No Hideouts Found
Avishek Parui Dialogues “Say something” you throat across our table where three plates of grapes and the leftovers furl a forest between us in which something had been lost or maybe cleverly hidden like a leak… And as the butterflies in our tablecloth begin to soak all that we had spilled sauce, juice, wine lies, grease, guilt; You stretch your strategic smile as I see the silhouettes sink… and think of the words that drop Waves. Dredge. Pills. Bridge. Edge. Brink… The rituals would stay the patterns will remain but this time when our eyes meet I hope to cut across to you with another strip of silence that the glass I broke after they had left wasn’t really slippery and the blood that curled my fingers thereafter was not very red… But guess you’d stop me midway slit across the stillness I would have built and say “I knew.” ******** Guy Fawkes’ Night As the boys outside were trying to set fire on the Guy they’d built you were thinking of a way to say sorry to mum for telling papa when he had asked over the phone that she had been out all afternoon… You know lying is a bad thing Mrs. Teresa says that in class that God is very angry when you lie but you think now maybe it would have been OK to say sorry to God later than to see papa scream “rotten bitch” and throw his big bad bottle at mum so hard that you could hear the glass hitting her eye and then the cringe and the cry when the blood that began to spread started to chase you…as you ran into your room so that mum could just feel the pain and not be ashamed… “The guy won’t catch fire”, you hear Tommy shout “It’s the freaking wind that blows it out” You stare at your colours and the page where you’d been trying to draw a house that’s become a birdcage… across the room papa is watching TV now where someone’s speaking on how the world could be turned to a better place by fighting terrorism together with love, care, faith while there’s still time you think it would be a good idea now to go to your mum’s room and show the big cage you’ve drawn with all the red crayons you have maybe you should write “SORRY” beneath it as well just in case mum doesn’t understand… ******** Quo Vadis After the torchlights had frisked through my wet insides and whistled away into the greasy night you came in to stay having walked through the heaviness of grey chimneysmoke in nightair and shrieks in radio plays despite the moons and purring cars you must have met… I had doubled down my stakes by then with the knowledge that I would crash again all signposts would be strewn across my tart taste… guess most of us cave in sometimes when the cold grows frills across the tiles and the rosebud shows the sled… But you showed up with your hair tied back too neatly into something like a bun… You smelled like someone who had stared at the whole of last night till the rhododendrons screamed a sunrise between them… I’m here to stay, you voiced till the claptrap is over and all the axioms flake off or die I looked out and saw the frisbees flying the stars that had dripped across were drying of course I knew you lied… ******** Spectres The twilight shrinks as each day dies from the cold rooftops the blood-red tiles that purple fast under changing moons. The hours slide beneath the lies the walls cave in against the tides the lovers fall way too soon. The hotdogs sell and the salad’s free see how Afghans die in flat TV-s no hideouts found in the end the hunters coughed… Apologies? Our eyes meet in guilty streets white stripes align strangers’ feet as the swishing cars race across the green-eyed gods who count clock-beats. Between love-songs the RJ says “Very soon the nation-heads would meet to plan a perfect world where every man is free.” You stare out at the lonely stars that drink your guilt and hide your scars from all that should not see. ******** Avishek Parui is completing doctoral studies at the Department of English, The University of Durham. He is the winner of The Short Fiction Competition 2010 by Platform Magazine, India, the winner of the Poetry Competition titled Journeys by Sampad, Birmingham, UK. He features in the anthologies of best poetry for the years 2009 and 2010 by Forward Press, UK. adminhumanitiesunderground.org
Armies Are Now Obsolete
The 19 th century history of the Internal Wars of the New Zealanders is fascinating and gruesome. Tens of thousands of Maori died in the intertribal Musket Wars of the opening decades of the 19th century. On a per capita basis the estimated casualty figures for these wars is equivalent to around 200,000 New Zealand deaths in the First World War (instead of the 18,000 lives actually lost). As expected, these events remain shadowy, as if they were almost exclusively the concern of Maori with European participation largely confined to the supply of weapons. Ron Crosby’s The Musket Wars (1999) and Angela Ballara’s Taua (2003) are two significant works that have attempted to shed more light on the causes and consequences of these devastating campaigns. HUG has been looking systematically into the history of these wars and especially tracking the international debates on the very idea of muskets during the period of 1839-1945. We reproduce two short articles and a letter to the editor from three leading newspapers of New Zealand. ARMIES ARE NOW OBSOLETE Evening Post, Volume CX, Issue 53, 30 August 1930, Page 24 “Future wars will be fought and decided by civilians, not by soldiers. Present-day armies will be superfluous— useless.” That is the sensational prophecy of Lieut. Colonel Mayer, one of Frances’s leading military experts, expressed in a forthcoming book, advance excerpts of which, appear, in ‘ the Neues Wiener Journal. Chemistry, and aircraft will fight future wars, and; both these elements will be directed, chiefly by civilian experts, not by soldiers, asserts the French military expert., Four, thousand aircraft, high explosives, and gas-bombing ,’ planes, will represent a greater offensive arid: destructive power than an army of a million soldiers, according to Lieut.