked, people were reading. Dakshinpuri is mentioned in the papers. J-K-L blocks are abuzz; everyone is eager to know what unexpected, enormous event had caused even their name to appear in the papers.
16 December 2000: In Dakshinpuri, a young man named ‘Raji’ was stabbed and killed at 11 p.m. yesterday. The police has identified three suspects. One has been arrested. A search is on for the other two.
Everybody scanned the report to locate familiar names. Groups huddled around newspapers, curious to know what had been written. Then they slowly dispersed, turning towards their homes to prepare for the day.
The sun was overhead. The street filled with students returning from school. Two boys ran past everyone. Soon afterwards, policemen advanced through the street, escorting a lad. Young men retreated into their homes. Men covered their card games with bedsheets. Autorickshaw drivers moved their three-wheelers to the side. Everything abated.
All eyes in the street were riveted on the boy. Hushed, the neighbourhood puzzled over which block he was from. The policemen walked through this wordless gathering, their fingers gripping the boy’s hands. His face looked downcast; it was clear he had been beaten.
‘Stop brother! Stop!’ A woman’s voice pierced through from a distance. She was running towards the policemen.
‘Arre, stop brother,’ she yelled. ‘I will teach this bastard a lesson. He has made life hell for me. I will kill him today.’ She had come close now. ‘I’ll rest only after killing him. Stop, brother.’
All eyes shifted to her. More people stepped out of their homes; the onlookers stepped closer. ‘Brother, step aside,’ the woman stopped in front of one of the policemen. ‘He is going to die today.’ She took off one of her slippers.
She was sobbing. She picked up the slipper and began hitting the boy.
Once here, there again, relentlessly, ruthlessly. The boy cried out in pain. The woman’s hands didn’t stop.
‘You will die today.’
There was no chance of intervening.
On his face, his back, his chest, his head. She hit him. And she continued to cry. Onlookers blurred around the scene. Everything slowed. The boy now bled from his nose and mouth.
‘Stand up! Stand up or I will kill you. You bastard! You wretch! You are no longer my son. If you ever set foot in my house again, you will die. Even if it means I will be hanged. Get out of my sight, you fiend!’
The boy, half dead by now, started to stand up.
‘Don’t just keep standing there! Today a mother will bear blame for having killed her own son.’
‘Get lost. Go away.’
‘Run!’
The boy caught his breath. Stumbled and fell, mustered up strength, and ran.
The woman stood there, crying, her folded hands mutely addressing the crowd.
She began to walk. Blending into the red uniforms of girls returning from school, she disappeared.
Everyone stood where they were, tense, watching the policemen.
The decisions:
To not steer it into a particular direction – neither towards power, nor towards the one on whom power is operating. It is an attempt to think without making moral judgements. Neither to oppose nor side with something. In this way it becomes possible to seek a new language.
What does an “ending” of a text mean? Is it the end of the text, or of the story unfolding in it, or of thought, of imagination, or of the mystery the text is weaving? Where does the end arrive? Where the answer that was being sought has been found? Or there, where the text has left us with a new question? And what if the end stands before you in contradiction to your expectations? What if it takes that turn which makes the text exceed its own limits? Limits which are held in place by a weighing-scale form of thinking, which means either to affirm or to oppose. It is only when you pull yourself out of this weighing-scale form of thinking that the possibility of surprise arises. The mystery within your own text reveals itself. It reveals itslef as much for the writer as for the reader.
It is not the attempt of this text to be opaque, but often it does draw the reader into a confusion. Who is going where? Who is standing where? Where is the reader looking from? And where is the writer travelling to? Many such questions weave themselves into a web around the text. Considered by itself, the ending of this text too is a question. It is a question that constitutes the text, and is also the question that the text leaves one with: “What is it that has happened?”
