This time he was a free man. So, all crime reporters were waiting for Bunty at the Lodhi Road Police Station on Thursday. I was the odd one out. I had met Bunty a year ago when we managed to meet him in the prison. I had given him my number then.
Bunty walked in. He looked at me. Then he said "chinki?"
I hollered "Bunty Chor"
And that was all that was needed. I spoke to him for a few minutes. He said he wanted to be good again. I said it is good to be good again. He asked me if I had cut my hair. I said a little. He said he remembered me. He asked for my number. I scribbled it on a piece of paper and handed it to him. Maybe I will see him again.
An edited version appeared in the Indian Express on Friday, June 25, 2010.
Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, June 24, 2010
From the futuristic submarine he had wanted to build, the one that would also crisscross the skies last year when he gave his imagination a free run, Bunty Chor aka Devender Sharma, now 39, after he was released from Tihar Jail last week, is now hopping on to the city buses, trying to start afresh. He is a nobody now. From the madman who rambled about having been to heaven and how peaceful it was compared to the cramped quarters of the jail where he thought everyone was out to get him, Bunty is now saner but a worried man.
The lovable, suave thief who ruled imagination, and even inspired film scripts like Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!, a movie that chronicled his whimsical style, is looking for a regular job, anything that would help him lead a straight life.
“ It's not easy. But at least it is not as bad as jail. I am happy to be a free man again,” he said. “I just need a chance.”
As he walked into the Lodhi Road Police Station on Thursday evening, he didn't look like his former self. At Tihar, when we had met him last year, he had looked shrunken, his collarbones were prominent, his eyes sunken. Here he was in his bleached hair, a red cap and a matching red Polo T shirt and blue jeans. His brother's gift, he said.
But his brother Balvinder Singh said he didn't buy him the clothes. He said he didn't want to keep his brother. Not after the family attempted to try to reform him twice earlier.
“ We can't keep him anymore. He always runs away,” he said. “I don't know where he is staying. Probably at the police station itself. But no, our doors are closed for him.”
Ever since he was released, Bunty, a Class IX dropout, has been coming to the police station hoping the man who nabbed him in 2002 and 2007, the cop who understood him and who he confided in telling him about all his exploits, his weaknesses, would help him lead a straight life. But for the cop, who can't stop talking about the unusual thief, it is like walking on a tightrope. In 2006, Bunty had promised him he would stop stealing and live an honest life. After he was released from jail in 2006, when he promised Singh he would lead a straight life. But after cars being stolen were reported from Defence Colony and Malviya Nagar in south Delhi, SHO Rajinder Singh knew it could be none other than Bunty. He was later arrested from a house in Noida. It had been a dramatic episode. The police broke into the house but not before Bunty had called the Police Control Room saying some goons had got into his house. The two sets of police argued and it took sometime for Singh to convince them how the suave looking man who had pictures of his wife and children displayed all over the house was indeed a conman and the photos were of another man's wife. Finally, Bunty was arrested. He had given the police a slip thrice before.
Singh still swears by Bunty's good and moral character. He said he is not a violent man. When he had arrested him, the super chor asked him not to slap him, he had asked for a chair and like a respectable man, admitted to his wrongs. More than Rs. 5 crore worth of goods were recovered from his instance. Later it was all distributed.
Leaning against the chair in his office, Singh’s eyes wander. He is waiting waiting for Bunty. Earlier in the day, Bunty called him and said he would be coming to meet him. Bunty is now staying with his elder brother in Vikaspuri. His family had first denied him saying they didn't want him to return. His tag of a thief would not rid of so easily.
Bunty was released from Tihar on May 30 and was then taken to the Amritsar Central Jail and released finally on June 14. He had already served three years in Tihar's Jail No. 4, a high security prison, for burglary and theft. He had at least 550 cases against him. Most of them were cases of unusual theft – a parrot, cutlery, a little dog who caught his fancy.
“ Bunty had a typical style. He stole only what he liked,” he said. “Girls loved him. He was in love and that's what led to his mental state. The girl is now married. Bunty when he came back tried to meet her but I guess she refused.”
The clock struck 4:30 p.m. Bunty had said he would be at the police station by 3 p.m.
“ This is his test. But I know he will come,” Singh said.
At 5 p.m. Bunty walked in. He was on the bus. It took time, he said.
“ For a man who drove expensive cars, even owned one that he fitted with gadgets, this is proof enough that he is trying hard to be good,” Singh said.
On Jun 15, a day after he paid the Rs. 2000 fine imposed by a sessions court in Amritsar, Bunty called Rajinder Singh. He wanted to meet him. The same day, Bunty Chor walked in with a little bag. He looked worn out. Singh got him a pair of shirt and trousers, then fed him lunch. For fours hours, the thief and the cop who had put him behind bars spoke about his life, his recovery from the mental illness, and his future.
That night Bunty stayed at the police station. He had nowhere to go. On the following night, he spent the night at his friend's house.
The Lodhi road police station is not new to former convicts staying and helping out with chores. Twenty-one-year old Abdul Wahab ,who was arrested for burglary after he ran away from Gujarat, is now an errand boy at the police station. The police officials are helping the young man with his studies, contributing to pay his fees. In return, Wahad runs errands for them.
But with Bunty, it isn't easy. He is an intelligent thief and you got to be cautious, Singh said.
“ He is trying to reform. But we are watching him. I am trying to get him some sort of a job but it is difficult given his reputation,” he said.
Singh has been approaching his friends, acquaintances, anyone to help out Bunty. He feels he has a responsibility towards the thief who wants to live a decent life.
“ My only worry is that if he doesn't get anything soon, he may turn to burglary again and that would not be good for us and the society,” he said. “I hope somebody would come forward.”
In fact it was Singh who called Bunty's elder brother asking him to give Bunty a second chance. The man was trying to make amends, he said.
All that Bunty had amassed is no longer there. He was duped by his friend, and then his lawyer, Singh said.
“ He has nothing,” he said.
Nobody will confirm where Bunty is staying. Bunty said he is living with his brother and would be helping out with his spare parts business but his brother denies the story.
Bunty had once told Singh he could help out a private detective agency, or assist the police with cracking burglary crimes. Now, he wants to get a passport and drive cabs in Japan. But he can't get a passport or a visa. He is having trouble getting a driving license with all his past records, Singh said.
“ Someone at some point will have to trust the man. Someone will have to give him a chance,” Singh said. “Maybe Dibakar Banerjee should compensate him. At least he could start some business with him. They made a story on his life. The crew came to my office to do research. They even went to meet Bunty in Tihar.”
Bunty said he would like the director to acknowledge him, maybe give him a role in one of his movies.
But then the man's past has already paved his future path with doubts.
“ What is the guarantee? We are extending help. Where is the process of rehabilitation? We think he doesn't want to indulge in crime. But who can be sure,” Singh said.
Thursday, June 24, 2010
Sunday, June 20, 2010
Miracle babies
Sitting in the hospital waiting for Bhateri Devi, the oldest mother to give birth to triplets at 66 years, my stomach churned when I saw her drag herself towards the ICU to feed the babies who are premature.
We had been to Jind earlier in the day to meet Rajo Devi Lohan who is the oldest mother in the world to give birth to a girl. In 2008, at 70, she delivered a baby girl at the same clinic.
It is a health hazard for these women. Regulations must be put in place before it becomes a popular trend.
We left for Haryana early morning to track thee women down and to understand why they go for the IVF at such an advanced age.
An edited version of the story appeared in the Sunday Express on June 20 in Section 2.
Chinki Sinha
Hisar, Jind
A little plastic baby doll in a swing smiles from the ceiling of the lobby at the National Fertility Clinic in Hisar. It is the sum total of the desires, the aspirations of the couples that walk in tempted by the promise of the IVF – pro-creation. Age isn't a restrictive force here. Motherhood is a limitless opportunity.
It transcends all barriers – infertility, age, situation in life. The plastic baby's arms are stretched out, the smile on its lips is permanent. It seduces the women, the men alike. The dangers, the complications then fade away, they get filtered out. What remains is the urge to procreate, to hold and rock the baby just like the baby that sits and smiles from the swing above. In this space, there is no getting into the right or wrong debate. It is only about demand, and the muchness of it.
National Fertility Centre was established in 2000 in Hisar by Gyanwati Bishnoi, a gynecologist. In ten years, the numbers of couples coming in for IVF has gone up exponentially. From a mere four or five couples, now the centre has more than 100 couples flocking to it per month hoping they can give birth despite all odds.
This is where Bhateri Devi came too. Twice the doctors transferred two embryos in her uterus. But it didn't work. In the third attempt, they transferred three embryos. All of those fertilized. At 66, Bhateri Devi from Satrod in Haryana became the oldest woman to give birth to triplets. She suffered. She went on the ventilator, she bled excessively. But the triplets were born. Complications were forgotten. In her village, everyone is waiting. For years she suffered the taunts, and she lived with the tag of being barren. Now, she proved to herself and to everyone else that she could have children too. Motherhood wasn't going to elude her.
National Fertility Centre is probably the only IVF clinic in the country that has the reputation of being the only centre where women of any age can go and conceive successfully. In its reception area, newspaper clippings adorn the walls. Boastful clippings from local media and national newspapers are everywhere. There's the miracle story of the 70-year-old Rajo Devi Lohan from Alewa in Jind who gave birth to a daughter in 2008. According to Dr. Anurag Bishnoi,Gyanwati's son and an embryologist, she is the brand ambassador of IVF in India. She is the oldest mother to give birth in the world at 70 years. Two years later, Rajo Devi's miracle tale dictates the directions to her village in Jind. There is the happy picture of Inder Devi who also gave birth to triplets at the age of 48 in 2007. Across the waiting area, the is Chameli Devi holding her twins she gave birth to in 2007 at 58. The story in the newspaper charted her painful survival and her miraculous achievement despite high blood pressure.
Almost all the stories about the elderly women trying the IVF as the last recourse to escape the stigma of being barren and not producing an heir, a must for a wedded wife, have a similar narrative. Their husbands married twice, thrice even desperate to get a child. Chameli Devi, the doting mother in the three-column picture, was her husband's second wife. From Santo Devi, his first wife, he wasn't able to produce an heir. So he married again. But Chameli Devi was unable to bear him children too. Then the couple discovered IVF and all was well, the narrative ran.
For Bishnoi, the criticisms that it is a health hazard for women at an advanced age to produce babies and that the doctor is acting immoral by helping them as it produces dysfunctional families where the child might be orphaned after a few years, are baseless. That the baby would be rendered motherless and fatherless too soon is not what is his call. He is only doing what is asked of him.
“That you should ask the families that want to go for this,” he says. “I am doing it because we can and it is what they want. There is a demand for it. We have the technology. We are doing it.”
A social change is in the works and this is what it is. Nothing less of a revolution, a change that is for the good. The IVF is the solution to the ills of the society. The rising numbers of people who are resorting to this technique is an indicator of its success and its relevance, he says. “It is changing the conservative thinking that women should be blamed for the problem. The attitude is changing. Every woman should have a child,”
Bhadur Ram, 60, sat hunched in the waiting area of the centre. He came from Hanumangarh in Rajasthan with his wife and neighbors to the centre hoping for a miracle. Nothing less than that, he said. He married twice but none of his wives could conceive. The second wife Lilawati is much younger than him. But at 40 years, it is like swimming against the tide if you hoped to conceive naturally, he said, his neighbour translating for him. As Lilawati waited inside for the tests, Bhadur Ram was suspended between hope and dejection. He had tried the shammams and the babas who promised healthy children in exchange for sacrifices and rituals, doctors who prescribed pills – red, green, yellow, blue. Nothing worked. Then, he found out how other women in his town had got pregnant despite being pronounced as infertile. It was the IVF. He bought into it. For Rs. 90,000 for the first injection, it was expensive but he would do it.