-Colonel Mayer. Organic chemistry has produced more than five thousand different gases, with many new ones being discovered or invented every year, he says. The world conflict swept away the alleged eternal truth and principles of classical, strategy, and at the close of the way, convinced of this, and that Germany would not be able to attack for at least fifteen years, Lieut.-Colonel Mayer’ suggested that the French army be completely demobilised and disbanded for ten years. He was told that his suggestion could not be taken seriously. “Notwithstanding that it is clear that a handful of civilian experts can, with combined gas and air attacks, destroy the largest and best-trained army in the world,” he says. In support of this theory, the French military expert cites Napoleon; who wrote during his last year on St. Helena: “Every victory of my troops was the triumph of new ideas. The time will come when neither cannon nor bayonets will be necessary for victory.” He declares that H. G. Wells is right when he says that the wars of the future will be fought by civilians. War operations of to-morrow will be sudden surprise attacks, unexpected in time and place. They will demoralise and intimidate the enemy. Forts, barracks, and present-day armies arc as irrevocably doomed to pass away as were tho bow, arrow and spear at the first shot from a musket. It is quite natural that the heads of the armies to-day are interested in seeing that no radical change takes place in the present system and order of things, declares Lieut.-Colonel Mayer, adding: “That Governments and General Staffs close their eyes to the truth does not alter the might and power of the facts.” AMMUNITION TO THE NATIVES. Colonist, Volume XII, Issue 1222, 11 June 1869, Page 2 Often than once we have noticed the fact, or probable fact, that outside white men, men of our own civilised Caucasian race, have supplied the rebels with ammunition. An incident has occurred in the North which gives conviction to the charge. We learn by the Hawke’s Bay Herald that Ensign Witty, in marching to join the force, found, near Putere, in Napier Province, a keg which had contained powder, with a maker’s name in Boston on it. American whalers have frequently been suspected of engaging in this disreputable traffic, by means of which cannibal savages are enabled to destroy peaceable and law loving white men. We hope, if there is any possible clue by which to trace the mercenary men who can thus trade in the blood of peaceful settlers, that the Colonial Government will prosecute the search for evidence to the utmost, and appeal to the American Government to take measures to stop such iniquity. There is no civilised Government in the world which knows better than the Government of the United States, the evil effects of such doings; for their frontier wars with the Indians are replete with parallels of the Poverty Bay massacres of helpless settlers, and the cruel use of the tomahawk and musket on the bodies of men, women, and children, who, indiscriminately, have been the victims of the savage. It may be difficult to trace the real culprits, but the maker’s name in sanctimonious Boston, may aid the Government of President Grant in discovering the wicked dealers, who thus at once Bets the laws of war and of civilised humanity at defiance. Treat this as a definite lesson to the settlers in New Zealand. The Musket. To the Editor of the Times. Daily Southern Cross, Volume VIII, Issue 522, 29 June 1852, Page 3 Sir, — Every military man will concur in the justice of your remarks on the subjects of the inefficiency of our regulation musket, thank you for making them. But we needed not this miserable “little war” in South Africa to demonstrate the inefficiency of which you so justly complain. “It is necessary, “as you say, ”that our soldiers should hit the enemy with their musketballs,” and that “this one thing they unfortunately -cannot do,” was too often proved in the course of the unhappy war in Afghanistan. The British musket was no match for the Affghan jezail. Even in fair open fight, when the enemy were not sheltered behind their precipitous rocks,
Guddu, I and the Qawallis at Vijay Mandal