Where the text leaves us – what is in that 'leaving'? It is neither to stabilise us, nor to leave us in a state of instability. Neither to allow to solidify nor to slither past. That is to say, it is not as if the text leads you into a dark alley, but neither does it guide you towards a particular destination. It can leave us with the offer of a foothold. It would then have in it a sense of balance as to how much to do, how much to turn, and that if pushed too roughly it can break. An ending – it can be an end of that place, of the story, of the text or of the scene, but not of the tendency which resides deep in the weave of the text.
The text begins with a newspaper, the sense that something enormous has happened, but it is fluid. The event and the news, are both contained within the sheet of the newspaper.
Something has happened. That something has made news. What has happened and its environment, both have shrunk into the newspaper. The newspaper is creating an environment. This brings the newspaper into a reverberation. This reverberation is the sense that the news is not merely news, rather it has torn through many groups and places as it lands in their midst.
This reverberation is not uniform. It has varying amplitude for the mother, for the men with the autorickshaws, for the onlookers. This reverberation has the effect not of knitting together, but of perforating a place.
A place is made of many languages. Newspapers also bring a particular language with them. When a language lands in a place, what does it mean?
Just as a place gets made and changes, so too language finds itself in a spiral of transformation. When a place draws things into itself, it also searches for a language with which to speak, to express this. When we fall into a place, a language emerges, seeds, and even as we maintain a distance from it, we keep absorbing it. As we speak and we listen, in the relentless passage of time, language, its instability, and its mutation get their sustenance. From pain, to complaint, to cajoling, to appealing, it keeps finding its passage.
Language – of complaint.
Language – of supplication.
Language – of appeal.
Language – of filling a form.
Language – of insitutions.
Language – of personal letters.
Language – of publicity.
Reading keeps negotiating between negation and affirmation; this keeps the edges of language in a state of examination.
Where should I write from? I know the place, but still, how do I stand before it?
When do we feel that we are meeting our own place, scenes and relationships for the first time? To belong to a place, to be at a place and to be in a place – it is when you step back from these relationships formed over known durations that you find yourself confronting a place. With what understanding about the place are you present in the place – if this itself becomes your starting point, then?
To remove yourself from your situation and your location is to come into an argument with your own fixed introductions. Writing demands that you always be within such argument. The question “where” refines and thickens the intersection of the ambits of first person, second person and third person. Why do you want to encounter today the place that you know – this is what has to be considered.
Which effects of things should I write about? Which effects of things should I travel with?
We came upon a diary of a man – a diary in which he had written about his everyday. Reading from one day to the next gave the sense that something big had transpired. In the diary he had written about what happened during his day, but the bigger sense one gets is of what has remained unsaid.
The tussle we feel in reading the diary is how not to let our thought drift into the causes of the effects of the everyday, how not to spin a tale about what happens when the effect of the day ebbs. It is when you extract your thought out of thinking about cause, reason, and evidence that the attempt at thinking emerges.
In thinking about the question “Where should I write from”, the question to the self would have been – which “where” will I end up creating in the process? After all, the “I” in this text is not of the writer alone, but of an entire place.
We would like to elaborate this point by talking through the “survey”. The survey we speak of is one which is conducted by agencies of the State to determine the “legitimate” dwellers of a place and to distinguish them from the “illegitimate” dwellers. Such surveys are door-to- door surveys. In a neighbourhood, conducting a survey for just the fifteen hundred families who reside in the ground floor construction of that neighbourhood takes the Municipal officers a few months.
During the survey, the question of “I”, more than it being a question of “where” it is standing, seemed to be of moving into a poly-vocal “I”, which cannot be summed up as a single “I”.
Every place maintains a veil, and it also keeps certain things in view. Keeping things veiled and making them transparent, both these processes work together to let a place breathe.
The survey is the eye of the state working with the view to guage, measure, assess a place. That which is being examined – how is it being examined? What does an understanding of this examination mean?
When something is examined, the examination brings into a crisis all the signs of change through which a place has lived till then.
The life of a place over thirty-five years, the signs of life that have made it, its struggle to keep itself alive in the eyes of the city, its weave which is made by threading every strand of the self gathered each day – how will the examination fare before all this?