At first, the IVF when it was introduced in India as the other option was not a popular recourse. But over the years, its success in a society where stigma about childless women in deeply entrenched has permeated the economic stratas, the rural-urban divide, and the inhibition of the people. It has cut through the barriers. It is the the miraculous cure, the best gift of science to them.
“At first they looked down upon the IVF. They thought it was never clear if the father was the real father. But now having read in the newspapers about the older women successfully giving births, I know this is the option for us,” he said. “I don't want to die without having babies. I have to leave something of me behind. An heir, and a name.”
Bishnoi, who joined his mother's centre soon after he finished his medical training, says.
“You know they tell me that panchayats here now tell the man to try IVF when he approaches them for permission to marry for s second or a third time because his wife is unable to bear him children. Now panchayats interfere. IVF is heralding in a change that's positive. This is showing to a man-dominated world that money can be spent on women's treatment and that they should be given a chance before being relegated to the second position. Now the societies are accepting that there are techniques and they are worth trying.”
He says they don't guarantee that all women who come to them will be able to bear children. “We can tell them results are good,” he says.
More than 20 percent of the women that come to the centre for IVF are above 50 years of age. Around 40 percent of them are in their 40s and the rest are less than 35 years of age. Yet another doctor in Hisar where there are two IVF clinics disapproved of the centre's practice. Govind Fertility and Research Centre came up in Hisar three years after the National Fertility Centre was founded. But Dr. Manju Khurana said they never encourage women more than 40 years of age to go for IVF.
“It is about right and wrong. You can play God. There is technology available but with technology there is the question of responsibility,” she said. “What kind of a family it will be. Imagine the child who will have to grow up knowing their parents are not there for long. It is a very selfish thing. It also has initiated a dangerous trend. Complications can happen at that age. The government must intervene, set up a cut-off age, an upper age limit. The guidelines are ready and they will be submitted soon. I guess the age we have proposed is around 45 or 50 years. This isn't healthy. See, IVF is a positive thing like ultrasound. But look at the flip side of ultrasound when it started being used to determine the sex of the baby. Then the government cracked down on the clinics that did it. Something like that must be done with regards to IVF, too. At the bottom of it all, it is a question of right or wrong. You can do it but should you do it. That's the question we must ask ourselves.”
In Haryana, there are around six or seven IVF clinics. In the country, there are more than 150. The first IVF centres were established in Jaipur, Delhi and Mumbai in 1991. Then these centres mushroomed everywhere spanning rural, semi-urban and metropolitan cities. One has come up in Bhatinda in Punjab. But a lot of people desirous of having a child still flock to the National Fertility Centre because of the success stories. There are no regulations for IVF that exist in India currently. This is the baby boom of a different kind.
Anyone can become a mother. The test tube baby has arrived and infertility can no longer subdue their spirits, their being. No longer will they have to live with the tags – barren, infertile, un-woman like, a traitor to her husband and her species. For the women, it is the ultimate dream, the eventual fulfillment. After all they were created for a purpose. That they should procreate is what the God mandated. The technology is only the means to that end. Nothing is without God's will. This is what he has willed, Bhateri Devi's husband Deva Singh said.
“She told me even if she dies while doing it, it is worth the try,” he said. “It was Bhateri who asked me to marry twice. My children are beautiful.” Deva Singh promised Bhateri the world for the children. He bought her gold bangles, he said. “She can ask me for anything,” he said. “She has given me what I yearned for all these years.”
***
In creating life, Bhateri Devi started to lose her own grip on it. Blood gushed out. It just won't stop. Breathing came in spurts on the night of May 29 when the 66-year-old mother gave birth to triplets in Hisar in northern Haryana.
At the National Fertility & Test Tube Baby Centre, they moved her to the ICU for the night. She was on the ventilator but she survived, her husband said.
Bhateri Devi who set a world record for being the oldest mother to give birth to triplets bled through the night and days after.
Yet another operation and she survived. The bleeding stopped eventually. But it took its toll.
As she walked to the intensive care unit of the Java Hospital in Hisar where the triplets weighing 1.2 kilogram, 1.1 kilogram and 780 grams are kept, to feed the babies, she almost dragged herself. Her face , wrinkled and crumpled as rivulets of sweat ran down her cheeks, looked haggard.
Outside in the hospital's lobby, a crowd of scribes and locals had gathered to see her. A celebrity now, Bhateri Devi lashed out at the media. She doesn't want the attention. She already went through a lot.
On the night of the operation, she was moved to the ICU. She had difficulty in breathing and according to doctors, she was on the ventilator. But the triplets emerged one after the other. All three embryos that were implanted in her uterus fertilized. Bhupinder, Isha and Bhupesh are premature babies born one-and-a-half months before they were due. Every two hours, Bhateri Devi goes inside the ICU where the triplets are lying in an incubator along with several IVF babies, to feed her children hoping they gain weight fast and she can return to Satrod, her village, and celebrate. That would also mean more loans. Already her husband took out a loan of Rs. 7 lakhs from a cooperative bank in Hisar mortgaging his land. It was all worth it, he said.
He saw the triplets once. He cried when the doctor at the National Fertility Clinic told him the babies had arrived. He had waited for a child for 48 years.
“We put everything at risk. This is god's wish,” he said, sitting inside the Room no. 104 at the child care centre in Hisar. His phone rang constantly. Relatives had been camping at his house, waiting for the children to come home.
Not that Bhateri Devi didn't anticipate the dangers. The couple knew their third attempt was a huge risk. No, the doctors at the clinic didn't tell them what the operation involved. They conducted the tests, said Bhateri could conceive and that was it. At the same clinic, the couple had tried conceiving twice before. But they weren't lucky. In the third attempt, the doctors transferred three embryos.
God was more than willing, Deva Singh, 70, said.
“Children are important. I hope I live until 100 to see them grow up,” he said.
Deva Singh, her husband, who married thrice so he could produce children, was a little nervous at first.
But the temptation overrode any concerns. At least nobody would taunt him in the village saying the couple was unable to produce children, that they didn't have an heir. Adoption was never an option for them. They wanted their own blood and flesh no matter what it cost – lives, limbs, anything. In yet another village, a 72-year-old woman is trying to hold on to life. The house in Alewa in Jind is a landmark. This is where the miracle happened. A pair of pink sandals with Cindrella's pictures was brought in by the visitors who haven't stopped coming to the house. Upstairs, in a closet, boxes of new clothes and toys are piled up. All are gifts. Rajo Devi holds the little fingers of her 18-month-old daughter Naveena, almost grips them. She isn't prepared to let go.
Rajo Devi Lohan who gave birth at the age of 70 years also went to the National Fertility Centre. But she developed complications. Two months ago, she started to bleed again. The couple went in for another operation recently. The bleeding has stopped but the woman is too weak. She tires too soon. A couple of years ago, a neighbour had brought in a newspaper clipping about the success of the centre. It even mentioned the women who had successfully given birth at an advanced age in Uchana. So Baba Ram, 75, went with Rajo Devi and his second wife Omni who he married because Rajo couldn't bear children, to Uchana. They were convinced and then the three went to the National Fertility Centre in Hisar.
Omni, who is Rajo's younger sister, had high blood pressure so the doctors said she couldn't. But Rajo could. They didn't warn them about the complications that could develop later or during the birth.
“We only go ahead in cases where the women are strong and healthy. We do thorough check-ups and then allow,” Dr. Bishnoi said.
Naveen was born in November 2008. The father sold off his buffaloes, his cart, and mortgaged his land. It cost him around Rs. 5 lakhs. They threw a grand party where guests from neighbouring villages came. Almost 2,500 guests ate at the celebration, Baba Ram says.
“Blood is thicker than anything. I am against adoption. The child is not your own. He will not take care of you,” he says. “I know we are old. But Omni is there. She can take care of her when we are gone. We have relatives who can do that. The child is a toy. We play with her the whole day.”
Two years later, the debt hasn't been repaid. Rs. 50,000 is remaining. But the family is planning on a grand birthday celebration again on Naveen's second birthday. After Rajo Devi's miracle feat, a biological wonder, two other women in their forties also went to the Hisar centre but weren't able to conceive. Baba Ram waited for almost 40 years for a child. Now, he wants to live till eternity. Rajo Devi wanted to go for a second child through IVF. The couple wanted a boy. But then complications developed and the uterus had to be removed.
“We can die sitting here only. The fear of death shouldn't stop you from trying for a child,” Rajo Devi says. “I am happy I could do this before I died.”
The anguish of living in a village where people referred to you as the family that didn't have children was gone. It was a relief. Baba Ram's sperm was fused with an anonymous donor's egg. But it was in her uterus that it began to take shape. It was hers. It emerged from her.
“The baby belongs to the uterus,” Bishnoi says. “This has been happening for years. Only now people are able to admit it because awareness about IVF has increased.”
As the child suckled at her breast, Rajo Devi's face lit up. A few moments later, she collapsed on the bed. The daughter ran around her. But her frail fingers had already lost their grip.
We had been to Jind earlier in the day to meet Rajo Devi Lohan who is the oldest mother in the world to give birth to a girl. In 2008, at 70, she delivered a baby girl at the same clinic.
It is a health hazard for these women. Regulations must be put in place before it becomes a popular trend.
We left for Haryana early morning to track thee women down and to understand why they go for the IVF at such an advanced age.
An edited version of the story appeared in the Sunday Express on June 20 in Section 2.
Chinki Sinha
Hisar, Jind
A little plastic baby doll in a swing smiles from the ceiling of the lobby at the National Fertility Clinic in Hisar. It is the sum total of the desires, the aspirations of the couples that walk in tempted by the promise of the IVF – pro-creation. Age isn't a restrictive force here. Motherhood is a limitless opportunity.
It transcends all barriers – infertility, age, situation in life. The plastic baby's arms are stretched out, the smile on its lips is permanent. It seduces the women, the men alike. The dangers, the complications then fade away, they get filtered out. What remains is the urge to procreate, to hold and rock the baby just like the baby that sits and smiles from the swing above. In this space, there is no getting into the right or wrong debate. It is only about demand, and the muchness of it.
National Fertility Centre was established in 2000 in Hisar by Gyanwati Bishnoi, a gynecologist. In ten years, the numbers of couples coming in for IVF has gone up exponentially. From a mere four or five couples, now the centre has more than 100 couples flocking to it per month hoping they can give birth despite all odds.
This is where Bhateri Devi came too. Twice the doctors transferred two embryos in her uterus. But it didn't work. In the third attempt, they transferred three embryos. All of those fertilized. At 66, Bhateri Devi from Satrod in Haryana became the oldest woman to give birth to triplets. She suffered. She went on the ventilator, she bled excessively. But the triplets were born. Complications were forgotten. In her village, everyone is waiting. For years she suffered the taunts, and she lived with the tag of being barren. Now, she proved to herself and to everyone else that she could have children too. Motherhood wasn't going to elude her.