Sambudha Sen Several years ago, when I was only twenty eight, I spent an extended period as a tenant in a flat in Vijay Mandal Enclave. The Delhi Development Authority had built this relatively new block of apartments in a terrain that was typical of Delhi. As part of the rapidly developing South Delhi , Vijay Mandal Enclave had been squeezed into a bit of spare land in vicinity of Mother’s International School and the Indian Institute of Technology. And because we lay directly under the air routes that connected Delhi to the world, I’d often hear the roar of low flying planes and dream about the day when one of them would carry me to Berkeley or Cambridge. But air routes and institutions of modern learning were only recent additions in a neighborhood wedged in by Kalu Sarai and Begumpur, two ancient settlements that had never really separated themselves from a Delhi ruined centuries before Shah Jahan began building, what is for us, the old city . The ruins of Kalu Sarai were clearly visible from the narrow balcony of our cramped fourth floor flat. One morning, when I’d stepped into that balcony to enjoy the cool, damp monsoon breeze with my coffee and cigarette, Kalu Sarai’s ruined 14th century mosque had looked particularly picturesque behind the fine rain screen. I believe that my long and intense relationship with that place began from that moment. I visited the ruins that very evening and was lucky enough to have run straight into Guddu singing a qawalli. Khazan Singh told me, after Guddu had finished, that we were sitting around the mazaar of a saint whose name nobody remembered but who was universally acknowledged to be a kind and benevolent spirit. Several people from Begumpur and Kalu Sarai visited the spot to solicit the unnamed Baba’s help and ten or fifteen of them were sure to be there on Thursdays when Guddu sang his qawwalis. A retired plumber from IIT, who called himself Maula, would come in early to sweep the area around the grave. Khazaan Singh also helped in the upkeep of the place with small financial contributions. He was a Jat from Begumpur but he put on a Mussalman’s skull cap whenever he visited the mazaar. And then there was Guddu whose qawallis, more than anything else, sustained the astonishing after life that the ruined mosque at Kalu Sarai had acquired. Guddu always struck me as a very responsible man. He worked as an auto rickshaw driver and was married to a hardworking woman who’d found employment as a full time domestic servant in a Vastant Vihar house. They had a five year old son and they seemed like a decent, stable, even upwardly mobile family when I’d visited them at the clean, well lit room that the employers of Guddu’s wife had provided for her. Guddu’s ordinary life, however, turned extraordinary in the evenings after he’d finished plying his auto rickshaw. He would then immerse himself in the activity he really loved – singing qawallis. He had a magnificent singing voice – melodious, supple but also rough and passionate. His repertoire of qawallis was large, and like many qawalls he did not hesitate to insert verses of his own into the compositions of Habib Painter or even Amir Khusro. And although Guddu never went to school , he was an extremely gifted teacher. He spoke of the complex analogies and metaphors of qawallis, of their deep ambiguities, and their effortless ability to move between different languages with such clarity that I rapidly abandoned my research in 19th British culture to pursue anything that would help me to understand the amazing longevity of the qawalli. I began purchasing translations of Jallaluddin Rumi and Fariduddin Attar and the music of Jaffar Hussain Badauni, Ghulam Farid Sabri and even Nusrat Fateh Ali who was very far, then, from international star he was to become. A close friend led me to Regina Quereshi’s book on the qawalli and I made several trips to the Nizamuddin Basti to cultivate the friendship of Miraz, whose knowledge of qawallis was, as Quereshi acknowledged , boundless . In an fit of enthusiasm, which I sustained for several weeks, I even made arragements to learn Urdu. The Urdu primer and dictionary with which I hoped to educate myself , together with the other books and music acquired during that period remain lovingly preserved and I do what I can for Miraz who ,despite his great knowledge of qawallis, languishes in a one room hovel in Nizamuddin. But a combination of ( I suppose predictable) factors caused me, many years ago, to abandon the work I began on the cultural afterlife of the Kalu Sarai masjid. Last month , though , while listening to Jafar sing Man Kunto Maula I was struck by a deep sense of longing for the work I’d set aside many years ago. Rummaging among my old papers I found a dusty notebook full of hazy and embarrassingly overwritten accounts of what went on at the mazaar : Guddu’s explanations of the songs he sang and of where they came from, the Maula’s descriptions of the unknown saint who regularly visited him during his sleep, my own immature thoughts on popular culture and on our syncretic traditions. One sequence , which I reproduce below, is typical of the notebook . It falls repeatedly into rhetorical excess and is completely lacking in the analytical sharpness that I aspire for in my academic writing. Please think of it as you would of photograph taken long ago by an amateur with a primitive black and white camera-a photograph that is blurred, badly composed but which preserves the shadow of a light that faded long ago. It had begun to rain quite hard now. I went across our narrow sitting room to shut the window that was letting the rain in. Beyond the broken walls of our compound, on a gently rising mound, overgrown with tangled shrubs, the nameless saint lay restfully in his grave. The crumbling eastern wall ,that was all that was left of his ruined
The Blind Kingdom