The more you understand being guaged, being measured, being assessed, being marked, the more difficult it gets to write it. This is not a crisis of how you will narrate a place, but of whether it is possible at all to reproduce yourself.
Such encounters make you confront the question of writing by dislodging yourself. It is one’s face-off with one’s self.
We were reading a book together. One among us commented – the force with which we move into a place is equalled by the force with which that place hurtles towards us. Do we have with us the questions by which we may understand this force, the eyes through which we may discern the life that lives within the currents of this force?
The challenge is to think and write from within the possible collision that may occur between the force with which you are moving towards something, and the force which is travelling towards you. This collision is not about turning away from your moral obligations to a place, rather it is about sensing the force within the sediment of the enigmas, mysteries, challenges and relationships of that place and battling with yourself – with how you think about that place, the lens through which you see that place, your knowledge, your body language, your formed and settled imaginations.
When everything was breaking apart in Nangla Maanchi, the neighbourhood beside the river Yamuna where some of us lived and which all of us had a deep relationship with, a kind of force was travelling towards us with great velocity, and that is what made it possible for us to sense a force within us with which to see, to write.
To write by dislodging yourself does not mean to write in opposition to something or someone. It is to cross the borders of your thought and be faced by your own self.
Many eyes beholding each other – to write from within this web of glances.
What is this “within”? Is it a place, a position? “Within” is the edge of something, of finding a balance there.
When you are “within”, you can travel in any direction. Travel: from place to place, from person to person, from thing to thing. No two travels are the same in form or sharpness. Each has its own particular impact and capacity to cut through things. It can be light, or thick, slanted or spiral. It has no end and neither does one set out on it in order to return. It is a travel without a return ticket. Text and writing live out this relationship between movement and there being no intention of a return.
We want to read a small extract from a text we wrote in 2003. The text is called “I Ashoki”. It has been written thinking about Ashokiji, a man who cleans sewers.
The boy who had come to file the complaint was also there. He was looking at me with surprised eyes. Maybe he was thinking that when he had come to the office, I was wearing clean clothes and talking to him like an officer. But today he was surprised seeing me in my dirty clothes. I was laughing within. In his eyes, I was first an officer, a sahib. He had called me sir. But what would he call me now? Maybe he was also thinking of the same thing.
Here, by writing through “I”, the writer actually stepped out of his own “I”. Writing from outside “I” doesn't mean writing through “he”, or through a name. And whose “I” you take on also makes a difference. The policeman's “I”? The onlooker's “I”? The “I” of the boy who ran away? His mother's “I”? When the “I” disappears it may be the moment at which you are deepest within yourself. Such being within yourself is to stand in argument with your self.
Where has the writer written this text from? The writer has reached some threshold in his thought, and that is where he is writing the text from. He is standing where his thought has brought him to. He cannot withdraw into a simple, coherent “I”.
The text is not an eyewitness account. It cannot be – it has been written from where the writer is, in his thoughts, when he has written it. Some thought has come to him, with the magnetic pull of which he has tugged that scene from far away close to himself, drawn it into his today, to ignite his thinking. That is, he is thinking a question through, in the process of which this scene comes to his mind, and he pulls it close to make it dialogue with his present question.
To write without falling into the extremes of being someone in the know on the one hand, and being unaware, on the other.
If you write as someone who is of that place, who knows the place, then you will unravel the mystery of the place, make it apparent. If you write as a passer-by, as a stranger, then you will do little more than express surprise, or turn what you have seen into an example to illustrate your thought. In either state, you will not be able to move closer to the enigma which is an integral part of the place.
It's not as if all these questions have been resolve once and for all by us. Rather, there are many encounters, meetings, contexts that continously challenge and provoke us, often producing in us a crisis of thought. And we are constantly in search of this too. There is no option. Because otherwise we will get ensnared within our own web of words. What we have thought – how can it be tested?