National Fertility Centre is probably the only IVF clinic in the country that has the reputation of being the only centre where women of any age can go and conceive successfully. In its reception area, newspaper clippings adorn the walls. Boastful clippings from local media and national newspapers are everywhere. There's the miracle story of the 70-year-old Rajo Devi Lohan from Alewa in Jind who gave birth to a daughter in 2008. According to Dr. Anurag Bishnoi,Gyanwati's son and an embryologist, she is the brand ambassador of IVF in India. She is the oldest mother to give birth in the world at 70 years. Two years later, Rajo Devi's miracle tale dictates the directions to her village in Jind. There is the happy picture of Inder Devi who also gave birth to triplets at the age of 48 in 2007. Across the waiting area, the is Chameli Devi holding her twins she gave birth to in 2007 at 58. The story in the newspaper charted her painful survival and her miraculous achievement despite high blood pressure.
Almost all the stories about the elderly women trying the IVF as the last recourse to escape the stigma of being barren and not producing an heir, a must for a wedded wife, have a similar narrative. Their husbands married twice, thrice even desperate to get a child. Chameli Devi, the doting mother in the three-column picture, was her husband's second wife. From Santo Devi, his first wife, he wasn't able to produce an heir. So he married again. But Chameli Devi was unable to bear him children too. Then the couple discovered IVF and all was well, the narrative ran.
For Bishnoi, the criticisms that it is a health hazard for women at an advanced age to produce babies and that the doctor is acting immoral by helping them as it produces dysfunctional families where the child might be orphaned after a few years, are baseless. That the baby would be rendered motherless and fatherless too soon is not what is his call. He is only doing what is asked of him.
“That you should ask the families that want to go for this,” he says. “I am doing it because we can and it is what they want. There is a demand for it. We have the technology. We are doing it.”
A social change is in the works and this is what it is. Nothing less of a revolution, a change that is for the good. The IVF is the solution to the ills of the society. The rising numbers of people who are resorting to this technique is an indicator of its success and its relevance, he says. “It is changing the conservative thinking that women should be blamed for the problem. The attitude is changing. Every woman should have a child,”
Bhadur Ram, 60, sat hunched in the waiting area of the centre. He came from Hanumangarh in Rajasthan with his wife and neighbors to the centre hoping for a miracle. Nothing less than that, he said. He married twice but none of his wives could conceive. The second wife Lilawati is much younger than him. But at 40 years, it is like swimming against the tide if you hoped to conceive naturally, he said, his neighbour translating for him. As Lilawati waited inside for the tests, Bhadur Ram was suspended between hope and dejection. He had tried the shammams and the babas who promised healthy children in exchange for sacrifices and rituals, doctors who prescribed pills – red, green, yellow, blue. Nothing worked. Then, he found out how other women in his town had got pregnant despite being pronounced as infertile. It was the IVF. He bought into it. For Rs. 90,000 for the first injection, it was expensive but he would do it.
At first, the IVF when it was introduced in India as the other option was not a popular recourse. But over the years, its success in a society where stigma about childless women in deeply entrenched has permeated the economic stratas, the rural-urban divide, and the inhibition of the people. It has cut through the barriers. It is the the miraculous cure, the best gift of science to them.
“At first they looked down upon the IVF. They thought it was never clear if the father was the real father. But now having read in the newspapers about the older women successfully giving births, I know this is the option for us,” he said. “I don't want to die without having babies. I have to leave something of me behind. An heir, and a name.”
Bishnoi, who joined his mother's centre soon after he finished his medical training, says.
“You know they tell me that panchayats here now tell the man to try IVF when he approaches them for permission to marry for s second or a third time because his wife is unable to bear him children. Now panchayats interfere. IVF is heralding in a change that's positive. This is showing to a man-dominated world that money can be spent on women's treatment and that they should be given a chance before being relegated to the second position. Now the societies are accepting that there are techniques and they are worth trying.”
He says they don't guarantee that all women who come to them will be able to bear children. “We can tell them results are good,” he says.
More than 20 percent of the women that come to the centre for IVF are above 50 years of age. Around 40 percent of them are in their 40s and the rest are less than 35 years of age. Yet another doctor in Hisar where there are two IVF clinics disapproved of the centre's practice. Govind Fertility and Research Centre came up in Hisar three years after the National Fertility Centre was founded. But Dr. Manju Khurana said they never encourage women more than 40 years of age to go for IVF.
“It is about right and wrong. You can play God. There is technology available but with technology there is the question of responsibility,” she said. “What kind of a family it will be. Imagine the child who will have to grow up knowing their parents are not there for long. It is a very selfish thing. It also has initiated a dangerous trend. Complications can happen at that age. The government must intervene, set up a cut-off age, an upper age limit. The guidelines are ready and they will be submitted soon. I guess the age we have proposed is around 45 or 50 years. This isn't healthy. See, IVF is a positive thing like ultrasound. But look at the flip side of ultrasound when it started being used to determine the sex of the baby. Then the government cracked down on the clinics that did it. Something like that must be done with regards to IVF, too. At the bottom of it all, it is a question of right or wrong. You can do it but should you do it. That's the question we must ask ourselves.”
In Haryana, there are around six or seven IVF clinics. In the country, there are more than 150. The first IVF centres were established in Jaipur, Delhi and Mumbai in 1991. Then these centres mushroomed everywhere spanning rural, semi-urban and metropolitan cities. One has come up in Bhatinda in Punjab. But a lot of people desirous of having a child still flock to the National Fertility Centre because of the success stories. There are no regulations for IVF that exist in India currently. This is the baby boom of a different kind.
Anyone can become a mother. The test tube baby has arrived and infertility can no longer subdue their spirits, their being. No longer will they have to live with the tags – barren, infertile, un-woman like, a traitor to her husband and her species. For the women, it is the ultimate dream, the eventual fulfillment. After all they were created for a purpose. That they should procreate is what the God mandated. The technology is only the means to that end. Nothing is without God's will. This is what he has willed, Bhateri Devi's husband Deva Singh said.
“She told me even if she dies while doing it, it is worth the try,” he said. “It was Bhateri who asked me to marry twice. My children are beautiful.” Deva Singh promised Bhateri the world for the children. He bought her gold bangles, he said. “She can ask me for anything,” he said. “She has given me what I yearned for all these years.”
***
In creating life, Bhateri Devi started to lose her own grip on it. Blood gushed out. It just won't stop. Breathing came in spurts on the night of May 29 when the 66-year-old mother gave birth to triplets in Hisar in northern Haryana.
At the National Fertility & Test Tube Baby Centre, they moved her to the ICU for the night. She was on the ventilator but she survived, her husband said.
Bhateri Devi who set a world record for being the oldest mother to give birth to triplets bled through the night and days after.
Yet another operation and she survived. The bleeding stopped eventually. But it took its toll.
As she walked to the intensive care unit of the Java Hospital in Hisar where the triplets weighing 1.2 kilogram, 1.1 kilogram and 780 grams are kept, to feed the babies, she almost dragged herself. Her face , wrinkled and crumpled as rivulets of sweat ran down her cheeks, looked haggard.
Outside in the hospital's lobby, a crowd of scribes and locals had gathered to see her. A celebrity now, Bhateri Devi lashed out at the media. She doesn't want the attention. She already went through a lot.
On the night of the operation, she was moved to the ICU. She had difficulty in breathing and according to doctors, she was on the ventilator. But the triplets emerged one after the other. All three embryos that were implanted in her uterus fertilized. Bhupinder, Isha and Bhupesh are premature babies born one-and-a-half months before they were due. Every two hours, Bhateri Devi goes inside the ICU where the triplets are lying in an incubator along with several IVF babies, to feed her children hoping they gain weight fast and she can return to Satrod, her village, and celebrate. That would also mean more loans. Already her husband took out a loan of Rs. 7 lakhs from a cooperative bank in Hisar mortgaging his land. It was all worth it, he said.
He saw the triplets once. He cried when the doctor at the National Fertility Clinic told him the babies had arrived. He had waited for a child for 48 years.
“We put everything at risk. This is god's wish,” he said, sitting inside the Room no. 104 at the child care centre in Hisar. His phone rang constantly. Relatives had been camping at his house, waiting for the children to come home.
Not that Bhateri Devi didn't anticipate the dangers. The couple knew their third attempt was a huge risk. No, the doctors at the clinic didn't tell them what the operation involved. They conducted the tests, said Bhateri could conceive and that was it. At the same clinic, the couple had tried conceiving twice before. But they weren't lucky. In the third attempt, the doctors transferred three embryos.
God was more than willing, Deva Singh, 70, said.
“Children are important. I hope I live until 100 to see them grow up,” he said.
Deva Singh, her husband, who married thrice so he could produce children, was a little nervous at first.
But the temptation overrode any concerns. At least nobody would taunt him in the village saying the couple was unable to produce children, that they didn't have an heir. Adoption was never an option for them. They wanted their own blood and flesh no matter what it cost – lives, limbs, anything. In yet another village, a 72-year-old woman is trying to hold on to life. The house in Alewa in Jind is a landmark. This is where the miracle happened. A pair of pink sandals with Cindrella's pictures was brought in by the visitors who haven't stopped coming to the house. Upstairs, in a closet, boxes of new clothes and toys are piled up. All are gifts. Rajo Devi holds the little fingers of her 18-month-old daughter Naveena, almost grips them. She isn't prepared to let go.
Rajo Devi Lohan who gave birth at the age of 70 years also went to the National Fertility Centre. But she developed complications. Two months ago, she started to bleed again. The couple went in for another operation recently. The bleeding has stopped but the woman is too weak. She tires too soon. A couple of years ago, a neighbour had brought in a newspaper clipping about the success of the centre. It even mentioned the women who had successfully given birth at an advanced age in Uchana. So Baba Ram, 75, went with Rajo Devi and his second wife Omni who he married because Rajo couldn't bear children, to Uchana. They were convinced and then the three went to the National Fertility Centre in Hisar.
Omni, who is Rajo's younger sister, had high blood pressure so the doctors said she couldn't. But Rajo could. They didn't warn them about the complications that could develop later or during the birth.
“We only go ahead in cases where the women are strong and healthy. We do thorough check-ups and then allow,” Dr. Bishnoi said.
Naveen was born in November 2008. The father sold off his buffaloes, his cart, and mortgaged his land. It cost him around Rs. 5 lakhs. They threw a grand party where guests from neighbouring villages came. Almost 2,500 guests ate at the celebration, Baba Ram says.
“Blood is thicker than anything. I am against adoption. The child is not your own. He will not take care of you,” he says. “I know we are old. But Omni is there. She can take care of her when we are gone. We have relatives who can do that. The child is a toy. We play with her the whole day.”
Two years later, the debt hasn't been repaid. Rs. 50,000 is remaining. But the family is planning on a grand birthday celebration again on Naveen's second birthday. After Rajo Devi's miracle feat, a biological wonder, two other women in their forties also went to the Hisar centre but weren't able to conceive. Baba Ram waited for almost 40 years for a child. Now, he wants to live till eternity. Rajo Devi wanted to go for a second child through IVF. The couple wanted a boy. But then complications developed and the uterus had to be removed.