Véronique Tadjo Chapter One; Earth Jolts The earth jolted, violently – all of a sudden – while most inhabitants still slept. In a matter of seconds, the world turned upside down. The ground split open, trees fell, walls shifted and collapsed, stones rolled around, torrents of dust darkened the new morning. The ground trembled, furiously. The earth revolted. Everything appeared to sink into an immense abyss. Sleepers awakened into the middle of a nightmare. Roofs crumbled down on their shoulders; wailing destroyed their throats; panic seized their entire being… Then the world’s belly burst open. An atrocious heat bore down. Death knocked and the sky remained merciless. From everywhere, those who survived got out from the ruins screaming out of fright and running in every direction. Mothers fled with their newborn babies; old people staggered; children crawled around; men shouted out commands. Dogs barked incessantly. Livestock escaped from their pens. Horses went crazy. No one knew where to go. Fear, and it was a disfiguring fear, sculpted faces. In a lightning flash, the empire had collapsed. They found themselves hurled into the same fear, the same fate. Moaning stabbed the atmosphere. People died by the thousands, crushed under ruins, lost in crevices, drowned in the river’s muddy waters that flowed, flooded and swept across the land with thunderous sounds. Beings and things floundered in the water, fell and disappeared beneath the surge. Within seconds, glory was destroyed; the past disembowelled; riches annihilated. But what followed was worse. When the earth stopped jolting, finally, and the inhabitants were left facing each other, fear became unbearable. The terror of destruction took hold and paralyzed them, totally. Horror asphyxiated them. Awareness of the end of the world froze their consciousness. They ranted and raved. They muttered unintelligible words. And then – all of a sudden – the slaves began the work of digging out. They were the only ones who still had strength to react. With their bare hands, they dug through the debris and handed over the bodies: entombed children; vanished mothers; injured fathers. They called out the names. They waited. They dug. Like prehistoric people, they were at nature’s mercy. Gradually, the others awakened from their heavy inertia. The memory of what had once made up their lives, pushed them to move. They gazed at each other, went down on all fours, and dug. When they were able to get someone out, they felt like they had conquered death. Clouds of loneliness and despair colored the days – the tears – the distress. How many more days? Time stood still. They looked only to survive – to eat and sleep – tightly holding on to each other, hoping that the new day would come for them, once again. No longer were there any chiefs, no aristocracy either. No longer were there slaves. People had lost their vanity, their hierarchies, their injustice. Death had taught them a lesson in humility. Death had shown them her unrivalled might by swallowing whomever she wanted. No more stratification. No more empire. Simply men and women such as they were at the beginning of time. This is when, coming from the other side of the mountains, the BlindPeople arrived. The survivors saw them approaching in a solid mass. Their army was sparkling. Dazzling rays of light streamed from their missiles and firearms. Their power was unmatched; their superiority invincible. Within a short while, they invaded the empire and installed their kingdom. Chapter Two; The King’s Palace Built on a gigantic hill, the palace spreads its wings over the city like a monstrous bat. The huge room with a hundred mirrors where the king held court formed the body of the beast and its wings were the raised ballrooms where banquets and meetings were held; the king’s chambers and those of his daughter were located in the head of the creature. They jutted out and were decorated with fine fabrics and gold encrusted ceilings. At the top of this structure, surveillance radars scanned the kingdom and picked up every sound-wave that moved across the realm. A bat was carved on the throne and the royal scepter because the bat inhabits the night and masters the sky despite blind eyes. Because the bat with its mysterious cries is the possessor of infinite powers. Because darkness is the bat’s force. Bats lived freely in the gardens of the palace. City-dwellers heard them from afar especially at the king’s consecrated feeding time. He stood up straight among them and followed the rustling of their beating wings. He knew, exactly, the special way they sounded if they liked the mixture of ripe fruit, fresh vegetables and insects he threw to them. These creatures multiplied at an uncontrollable rate. In this way, they colonized all the trees in the city and drove away the sparrows which fled, gradually, towards the North. They attacked the children, getting entangled in their hair. They scratched and emitted piercing cries like needles on eardrums. Every morning servants washed down the palace’s steps and facade. They had to rub, scrape and scrub to get rid of the excrement that these flying mammals left everywhere. The atmosphere was invaded by a stifling stench and the gardens resembled garbage dumps. Green and blue flies buzzed up around the ears of His Majesty Ato IV. While feeding his bats one particular day the king was pensive. In the evening he was to host a huge marriage banquet with the entire court in attendance. Normally, this should have put him in a good mood yet he was very unhappy because he would have preferred to spend all this money in honor of his own daughter. His only child. But she categorically refused to get married so instead he had to celebrate the wedding festivities of a young cousin. He was thinking: “Ahh, how I would have loved to marry off Akissi!” Ato IV was thinking as he returned to his chambers. I would have had made for her a