Knocking: It means being called.
Knocking: Being drawn away from that which you are in.
Knocking: An invitation to be surprised.
Do words have a knock-like force? What kind of knocking do words do? And what does that do to us? Does it take things away from view? Or does it produce a difficulty of some other sort?
“Damdaar” (courageous, honourable). When we brought this word amidst us as a knocking, it brought to the fore lives which were around us, but which had till then eluded our conversations. Lives that collide with the entanglements of daily living and engender in them a movement and a momentum. These lives don't allow themselves to come into a stillness, don't allow themselves to be cast in fixed moulds. The lives we got drawn towards when we started responding to this knocking captivated us, but the travel towards them seemed long and arduous. What are these lives?
These lives are not part of the count – the count through which you consolidate your ways of thinking. This journey takes us to the question of how one can be with or travel with them, and what forms this being and traveling can be threaded into. We cannot just retell them, we cannot end up doing a transcript, and if we write them as if we were writing our own experience then we will not have really been able to think through their city, the city they make.
These lives cannot be written through the moral shapes and forms of “I”, or be formulated through the language of experience. Their gravitas will be made light if we merely speak of them as people in journey. They cannot be narrated like stories from our past and to speak of them as wanderers would be like sentencing them to a fixity. Then what weave can we give to our encounters with these lives? We reached a point where we knew it was not possible for us to enter their selves. Because their selves call for a renewal every single day.
Then after some more time elapsed we understood that the world doesn't come face to face with them through some event. Rather, they percolate through and fill lives without any event having caused them or occasioned them to do so. Their “I” is invisible, but neither is it a private “I”.
To write from within someone else does not mean one has cast away one’s own self. It is about being able to wrestle with and flow along with those figures which are formed by the “I” of many others. This became a very difficult challenge for us. Over and over, we could see our efforts were ending up congealing this “I” in order to make it appear before us, speak to us. It’s not that we merely encountered this as a block to writing; such obstacles don't halt thought – rather they demand that we examine ourselves and push the unexamined limits of how we think, what we are writing.
We would like to end with a text, which we are still working on, and which has emerged from this tussle.
Our effort can be summed up as this:
Flow of time: In which a person and a life cannot be rendered.
We say “something is changing” and think we have understood, and have been able to explain what we have understood to others. But in thinking and staying with Babli's conversations with Bhoori Maiyya, we realised Bhoori Maiyya has signs through which she can mark every change in her life. But how to write or think this “being able to say” has been a struggle for us.
In Babli's conversations with Bhoori Maiyya we registered a fluidity of time.
Time – the duration for which she is speaking.
Time – the duration over which the conversation is being written.
Time – which she inhabits when she speaks.
Time – which she conjures as she speaks, which is without limits.
Time – a creative tension of the thought interval between speaking and listening.
In our conversations between Babli and Bhoori Maiyya, Jaanu sensed this flow of time and tried to recreate it through his own reading. He tried to understand this and bring the different senses of time into collision. What is the flow of time? It does not speak in one voice. It does not belong to one person. We end now by sharing with you the text that is emerging through such a reading.