“We can die sitting here only. The fear of death shouldn't stop you from trying for a child,” Rajo Devi says. “I am happy I could do this before I died.”
The anguish of living in a village where people referred to you as the family that didn't have children was gone. It was a relief. Baba Ram's sperm was fused with an anonymous donor's egg. But it was in her uterus that it began to take shape. It was hers. It emerged from her.
“The baby belongs to the uterus,” Bishnoi says. “This has been happening for years. Only now people are able to admit it because awareness about IVF has increased.”
As the child suckled at her breast, Rajo Devi's face lit up. A few moments later, she collapsed on the bed. The daughter ran around her. But her frail fingers had already lost their grip.
Saturday, June 05, 2010
The other Delhi
I was invited by friends to take the Ring-rail but never quite made it to the station that's minutes away from my house in Nizamuddin. I didn't know something like this existed. But on Saturday I took the ring-rail service and saw a different city.
An edited version was published in the Real Page 3 section of the Indian Express on June 6, 2010.
Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, June 4, 2010
From the windows of the grimy train of the ring-railway service, a showpiece during Delhi's Asiad Games in 1982, an invisible, embarrassing city unfolds.
This is the city they are trying to hide this October when the tourists come pouring in for the Commonwealth Games. They have built the swanky Metro with its sleek air-conditioned coaches, its shiny metallic body, and there are the new buses. They have fancy stations, modern-day bus stops. That's the illusion of the city.
But a parallel city, the underbelly of the capital, with all its poverty, squalor and vulgarity and numerous slums, spills on to the platforms of the railway line and the train doesn't rush past them. It is not avoiding them. It halts, blows its whistle. People – mostly daily-wage labourers, students, and saleswomen with their sacks – get off. A few get in. Stench from the manufacturing units in Daya Basti, from open-air toilets next to the tracks because in the slums teeming with the poor, private toilets are a luxury, and smoke from the stoves get in too. The passengers don't squirm. They are used to it. It's part of their life. The train is part of their life, too.
The coaches are never full. But the train has retained its loyal passengers like Rajinder Singh who once was tempted with the Metro and hopped on to it once to get to work from Mundka. After changing five trains and then boarding a bus to get to work at INA, he ended up spending Rs. 76. One-way ticket on the ring-railway cost only Rs. 4.
He was back on the sooty, grimy train the next day.
“I have been using the ring-railway from 1985. It takes me an hour to get to Daya Basti and then I take another train to Bahadurgarh. This train has never betrayed me. The city has forgotten this exists because I guess they are uncomfortable to see what lies beneath the polish,” he says looking out of the window.
At Inderpuri Halt, a old man with thick, misty glasses had set up his bidi shop on the platform. The shanties had slowly made their way on to the platform. Tarpaulin sheets and colorful mud walls hid little of the squalor, the crumbling lives, the resurgent spirit. They had all spilled on to the platform. The boundaries between private and public had been blurred. They weren't bothered by the oncoming train. The eyes would rest on them for a moment only. They had an understanding with those who stared out at them. Those eyes were not intrusive. They weren't judging them for their situation in life. The train would go on, show other lives.
“Poverty can't be hidden. On both sides you have slums, you have naked children running around,” he says. “Maybe the tourists should not be told that this train is there. Then they will never know this side of the city.”
On the dilapidated tracks that were laid in the 1970s, the drab train travels around the city, exposing its ugly back lanes, the windows that led into dark rooms, exposed the vulnerability of the walls that had cracks on them because nobody bothered to or afford to fix them.
It's a city that you never see from the steel and metal windows of the metro. The metro never criscrosses its path with the ring-railway. But it can be seen. At one point, the tracks run parallel – one above the ground, the metro train perched on the narrow pillars, the other close to the ground.
There are slanted houses that looked bent with all the people that were sharing the small space, there are threadbare curtains covering up the shame of poverty on the way. But there is beauty, too. In the city that's feeding on aspirations, a journey on the ring-rail is comforting. There are so many who have been left behind in the race.
On the tracks, they are the ragpickers who are busy doing drugs. The train doesn't startle them. They are used ot it. It is always on time.
Rajinder Singh, who works in the Delhi Development Authority, said he likes to look out of the window and ruminate. The train ride takes away all his regrets in life. He thinks of God as the train lurches past the numerous stations. He has done well for himself and his family. He can tell that when the stench from the slums gushes in from the windows.
In the distance, from under a sooty footover bridge, Daya Basti emerges. Kamla rushes in with her two daughters – Aasha and Anuradha. She has been living in the jhuggi for the last 10 years.
She was going home in Gorakhpur and the train would take her to New Delhi Railway Station for Rs. 12 only.
Kamla works at a mobile charger assembling unit in Daya Basti and earns Rs. 3000 a month. That's not good enough, she says.
Everytime she takes the ring rail, she thinks about the metro. It looks enticing. But it is so out of reach. The metro doesn't connect with the ring rail at all. Most of the 21 stations on the circular track are in places that are not connected by feeder services. Perhaps nobody thought of giving that luxury to those who used the ring railway. Maybe she will go on it once, she says.
“But where will I go. It can't take me anywhere,” she says.
Her daughter Aasha craned her neck out of the window and pointed to a little lane. That's where her school is, she says.
A mountain of garbage, colourful with pink and yellow plastci bags, hid the school. Then came the tin sheds at Kishan Ganj and then yet another slum.
The train goes around the city. The life along its tracks too goes around in a circle. The misery, the poverty is a vicious circle too.
There are 12 electric trains on the ring rail and it can accommodate 7,000 people. But many have broken off from the circle and from the ring rail. There's not more than two to three percent occupancy in most electrically maintained units.
There are only four ring-rail services in the day – two in the morning starting at 7 a.m. and two in the evening starting at 4:55 p.m. from Lajpat Nagar station.
The people on it are familiar faces from the city. There are sweaty, tense, and nervous faces. A few urchins squat near the door. Others are quiet, absorbed. Only here you know where they return to when their drudgery in the city of the future ends.
An edited version was published in the Real Page 3 section of the Indian Express on June 6, 2010.
Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, June 4, 2010
From the windows of the grimy train of the ring-railway service, a showpiece during Delhi's Asiad Games in 1982, an invisible, embarrassing city unfolds.
This is the city they are trying to hide this October when the tourists come pouring in for the Commonwealth Games. They have built the swanky Metro with its sleek air-conditioned coaches, its shiny metallic body, and there are the new buses. They have fancy stations, modern-day bus stops. That's the illusion of the city.
But a parallel city, the underbelly of the capital, with all its poverty, squalor and vulgarity and numerous slums, spills on to the platforms of the railway line and the train doesn't rush past them. It is not avoiding them. It halts, blows its whistle. People – mostly daily-wage labourers, students, and saleswomen with their sacks – get off. A few get in. Stench from the manufacturing units in Daya Basti, from open-air toilets next to the tracks because in the slums teeming with the poor, private toilets are a luxury, and smoke from the stoves get in too. The passengers don't squirm. They are used to it. It's part of their life. The train is part of their life, too.
The coaches are never full. But the train has retained its loyal passengers like Rajinder Singh who once was tempted with the Metro and hopped on to it once to get to work from Mundka. After changing five trains and then boarding a bus to get to work at INA, he ended up spending Rs. 76. One-way ticket on the ring-railway cost only Rs. 4.
He was back on the sooty, grimy train the next day.
“I have been using the ring-railway from 1985. It takes me an hour to get to Daya Basti and then I take another train to Bahadurgarh. This train has never betrayed me. The city has forgotten this exists because I guess they are uncomfortable to see what lies beneath the polish,” he says looking out of the window.
At Inderpuri Halt, a old man with thick, misty glasses had set up his bidi shop on the platform. The shanties had slowly made their way on to the platform. Tarpaulin sheets and colorful mud walls hid little of the squalor, the crumbling lives, the resurgent spirit. They had all spilled on to the platform. The boundaries between private and public had been blurred. They weren't bothered by the oncoming train. The eyes would rest on them for a moment only. They had an understanding with those who stared out at them. Those eyes were not intrusive. They weren't judging them for their situation in life. The train would go on, show other lives.
“Poverty can't be hidden. On both sides you have slums, you have naked children running around,” he says. “Maybe the tourists should not be told that this train is there. Then they will never know this side of the city.”
On the dilapidated tracks that were laid in the 1970s, the drab train travels around the city, exposing its ugly back lanes, the windows that led into dark rooms, exposed the vulnerability of the walls that had cracks on them because nobody bothered to or afford to fix them.
It's a city that you never see from the steel and metal windows of the metro. The metro never criscrosses its path with the ring-railway. But it can be seen. At one point, the tracks run parallel – one above the ground, the metro train perched on the narrow pillars, the other close to the ground.
There are slanted houses that looked bent with all the people that were sharing the small space, there are threadbare curtains covering up the shame of poverty on the way. But there is beauty, too. In the city that's feeding on aspirations, a journey on the ring-rail is comforting. There are so many who have been left behind in the race.
On the tracks, they are the ragpickers who are busy doing drugs. The train doesn't startle them. They are used ot it. It is always on time.
Rajinder Singh, who works in the Delhi Development Authority, said he likes to look out of the window and ruminate. The train ride takes away all his regrets in life. He thinks of God as the train lurches past the numerous stations. He has done well for himself and his family. He can tell that when the stench from the slums gushes in from the windows.
In the distance, from under a sooty footover bridge, Daya Basti emerges. Kamla rushes in with her two daughters – Aasha and Anuradha. She has been living in the jhuggi for the last 10 years.
She was going home in Gorakhpur and the train would take her to New Delhi Railway Station for Rs. 12 only.
Kamla works at a mobile charger assembling unit in Daya Basti and earns Rs. 3000 a month. That's not good enough, she says.
Everytime she takes the ring rail, she thinks about the metro. It looks enticing. But it is so out of reach. The metro doesn't connect with the ring rail at all. Most of the 21 stations on the circular track are in places that are not connected by feeder services. Perhaps nobody thought of giving that luxury to those who used the ring railway. Maybe she will go on it once, she says.
“But where will I go. It can't take me anywhere,” she says.
Her daughter Aasha craned her neck out of the window and pointed to a little lane. That's where her school is, she says.
A mountain of garbage, colourful with pink and yellow plastci bags, hid the school. Then came the tin sheds at Kishan Ganj and then yet another slum.
The train goes around the city. The life along its tracks too goes around in a circle. The misery, the poverty is a vicious circle too.
There are 12 electric trains on the ring rail and it can accommodate 7,000 people. But many have broken off from the circle and from the ring rail. There's not more than two to three percent occupancy in most electrically maintained units.
There are only four ring-rail services in the day – two in the morning starting at 7 a.m. and two in the evening starting at 4:55 p.m. from Lajpat Nagar station.
The people on it are familiar faces from the city. There are sweaty, tense, and nervous faces. A few urchins squat near the door. Others are quiet, absorbed. Only here you know where they return to when their drudgery in the city of the future ends.
Sunday, May 23, 2010
Born inside prison
Finally, this piece I had started working on in October 2009 made its way to Sunday Real Page 3 of Indian Express on May 23, 2010. I had written about the girl with big, black eyes and her life in prison. The edited version seemed very different.
Here is what got published http://www.indianexpress.com/news/little-steps-in-prison/622469/
Here is what I wrote.
Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, November 6, 2009
On a cold December morning five years ago, two undertrials – husband and wife - sat on the cold stone steps inside a prison, and spoke urgently. The wife had just told him she was pregnant.
Their first child would be born inside the high walls of Tihar, shut off from the world, born free yet jailed. It would take its first steps inside a crammed barrack, and wear hand-me-downs most of its growing years until they took her away and put her in a residential school elsewhere, she said.
He didn’t know how to respond, Sonia recalled. Under the watchful gaze of the guards that kept pacing up and down, Mohd. Kalam felt awkward. Sonia could tell.
Walking up to him that morning, she had debated how to break the news to him. Two weeks after she was remanded to Jail no. 6 in Tihar, a co-accused in a murder case along with her husband Mohd. Kalam, the doctor at the Deen Dayal Upadhyay Hospital where she had been taken for medical checkup, a prison routine, had told her she was pregnant. That was 10 years after she was married. The law in India, as in many other countries, is that children can stay with their mothers in prison until they are five years of age. Then, they are put in residential schools where they live with other inmates’ children and complete school.
When their 30-minute interaction was over, the guards led them to their barracks to be locked up for a week before they would get to see each other. They had decided to keep the baby.
Sonia is a co-accused, along with her husband Mohd. Kalam who is serving time in Jail No. 3 for a murder case, and both are undertrials at Tihar Jail since 2005.
Inside the 400-acre campus of Tihar jail, in her stuffy barrack that she shared with eight other women, Sonia first told another inmate, who incidentally was also pregnant, about her fears, and joys, the bouts of ecstasy, and the subsequent pangs of guilt of wanting to give birth to her child inside a prison. She just couldn’t abort the baby.
“Who knows if I would ever get pregnant again? I am not getting younger,” Sonia said. “We thought about a lot of things. Her future, her needs. We have facilities inside the jail but it is not the same. Here we live in a limbo, waiting forever.”
For years after she married Kalam, a leather goods manufacturer in Mongolpuri, the couple had been hoping for a child.
And so when she took those hurried steps towards where her husband was sitting on the designated day of meeting (prisoners whose relatives are in the same complex get to meet for 30 minutes on the first, third and the fourth Saturdays in a month), Sonia had already decided her child would share her sentence.
A year later, while they were still fighting their case in the court, the baby was born in a city hospital. Two days later, she came home to her barrack inside the women’s jail at Tihar.
There could have been no other name for her. Tamanna was the sum total of their desires, the yearnings of two undertrials waiting for their sentence or acquittal, for a closure to their suspended lives in small prison cells where they spent their days oscillating between hope and dejection, hoping they could someday raise their daughter in a proper home, together, far from the madness of the prison, and its quirks, its stories of torture and sadness, its grim cells and its convicts.
They named the frail baby with thin arms, and dark hair Tamanna or desire. Inside the grim prison where they slept under the window that had no netting to keep the mosquitoes out,
Tamanna grew up inside the 40-acre prison compound, following the prison rules, meeting her father for 30 minutes over the weekend, supervised by the guards. At first she hadn’t known him, didn’t get used to him. It was only later that she started to respond to him. But the daughter breaks the deadening monotony of prison life for the mother. There is something to look forward to, she says.
Tamanna, now four years old, has large watery, unblinking eyes. The frail, quiet child, is one of around 2,000 children languishing in prisons across the country, including Tihar, as per the National Crime Records Bureau survey in 2007.
She doesn’t smile too often, and not so easily. She has learnt to be passive. When the other children tease her, pull her hair or tug at her sleeves, she doesn’t fight back.
Tamanna, the quiet child, always tags along the other children, trailing behind them.
Ruby, 6, is her friend. Soon, Ruby will leave the prison and go to a hostel where an NGO will take care of her studies.
Often, the children talk about home. Ruby is from Narela and has drawn on paper her house so Tamanna can see.
“Tamanna says she wants to come home with me,” she said. “I tell her we are in jail and she says when you get out, take me with you. I tell her there’s babu, there are cows, and flowers in my house. Tamanna’s house is far. She has told me.”
That’s what Sonia tells her daughter anyways. She wants her daughter to understand that this is a phase, that jail, its barracks, its convicts are only part of this life and that there is a life for her that’s different.
But Tamanna has no reference point. For her, home is the L-shaped barrack where the duo keeps their belongings in a bag, and where her mother plugs her ears when the women hurl abuses at each other.
The largest prison complex in Asia, Tihar was built in 1958 as a maximum security prison run by the Punjab government. In 1966, the Delhi government took over the prison and in 1984, it was renamed Tihar Prisons. It has nine jails, and staff quarters.
But it was not until 10 years later that Tihar started to experiment with prison reforms ushered in by Kiran Bedi who took over as the Director General in 1993.
When Bedi saw the children, who lived with their mothers till they turned six, hurling abuses and using legal jargons like custody and bail, and playing gang war games with paper knives and paper guns , she was shocked.
Then started a string of prison reforms under her. A crèche was established for the children where they could spend the day away from the barracks and learn to read and write. Stella Mama, a Nigerian, who has been convicted for smuggling narcotics, is in charge of the crèche. She knows the children by names, she has their background at her fingertips and she has grown fond of them because they provide a break in the monotony of her life, too.
“The children talked about courts and orders because they attended the courts, they talked about knives, played stab-stab and made knives out of spoons,” Bedi said. “When I saw all that, we didn’t take long. We put them in a play way school.”
Bedi won the 1994 Ramon Magsaysay Award in 1994 for initiating prison reforms policies inside Tihar.
Tamanna sleeps in the barracks in the women’s jail, and attends a school run by the former Director General of Tihar Kiran Bedi’s NGO India Vision Foundation.
In her cramped corridor-like cell where Sonia sleeps under the window, and where they keep their belongings – a bucket, a few clothes, and a few old toys handed down to the girl by the NGOs - the mother says she has tried to speak about home to Tamanna.
But the daughter who was born inside the prison has no reference point. Often her friends tell her they had a garden in the village, and an uncle and cattle. Home is an elusive concept, something that she can’t connect with, a vision she can’t imagine. She has never known freedom outside the prison, her mother says.
Instead, Tamanna knows the rules of the prison. She is not a troublesome child. After school, she plays with other children, and at 6 p.m., she quietly returns to her barrack.
She spends the rest of the evening in the crowded cell in her corner, leaning against the wall, playing with her doll, a birthday gift from the crèche till the lights go out.
That’s when her space expands. There’s nobody watching. It’s dark and it’s only her with her mother. She snuggles close to her mother and talks about her fights, and new friends and what Stella Mama, the warden, taught them.
When she was six months old, Sonia started taking Tamanna to the crèche run by Kiran Bedi’s NGO.
Sonia too started working in the crèche, cooking meals for 40 odd children, for Rs. 1,000 a month. The money gets deposited in her account and she can use coupons to buy little treats for Tamanna from the canteen inside the jail sells tea and snacks to inmates.
The prison provides meals. The canteen is one of the luxuries inside the prison complex for those who can afford it. A glass of tea costs Rs. 5.
On her daughter’s first birthday, Sonia asked another inmate to see if she could get her family outside to bring her two dresses for Tamanna. She traded her coupons for the baby clothes.
“You find a way out. It’s not easy brining her up here. There are so many things you can’t do. This was the least,” she said.
Bringing up a child in a prison with all its questions and demands isn’t easy. Sonia has realized that.
She has already spent about four years in the jail, and doesn’t know how many she has left. Inside the walls, she feels protected but even though she knows nobody is waiting for her release, she would rather be free.
It is the feeling of being locked up, of being branded that Sonia detests.
Inside the prison, the barracks and the cells hold hundreds of such stories, tales of abandonment, of love gone wrong, and of ambitions cut short.
Eva Jennifer Antony couldn’t give up on love. And she couldn’t make her man change his ways. So she became an accomplice in his crime, she said.
Together, they stole money through credit card fraud. She tried to dissuade him. Eva worked at a BPO, earned about Rs. 18,000 per month.
They could live well, she argued.
She had moved in with him by then. She got pregnant. There was no way out.
A few months later, both were incarcerated in a murder case of a man whose credit card details the duo had used to swindle money.
“I loved him and I ended up in jail,” she said.
Fissures in their relationship surfaced when her boyfriend wanted her to abort the baby.
But the 28-year-old wanted to keep the baby. Eva, with her dark, brooding eyes, and a ready smile, was abandoned when her husband got out on bail and never came back. He was lodged in Jail No.4.
Eva remained. Her mother came to meet her once in the prison. That was it.
“If he comes back, I will shut the door on him. He made his choices. I don’t need a man now,” Eva said, holding her five-and-a-half month old daughter. “Yes, I am a single mother, and I care two hoots about the society.”
Eva carries her baby around all day, and seldom speaks to other women.
She is worried about Rozanne’s future. It was one thing to bring her into the world. That was about her values, her love, and her rebel spirit. To bring her up inside the prison is a task, and Eva, a strong, free-spirited, and tough woman is slowly crumbling, disintegrating. The prison with all its reforms and comforts, and its abuses and criminals, and its depressing stories can’t give to her daughter what freedom could.
For those children whose mothers are in prison for years, the arrival of a fifth birthday is the most painful day because then the children must leave to live with their family outside, if they have one, or in residential schools.
Tihar, Asia's largest jail, is home to around 60 children. There are an estimated 1,392 children
living in jails across India, as per a Home Minitry figure in 2001.
The National Institute of Criminology Forensic Sciences, Ministry of Home Affairs, conducted a comprehensive study on the children in prisons in 1999. In it, head of criminology B.N. Chattoraj said the government needs to improve jail conditions for women and children. His researchers had found that there were no separate facilities for the children, who had to share their mothers' bed, usually a thin mattress in case of undertrials. Many prisons still don’t have crèches or recreational and educational facilities for children. In some cases, women and children share the same ward with men and conditions in prisons could be best described as sub human, the study said.
The study also said that children live in conditions of depravity.
The crèche in jail no. 6-A, where Sonia cooks and Tamanna learns to put names to colours, is a big, airy room with a high ceiling. On the walls are bright posters, and on the floor are scattered numerous red chairs and floor mats. There’s a cupboard with the toys and there are cribs where younger babies sleep rocked by women. Across the hall, there is a beauty parlour for women, yet another rehabilitation scheme at Tihar, where women learn the trade.
The India Vision Foundation established the crèche in 1994. Later, they tied up with residential missionary schools to educate the children like the Assisi Convent in Noida, and Grace Mission in Gurgaon. Rubeena is a six years old girl in Assisi Convent in Noida. Her mother is an undertrial and Rubeena is sent to the prison complex once a year to spend a week with her mother.
But their lives are suspended in the cycle of court hearings and sentences and arguments. The mesh is too dense for them to contemplate resolutions. So, they take the little pleasures of life and tuck it in their minds. Long after Tamanna is gone, Sonia will dig those out from the corridors of her memory and those will sustain her day after day in a prison where her baby was born, and she became hopeful.
For now, she is dreading the moment when her daughter will go. But the abdonment is imminent. Prison is a place of no luxuries. Motherhood, and love are expensive treats.
Here is what got published http://www.indianexpress.com/news/little-steps-in-prison/622469/
Here is what I wrote.
Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, November 6, 2009
On a cold December morning five years ago, two undertrials – husband and wife - sat on the cold stone steps inside a prison, and spoke urgently. The wife had just told him she was pregnant.