These mud-filled lanes, now that it is raining, are filled with the scent of wet earth, but what a spectacle too they make of those who pass through them—to be stuck with an umbrella in a narrow lane, and while you struggle to break free, the water dripping down the roofs will leave you drenched! Strong, unceasing waves of conversation – they sting me all over like bees and I toss and turn in my bed, what more I can do? That I should go near and listen... this thought never crossed my mind. The sounds of conversation would rise, then dip, and sometimes from amidst the voices I would hear clearly my name, Bhoora... This decision we have taken for Bhoora is the right one. My mind is straining to tune in to these sounds from far away. Women have stepped out in the rain; their dupattas are their umbrellas, and they walk briskly – ah, these pictures of perfection! They balance all their purchases in one hand and hitch up their salwars with the other. The conversation had resumed after dinner, by eleven, perhaps eleven thirty, after our excited, mischief-filled cheering, hooting and howling quietened, in that place where there were neither men nor women, in that neighbourhood of about two hundred and fifty houses, where groups of twen to twelve people lived in each house and where we had gone to live, within a cluster of ten to twelve houses. Here, whichever point you stood at, you could see the doors of all the houses all at once. Looking in the direction of the thakurain, I edged closer to the radio and touched it – because I felt protected by the compassion on her face, a face unlike anyone else's there – when suddenly the radio crackled to life, that day when Kangana, Jhoomar, Nanda, Hema and I had bathed and dressed as soon as we woke up, that morning when we heard the news that a little prince had been born in the thakur's home, that we had to make haste, get ready. “Do you know Guruji, at home right now Ammi will be making sweet sewayin, Ashad and Abdullah will be getting ready to go to the Idgah to offer prayers, my sister will be smiling, though Abbu Jaan and Uncle will be screaming and demanding to know if their pants have been readied, why their shirts haven't been ironed, where their prayer caps are, why the children aren't ready yet, get them ready them quickly, we should leave at once, it's getting late. Today, once again, my day began with a dream... For many nights now I have been dreaming about a lake; many of my friends are with me in my dream, and the only way out of where we are, and to get to where we can pray, is through the lake; we have to walk over rocks; I have managed somehow but two of my friends are stuck in the middle and the helplessness I feel when they fall into the lake causes me to wake up. Do you get the import of this dream? I have seen it a few times now. Across the lane from me, a few steps from my house, live a husband and a wife who, though they have come from a village, are utterly shameless; I can't stand it when the girl goes about her chores – inside, but also outside her house – without her veil properly on her, and I mutter under my breath; but when she stands at the threshold of her house looking unblinkingly at the wall clock within my house I feel I understand how removed she feels, how distances stretch out in front of her – like that day when people were looking more at me than at the bride and the groom even though they were the ones dressed up and I was in a simple kurta-pyjama, and yet everyone's gaze slowly settled on me and when I went up on the stage to bless the newly married couple everyone asked to have a photo clicked with me, not like that “I” who everyone accepts, but perhaps like that word which, if others join it with their “I” then it is possible that the very way in which “I” is understood in their milieu might change. “I want to wear these clothes today,” “Guruji, please give me that ear-ring today,” “I can't do without your jewellery right now” – when I lived up on the hillock, though it had rooms and walls, but within those walls the way clothes and all other things used to be scattered about and mingled without fear or hesitation, it used to feel like there was no concept of “I”, “me”, “mine”. Beautiful. Beautiful, like she used to say it in English, the lady whose words we didn't follow, we only understood “beautiful”; but even then, the smiling faces – hers and ours – told us there was a joy we shared.
The Cybermohalla Ensemble is Azra Tabassum, Shamsher Ali, Lakhmi Kohli, Love Anand, Neelofar, Babli Rai, Nasreen, Jaanu Nagar, Rabiya Quraishy, Rakesh Khairalia.
The Ensemble has emerged from within the project called "Cybermohalla", a network of dispersed labs for experimentation and exploration among young people in different neighbourhoods of the city, that was initiated by Ankur: Society for Alternatives in Education, Delhi and Sarai-CSDS, Delhi in the year 2001.
Over the years, the ensemble has produced a very wide range of materials, practices, works and structures. Their work has circulated and been shown in online journals, radio broadcasts, publications, neighbourhood gatherings, contemporary and new media art exhibitions.
Cybermohalla Ensemble’s publications include Bahurupiya Shehr (Rajkamal, Delhi 2007), Trickster City (Penguin India, 2010), No Apologies for the Interruption. They have been published in The rest of now;, Companion book to Manifesta7, co-curated by Raqs Media Collective (Companion Book ed. Rana Dasgupta), 2008, City Improbable, a collection of writings about Delhi, ed. Khushwant Singh, Penguin-India, 2010.
Shveta Sarda works at Sarai-CSDS and is a translator and writer.