Their first child would be born inside the high walls of Tihar, shut off from the world, born free yet jailed. It would take its first steps inside a crammed barrack, and wear hand-me-downs most of its growing years until they took her away and put her in a residential school elsewhere, she said.
He didn’t know how to respond, Sonia recalled. Under the watchful gaze of the guards that kept pacing up and down, Mohd. Kalam felt awkward. Sonia could tell.
Walking up to him that morning, she had debated how to break the news to him. Two weeks after she was remanded to Jail no. 6 in Tihar, a co-accused in a murder case along with her husband Mohd. Kalam, the doctor at the Deen Dayal Upadhyay Hospital where she had been taken for medical checkup, a prison routine, had told her she was pregnant. That was 10 years after she was married. The law in India, as in many other countries, is that children can stay with their mothers in prison until they are five years of age. Then, they are put in residential schools where they live with other inmates’ children and complete school.
When their 30-minute interaction was over, the guards led them to their barracks to be locked up for a week before they would get to see each other. They had decided to keep the baby.
Sonia is a co-accused, along with her husband Mohd. Kalam who is serving time in Jail No. 3 for a murder case, and both are undertrials at Tihar Jail since 2005.
Inside the 400-acre campus of Tihar jail, in her stuffy barrack that she shared with eight other women, Sonia first told another inmate, who incidentally was also pregnant, about her fears, and joys, the bouts of ecstasy, and the subsequent pangs of guilt of wanting to give birth to her child inside a prison. She just couldn’t abort the baby.
“Who knows if I would ever get pregnant again? I am not getting younger,” Sonia said. “We thought about a lot of things. Her future, her needs. We have facilities inside the jail but it is not the same. Here we live in a limbo, waiting forever.”
For years after she married Kalam, a leather goods manufacturer in Mongolpuri, the couple had been hoping for a child.
And so when she took those hurried steps towards where her husband was sitting on the designated day of meeting (prisoners whose relatives are in the same complex get to meet for 30 minutes on the first, third and the fourth Saturdays in a month), Sonia had already decided her child would share her sentence.
A year later, while they were still fighting their case in the court, the baby was born in a city hospital. Two days later, she came home to her barrack inside the women’s jail at Tihar.
There could have been no other name for her. Tamanna was the sum total of their desires, the yearnings of two undertrials waiting for their sentence or acquittal, for a closure to their suspended lives in small prison cells where they spent their days oscillating between hope and dejection, hoping they could someday raise their daughter in a proper home, together, far from the madness of the prison, and its quirks, its stories of torture and sadness, its grim cells and its convicts.
They named the frail baby with thin arms, and dark hair Tamanna or desire. Inside the grim prison where they slept under the window that had no netting to keep the mosquitoes out,
Tamanna grew up inside the 40-acre prison compound, following the prison rules, meeting her father for 30 minutes over the weekend, supervised by the guards. At first she hadn’t known him, didn’t get used to him. It was only later that she started to respond to him. But the daughter breaks the deadening monotony of prison life for the mother. There is something to look forward to, she says.
Tamanna, now four years old, has large watery, unblinking eyes. The frail, quiet child, is one of around 2,000 children languishing in prisons across the country, including Tihar, as per the National Crime Records Bureau survey in 2007.
She doesn’t smile too often, and not so easily. She has learnt to be passive. When the other children tease her, pull her hair or tug at her sleeves, she doesn’t fight back.
Tamanna, the quiet child, always tags along the other children, trailing behind them.
Ruby, 6, is her friend. Soon, Ruby will leave the prison and go to a hostel where an NGO will take care of her studies.
Often, the children talk about home. Ruby is from Narela and has drawn on paper her house so Tamanna can see.
“Tamanna says she wants to come home with me,” she said. “I tell her we are in jail and she says when you get out, take me with you. I tell her there’s babu, there are cows, and flowers in my house. Tamanna’s house is far. She has told me.”
That’s what Sonia tells her daughter anyways. She wants her daughter to understand that this is a phase, that jail, its barracks, its convicts are only part of this life and that there is a life for her that’s different.
But Tamanna has no reference point. For her, home is the L-shaped barrack where the duo keeps their belongings in a bag, and where her mother plugs her ears when the women hurl abuses at each other.
The largest prison complex in Asia, Tihar was built in 1958 as a maximum security prison run by the Punjab government. In 1966, the Delhi government took over the prison and in 1984, it was renamed Tihar Prisons. It has nine jails, and staff quarters.
But it was not until 10 years later that Tihar started to experiment with prison reforms ushered in by Kiran Bedi who took over as the Director General in 1993.
When Bedi saw the children, who lived with their mothers till they turned six, hurling abuses and using legal jargons like custody and bail, and playing gang war games with paper knives and paper guns , she was shocked.
Then started a string of prison reforms under her. A crèche was established for the children where they could spend the day away from the barracks and learn to read and write. Stella Mama, a Nigerian, who has been convicted for smuggling narcotics, is in charge of the crèche. She knows the children by names, she has their background at her fingertips and she has grown fond of them because they provide a break in the monotony of her life, too.
“The children talked about courts and orders because they attended the courts, they talked about knives, played stab-stab and made knives out of spoons,” Bedi said. “When I saw all that, we didn’t take long. We put them in a play way school.”
Bedi won the 1994 Ramon Magsaysay Award in 1994 for initiating prison reforms policies inside Tihar.
Tamanna sleeps in the barracks in the women’s jail, and attends a school run by the former Director General of Tihar Kiran Bedi’s NGO India Vision Foundation.
In her cramped corridor-like cell where Sonia sleeps under the window, and where they keep their belongings – a bucket, a few clothes, and a few old toys handed down to the girl by the NGOs - the mother says she has tried to speak about home to Tamanna.
But the daughter who was born inside the prison has no reference point. Often her friends tell her they had a garden in the village, and an uncle and cattle. Home is an elusive concept, something that she can’t connect with, a vision she can’t imagine. She has never known freedom outside the prison, her mother says.
Instead, Tamanna knows the rules of the prison. She is not a troublesome child. After school, she plays with other children, and at 6 p.m., she quietly returns to her barrack.
She spends the rest of the evening in the crowded cell in her corner, leaning against the wall, playing with her doll, a birthday gift from the crèche till the lights go out.
That’s when her space expands. There’s nobody watching. It’s dark and it’s only her with her mother. She snuggles close to her mother and talks about her fights, and new friends and what Stella Mama, the warden, taught them.
When she was six months old, Sonia started taking Tamanna to the crèche run by Kiran Bedi’s NGO.
Sonia too started working in the crèche, cooking meals for 40 odd children, for Rs. 1,000 a month. The money gets deposited in her account and she can use coupons to buy little treats for Tamanna from the canteen inside the jail sells tea and snacks to inmates.
The prison provides meals. The canteen is one of the luxuries inside the prison complex for those who can afford it. A glass of tea costs Rs. 5.
On her daughter’s first birthday, Sonia asked another inmate to see if she could get her family outside to bring her two dresses for Tamanna. She traded her coupons for the baby clothes.
“You find a way out. It’s not easy brining her up here. There are so many things you can’t do. This was the least,” she said.
Bringing up a child in a prison with all its questions and demands isn’t easy. Sonia has realized that.
She has already spent about four years in the jail, and doesn’t know how many she has left. Inside the walls, she feels protected but even though she knows nobody is waiting for her release, she would rather be free.
It is the feeling of being locked up, of being branded that Sonia detests.
Inside the prison, the barracks and the cells hold hundreds of such stories, tales of abandonment, of love gone wrong, and of ambitions cut short.
Eva Jennifer Antony couldn’t give up on love. And she couldn’t make her man change his ways. So she became an accomplice in his crime, she said.
Together, they stole money through credit card fraud. She tried to dissuade him. Eva worked at a BPO, earned about Rs. 18,000 per month.
They could live well, she argued.
She had moved in with him by then. She got pregnant. There was no way out.
A few months later, both were incarcerated in a murder case of a man whose credit card details the duo had used to swindle money.
“I loved him and I ended up in jail,” she said.
Fissures in their relationship surfaced when her boyfriend wanted her to abort the baby.
But the 28-year-old wanted to keep the baby. Eva, with her dark, brooding eyes, and a ready smile, was abandoned when her husband got out on bail and never came back. He was lodged in Jail No.4.
Eva remained. Her mother came to meet her once in the prison. That was it.
“If he comes back, I will shut the door on him. He made his choices. I don’t need a man now,” Eva said, holding her five-and-a-half month old daughter. “Yes, I am a single mother, and I care two hoots about the society.”
Eva carries her baby around all day, and seldom speaks to other women.
She is worried about Rozanne’s future. It was one thing to bring her into the world. That was about her values, her love, and her rebel spirit. To bring her up inside the prison is a task, and Eva, a strong, free-spirited, and tough woman is slowly crumbling, disintegrating. The prison with all its reforms and comforts, and its abuses and criminals, and its depressing stories can’t give to her daughter what freedom could.
For those children whose mothers are in prison for years, the arrival of a fifth birthday is the most painful day because then the children must leave to live with their family outside, if they have one, or in residential schools.
Tihar, Asia's largest jail, is home to around 60 children. There are an estimated 1,392 children
living in jails across India, as per a Home Minitry figure in 2001.
The National Institute of Criminology Forensic Sciences, Ministry of Home Affairs, conducted a comprehensive study on the children in prisons in 1999. In it, head of criminology B.N. Chattoraj said the government needs to improve jail conditions for women and children. His researchers had found that there were no separate facilities for the children, who had to share their mothers' bed, usually a thin mattress in case of undertrials. Many prisons still don’t have crèches or recreational and educational facilities for children. In some cases, women and children share the same ward with men and conditions in prisons could be best described as sub human, the study said.
The study also said that children live in conditions of depravity.
The crèche in jail no. 6-A, where Sonia cooks and Tamanna learns to put names to colours, is a big, airy room with a high ceiling. On the walls are bright posters, and on the floor are scattered numerous red chairs and floor mats. There’s a cupboard with the toys and there are cribs where younger babies sleep rocked by women. Across the hall, there is a beauty parlour for women, yet another rehabilitation scheme at Tihar, where women learn the trade.
The India Vision Foundation established the crèche in 1994. Later, they tied up with residential missionary schools to educate the children like the Assisi Convent in Noida, and Grace Mission in Gurgaon. Rubeena is a six years old girl in Assisi Convent in Noida. Her mother is an undertrial and Rubeena is sent to the prison complex once a year to spend a week with her mother.
But their lives are suspended in the cycle of court hearings and sentences and arguments. The mesh is too dense for them to contemplate resolutions. So, they take the little pleasures of life and tuck it in their minds. Long after Tamanna is gone, Sonia will dig those out from the corridors of her memory and those will sustain her day after day in a prison where her baby was born, and she became hopeful.
For now, she is dreading the moment when her daughter will go. But the abdonment is imminent. Prison is a place of no luxuries. Motherhood, and love are expensive treats.
Sunday, May 16, 2010
Marriage in silence
This was an experience. I saw the email invite in my inbox and it got me curious. So, I went and it was fun - the introduction, the courtship, everything. But what lurked beneath was fear of the unknown and of the future.
The marriages seemed to be working. After all they came from the same worlds, they spoke the same language of silence.
An edited version was published in the Real Page 3 section of the Indian Express on May 16, 2010.
Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, April 30, 2010
No word. No sound.
They mostly communicated in silence about their expectations, of love they were trying to find. She followed closely how his hands rose and fell, how his fingers clasped, unfolded, wound again, how his lips twitched as he tried to tell her what books he read or what time he goes to work. Before she said yes to Yogesh, Babal Kumari, a 25-year-old deaf and dumb girl, needed to know more about him.
He went through the motions again, adding more to his profile, hoping she would say yes to him. She knew how to decode. Outside the large hall where dozens of parents of deaf and dumb women and men congregated to participate in the Pranay Milan Sammelan, an annual event to facilitate matrimonial prospects for the hearing impaired, at the Sacred Heart Cathedral she met him first. Her brother-in-law and his father had approached each other before after Yogesh went up on the stage and communicated the family wanted a Rajput girl.
But Babal left unimpressed. The boy followed. Of the women who had come seeking an alliance, he had already set his heart upon Babal.
So, they met again. A friend facilitated the meeting. She stood and watched, listened through his hands and eyes what he had to say and excused herself and walked up to the front row to sit. She flipped through the file with the photos and the information on the men and then looked up at the stage where more men were still advertising themselves.
In its 18 th year, the Pranay Sammelan, organized by the Delhi Foundation for Deaf Women that was established in 1973 to help deaf women get education and vocational training, has gained popularity among the parents of deaf and dumb children who flock to the event to seek a groom or a bride because the deaf and the dumb have their own community, and their own language and it’s only within the like that they stray, express, love and hate.
When a utensil fell on the ground with a loud thud and Pooja didn’t look up, Brijendra Singh knew something was wrong. He took her to a doctor, and then did the rounds of hospitals in Agra where they lived and in Delhi, too, but the doctors said this was incurable. His daughter was deaf. She could speak, though. But in her world there was only silence. How would she then imitate the sounds she heard? There was no reference. Her lips moved but the sounds that came out didn’t conform to any language. She spoke her own tongue and only her mother seemed to understand.
Pooja learned the sign language so she could communicate. She also learned speech therapy in Agra and learned to say her name.
“It is difficult. It takes months to teach one word,” Brijendra Singh said.
When she was 23, he brought her to Delhi last May to participate in the Pranay Sammelan. She looked her best and the parents proudly walked up to the stage and talked about their only daughter.
A match was found the same day. A family from Agra was looking for a bride for their son who works in Hero Honda group. They liked the slight, coy girl.
On February 7 this year, the marriage was solemnized in a grand function at Agra. Renu, the girl’s mother, said when Pooja walked on to the revolving stage, she looked resplendent. She had never seen her so happy.
Pooja came along with her husband Santosh to the event on Friday. They shared their stories with others.
Pooja who is a trained beautician now lives with her husband in Gurgaon. They have evolved their own way of communicating while he is away at work.
A few minutes before he gets home, he sends her a text message and she comes down and opens the door. Little adjustments but they understand each other and they complement each other, Renu said.
Standing with her husband, Pooja spread her hands to include her mother-in-law, her parents and her husband and then clasped them to say they were all happy together.
“On her wedding a lot of their deaf and dumb friends had come. It was fun. They talked so fast we couldn’t keep track,” her father said.
Sometimes, the father becomes sad that there are so many things that have remained unspoken between the two of them. In their limited world of communication without words, he often wonders the boundless conversations the father and the daughter could have had it not been for the sound of silence that filled her ears and the words hat filled his mind.
But over the years, as he watched her grow up, he became part insider of her world.
“They have no pretensions. They have a lot of trust and faith,” he said. “Their world is simple. She tells me it is better this way. She doesn’t get to hear the bad things that go on in the world.”
In 1991, the Delhi Foundation of Deaf Women started hosting the event to facilitate matrimonials between the hearing-impaired. For years, they had filled in a crucial gap by providing vocational training but when they saw the families express anxiety about their future, and the girls’ themselves indicating how they needed a companion, they decided to help them find a match.
Rajlakshmi Rao, the president of DFDW, said the marriages survive because expectations are low.
“They learn to be grateful all their lives. They have a lot more empathy. All they want is a companion who can understand who they are,” she said.
The DFDW circulates the testimonials, including the salary and qualifications of the boys and the girls, and their profiles, and helps parents interact with each other.
Four years ago, www.shadi.com , the world’s largest matrimonial website partnered with the organization to help the cause. So, they have been sponsoring the events such as Friday’s and also offering to upload their profiles on their website for free.
Almost 5 percent cases on shadi.com are special cases, Neelesh Borgharkar, the national sales head for the website, said.
“This is just helping them to widen the platform,” he said.
For years, the organization has relied on word of mouth to get the parents to come to the event. SB Kumar and Durga Devi had heard about the event from a friend in Patna. Last year, they had attended a similar event in Varanasi to look for a match for their daughter Pragya Anand, who is pursuing her bachelor’s in sociology through distance learning.
“We weren’t lucky,” the father said.
Most of the men and women who came Friday had either left studies after high school or had pursued further education through distance education. Pragya's father said it would have been nice if the government opened more colleges and gave more opportunities to the deaf and dumb who are bright but only can't speak or hear. Pragya plays chess at the national level and is good in studies but has only limited options. It's difficult in college because many institutes of higher learning don't have special educators, he said.
On Friday, he had already short listed a few profiles in the file they had been handed. Pragya, 28, is not ready to marry yet but for parents, it's time she did.
“She doesn’t understand. What will happen to her when we are dead?”, the mother said.
The daughter and the mother learned to leave behind the luxuries of the language years ago. But they speak through the nights about their fears and longings. Where sound fails, eyes and hands take over. Emotions were never a prisoner of words, Durga Devi said.
But now, it is time their daughter found a man.
“We have come with a lot of hope. Let’s see if we can find someone for her,” the father said.
While the parents spoke about their concerns and reservations, Pragya and Rizwana were quietly watching Babal Kumari and Yogesh strike up a conversation. They hadn’t found their own suitors yet.
Raish Ahmed said he wasn’t able to find any Muslim grooms at the event. Rizwana, who has completed her high school and is well-versed in household chores, is already 25. the Pranay Sammelan was his biggest chance. Perhaps if they advertised better, more Muslim families would come.
“They don’t know. Many of us don’t know about this,” he said. “It’s so much better to come and find someone who belongs to the same world.”
Surabhi (name changed) would give it a second chance. She had been married once. But it ended in divorce because both of them didn’t speak the language of silence and signs. The man wasn’t deaf and dumb. After a while, it ended, her mother said.
“Those kinds of marriages don’t last. There’s nothing to speak after a point,” she said.
A few men showed interest. They were keeping their fingers crossed.
Up on the stage, men and women wearing numbers to identify them paraded in front of the audience.
Other voiceless pairs cheered on. What had never been told in a language or ornamented with words, shone through the eyes without the pomp of speech. They wanted to break the silence with a companion and that’s what brought them here.
The marriages seemed to be working. After all they came from the same worlds, they spoke the same language of silence.
An edited version was published in the Real Page 3 section of the Indian Express on May 16, 2010.
Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, April 30, 2010
No word. No sound.
They mostly communicated in silence about their expectations, of love they were trying to find. She followed closely how his hands rose and fell, how his fingers clasped, unfolded, wound again, how his lips twitched as he tried to tell her what books he read or what time he goes to work. Before she said yes to Yogesh, Babal Kumari, a 25-year-old deaf and dumb girl, needed to know more about him.
He went through the motions again, adding more to his profile, hoping she would say yes to him. She knew how to decode. Outside the large hall where dozens of parents of deaf and dumb women and men congregated to participate in the Pranay Milan Sammelan, an annual event to facilitate matrimonial prospects for the hearing impaired, at the Sacred Heart Cathedral she met him first. Her brother-in-law and his father had approached each other before after Yogesh went up on the stage and communicated the family wanted a Rajput girl.
But Babal left unimpressed. The boy followed. Of the women who had come seeking an alliance, he had already set his heart upon Babal.
So, they met again. A friend facilitated the meeting. She stood and watched, listened through his hands and eyes what he had to say and excused herself and walked up to the front row to sit. She flipped through the file with the photos and the information on the men and then looked up at the stage where more men were still advertising themselves.
In its 18 th year, the Pranay Sammelan, organized by the Delhi Foundation for Deaf Women that was established in 1973 to help deaf women get education and vocational training, has gained popularity among the parents of deaf and dumb children who flock to the event to seek a groom or a bride because the deaf and the dumb have their own community, and their own language and it’s only within the like that they stray, express, love and hate.
When a utensil fell on the ground with a loud thud and Pooja didn’t look up, Brijendra Singh knew something was wrong. He took her to a doctor, and then did the rounds of hospitals in Agra where they lived and in Delhi, too, but the doctors said this was incurable. His daughter was deaf. She could speak, though. But in her world there was only silence. How would she then imitate the sounds she heard? There was no reference. Her lips moved but the sounds that came out didn’t conform to any language. She spoke her own tongue and only her mother seemed to understand.
Pooja learned the sign language so she could communicate. She also learned speech therapy in Agra and learned to say her name.
“It is difficult. It takes months to teach one word,” Brijendra Singh said.
When she was 23, he brought her to Delhi last May to participate in the Pranay Sammelan. She looked her best and the parents proudly walked up to the stage and talked about their only daughter.
A match was found the same day. A family from Agra was looking for a bride for their son who works in Hero Honda group. They liked the slight, coy girl.
On February 7 this year, the marriage was solemnized in a grand function at Agra. Renu, the girl’s mother, said when Pooja walked on to the revolving stage, she looked resplendent. She had never seen her so happy.
Pooja came along with her husband Santosh to the event on Friday. They shared their stories with others.
Pooja who is a trained beautician now lives with her husband in Gurgaon. They have evolved their own way of communicating while he is away at work.
A few minutes before he gets home, he sends her a text message and she comes down and opens the door. Little adjustments but they understand each other and they complement each other, Renu said.
Standing with her husband, Pooja spread her hands to include her mother-in-law, her parents and her husband and then clasped them to say they were all happy together.
“On her wedding a lot of their deaf and dumb friends had come. It was fun. They talked so fast we couldn’t keep track,” her father said.
Sometimes, the father becomes sad that there are so many things that have remained unspoken between the two of them. In their limited world of communication without words, he often wonders the boundless conversations the father and the daughter could have had it not been for the sound of silence that filled her ears and the words hat filled his mind.
But over the years, as he watched her grow up, he became part insider of her world.
“They have no pretensions. They have a lot of trust and faith,” he said. “Their world is simple. She tells me it is better this way. She doesn’t get to hear the bad things that go on in the world.”
In 1991, the Delhi Foundation of Deaf Women started hosting the event to facilitate matrimonials between the hearing-impaired. For years, they had filled in a crucial gap by providing vocational training but when they saw the families express anxiety about their future, and the girls’ themselves indicating how they needed a companion, they decided to help them find a match.
Rajlakshmi Rao, the president of DFDW, said the marriages survive because expectations are low.
“They learn to be grateful all their lives. They have a lot more empathy. All they want is a companion who can understand who they are,” she said.
The DFDW circulates the testimonials, including the salary and qualifications of the boys and the girls, and their profiles, and helps parents interact with each other.
Four years ago, www.shadi.com , the world’s largest matrimonial website partnered with the organization to help the cause. So, they have been sponsoring the events such as Friday’s and also offering to upload their profiles on their website for free.
Almost 5 percent cases on shadi.com are special cases, Neelesh Borgharkar, the national sales head for the website, said.
“This is just helping them to widen the platform,” he said.
For years, the organization has relied on word of mouth to get the parents to come to the event. SB Kumar and Durga Devi had heard about the event from a friend in Patna. Last year, they had attended a similar event in Varanasi to look for a match for their daughter Pragya Anand, who is pursuing her bachelor’s in sociology through distance learning.
“We weren’t lucky,” the father said.
Most of the men and women who came Friday had either left studies after high school or had pursued further education through distance education. Pragya's father said it would have been nice if the government opened more colleges and gave more opportunities to the deaf and dumb who are bright but only can't speak or hear. Pragya plays chess at the national level and is good in studies but has only limited options. It's difficult in college because many institutes of higher learning don't have special educators, he said.
On Friday, he had already short listed a few profiles in the file they had been handed. Pragya, 28, is not ready to marry yet but for parents, it's time she did.
“She doesn’t understand. What will happen to her when we are dead?”, the mother said.
The daughter and the mother learned to leave behind the luxuries of the language years ago. But they speak through the nights about their fears and longings. Where sound fails, eyes and hands take over. Emotions were never a prisoner of words, Durga Devi said.
But now, it is time their daughter found a man.
“We have come with a lot of hope. Let’s see if we can find someone for her,” the father said.
While the parents spoke about their concerns and reservations, Pragya and Rizwana were quietly watching Babal Kumari and Yogesh strike up a conversation. They hadn’t found their own suitors yet.
Raish Ahmed said he wasn’t able to find any Muslim grooms at the event. Rizwana, who has completed her high school and is well-versed in household chores, is already 25. the Pranay Sammelan was his biggest chance. Perhaps if they advertised better, more Muslim families would come.
“They don’t know. Many of us don’t know about this,” he said. “It’s so much better to come and find someone who belongs to the same world.”
Surabhi (name changed) would give it a second chance. She had been married once. But it ended in divorce because both of them didn’t speak the language of silence and signs. The man wasn’t deaf and dumb. After a while, it ended, her mother said.
“Those kinds of marriages don’t last. There’s nothing to speak after a point,” she said.
A few men showed interest. They were keeping their fingers crossed.
Up on the stage, men and women wearing numbers to identify them paraded in front of the audience.
Other voiceless pairs cheered on. What had never been told in a language or ornamented with words, shone through the eyes without the pomp of speech. They wanted to break the silence with a companion and that’s what brought them here.
Monday, May 10, 2010
"Success has many fathers. Failure has none. Why do you come after me? Media always goes for those shining stars." - Ravi Kumar to me
We went to the UPSC building after the results were announced to "get colour" but there was nobody there except a few television crew members who were trying to capture some footage of the list. We hung around waiting for candidates to trickle in. At last we saw Ravi Kumar looking at the list anxiously. And we tried to help him find his name. At one time, I thought I saw it. But it was "Ravit Kumar" and he corrected me saying he had made the same mistake. When he was sure he hadn't cleared the exams, we were sad, too. I followed him and he told me something I will always remember "At the end of the day, I will be alone with my sorrow."
An edited verison was published in Indian Express Sunday Real Page 3 section on May 9, 2010.
Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, May 7, 2010
When he had only three pages of the list to scan for his name, his fingers stiffened as he rolled them down the list of successful candidates who had made it to the Union Public Service Commission examinations.
No, it was not there. But maybe he had missed it. At least that was the hope then. Ravi Kumar was one of the very few candidates who came to the UPSC building to see the list where they had pasted it on a notice board outside.
He went through the list again. When he had read through 440 names, almost half of the list, tiny beads of sweat appeared on his forehead. He fought off the tears. This was his last attempt. For three years, his name had eluded him. It wasn’t there this year, too.
For the school teacher, becoming a civil servant was a childhood dream, a passion that consumed him, an obsession that didn’t let him pursue anything else. Born and raised in Patna, Bihar, Kumar came to Delhi to prepare for the civil services examinations. He completed his teacher training and worked in a government school in Saket. But that was only to sustain him while he gave all he could to get where he wanted to.
But outside the building where aspirations converge and too many dreams crash, Ravi Kumar didn’t mourn his loss for too long. He needed to get away.
“Success has many fathers and failure has none. At the end of the day, my grief is personal,” he said.
On the list, Shah Faesal, a Kashmiri youth’s name stood out. A doctor, he had topped the list in his first attempt. Son on a man killed by the militants in the valley, he grew up believing he could do it and be a role model for others. He came to Delhi in 2008. Some of his coaching and lodging and boarding were sponsored by the Zakat Foundation of India, which was established in 1997 to help the poor and the needy. Two of the seven candidates the organization had helped – Shah Faesal and Mohd. Shahid Alam, who is from Jharkhand – have made it to the list. For many, the examinations are a great equalizer. It doesn’t cost more than Rs. 100 to take the examinations.
Faesal hadn’t come to see his name. He was the star of the day. Nor had the other toppers - Prakash Rajpurohit, a B Tech holder from IIT, Delhi, who was ranked second, and Iva Sahay, MA (Geography) from JNU, who secured the third rank.
Among the top 25 candidates who had cleared the examination, 15 are male and 10 are female candidates. Their phones were ringing off the hook. The news had reached them.
A few who had come, came anticipating the best, and fearing the worst. By then, they knew they weren’t in the top 25. But the list was long. Maybe, they too figured in the middle, towards the bottom, somewhere.
Ravi Kumar walked away slowly.
A few moments ago, Rahul Sinha had run along the same pavement to hug his friend. He had cracked the examinations and he couldn’t contain his excitement.
From his tea stall, Ravindar Nath watched the expressions closely. He was used to the exuberance that was infectious. But he was also used to seeing the fallen faces and itbroke his heart each time he saw somebody walking away slowly, unsteadily. He knew then that the building, its promise, its myth, and all that it stood for – change, exaltation, fame – had just eluded them.
Nath has been working at the tea stall for more than 35 years. Until five years ago, on the day the results were announced, it was like a mela. There used to be a lot of activity, buzz then.
“People camped here for hours. They would come and spread sheets and sit for hours. They came early and we sold them snacks and tea,” he recalled.
In those days, he also hung a light bulb from a wire on a pole so that in the evenings the place was well lit.
“They used to place the list here on this side. It used to be a different sight then. All along the road, cars were parked. The traffic got crazy as people came to see the list,” he said.
Now, he leaves early. Mostly by 8 p.m.
Now he doesn’t stock the little shop with snacks – patties, cakes and biscuits. The business was different then. He was hardly able to leave before 11 p.m.
“I sold a lot of tea. Now, hardly anyone comes to see the list. They see it on the internet,” he said. “Then the grief is not public.”
A few more trickled in. They were curious passers by, a few relatives, and some friends. An old man studied the list closely. He wasn’t searching for any name in particular. He was just partaking of their success. It made him feel good to see the list, to see so many had made it through.
Rajesh Kumar was on his way home from the Home Ministry office where he works when he jumped off the bus near the UPSC building. He saw some excitement around the place, a lot of television crew and he knew the list was out. His brother Ajay Kumar had taken the examinations and he wanted to surprise him with the good news.
“I hope his name is there,” he said as he scanned the list, meticulously going through every name.
Anup Pandey was already on the phone. His friend Jaishankar Upadhyay had made it to the list. As he was in Gorakhpur, he had asked Anup to look at the list for him. Sometimes, the excitement and the anxiety are too much for the candidates to see the list themselves. They are nervous of the fear, of the extreme possibilities – dejection and exhilaration.
“He is very happy. This was his last attempt,” he said. “He is rank 412.”
On Thursday, the list was put up at around 2:30 p.m. A few people came to see the list in the afternoon but by evening, it was deserted.
Jyoti, a woman guard said last year she had seen a few women last year celebrating outside the building.
“One of them had made it and they came to confirm. They had seen the list online but they wanted to see it on paper outside the building. Then, it wouldn’t be wrong,” she said.
“But this year, it is so silent.”
An edited verison was published in Indian Express Sunday Real Page 3 section on May 9, 2010.
Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, May 7, 2010
When he had only three pages of the list to scan for his name, his fingers stiffened as he rolled them down the list of successful candidates who had made it to the Union Public Service Commission examinations.
No, it was not there. But maybe he had missed it. At least that was the hope then. Ravi Kumar was one of the very few candidates who came to the UPSC building to see the list where they had pasted it on a notice board outside.
He went through the list again. When he had read through 440 names, almost half of the list, tiny beads of sweat appeared on his forehead. He fought off the tears. This was his last attempt. For three years, his name had eluded him. It wasn’t there this year, too.
For the school teacher, becoming a civil servant was a childhood dream, a passion that consumed him, an obsession that didn’t let him pursue anything else. Born and raised in Patna, Bihar, Kumar came to Delhi to prepare for the civil services examinations. He completed his teacher training and worked in a government school in Saket. But that was only to sustain him while he gave all he could to get where he wanted to.
But outside the building where aspirations converge and too many dreams crash, Ravi Kumar didn’t mourn his loss for too long. He needed to get away.
“Success has many fathers and failure has none. At the end of the day, my grief is personal,” he said.
On the list, Shah Faesal, a Kashmiri youth’s name stood out. A doctor, he had topped the list in his first attempt. Son on a man killed by the militants in the valley, he grew up believing he could do it and be a role model for others. He came to Delhi in 2008. Some of his coaching and lodging and boarding were sponsored by the Zakat Foundation of India, which was established in 1997 to help the poor and the needy. Two of the seven candidates the organization had helped – Shah Faesal and Mohd. Shahid Alam, who is from Jharkhand – have made it to the list. For many, the examinations are a great equalizer. It doesn’t cost more than Rs. 100 to take the examinations.
Faesal hadn’t come to see his name. He was the star of the day. Nor had the other toppers - Prakash Rajpurohit, a B Tech holder from IIT, Delhi, who was ranked second, and Iva Sahay, MA (Geography) from JNU, who secured the third rank.
Among the top 25 candidates who had cleared the examination, 15 are male and 10 are female candidates. Their phones were ringing off the hook. The news had reached them.
A few who had come, came anticipating the best, and fearing the worst. By then, they knew they weren’t in the top 25. But the list was long. Maybe, they too figured in the middle, towards the bottom, somewhere.
Ravi Kumar walked away slowly.
A few moments ago, Rahul Sinha had run along the same pavement to hug his friend. He had cracked the examinations and he couldn’t contain his excitement.
From his tea stall, Ravindar Nath watched the expressions closely. He was used to the exuberance that was infectious. But he was also used to seeing the fallen faces and itbroke his heart each time he saw somebody walking away slowly, unsteadily. He knew then that the building, its promise, its myth, and all that it stood for – change, exaltation, fame – had just eluded them.
Nath has been working at the tea stall for more than 35 years. Until five years ago, on the day the results were announced, it was like a mela. There used to be a lot of activity, buzz then.
“People camped here for hours. They would come and spread sheets and sit for hours. They came early and we sold them snacks and tea,” he recalled.
In those days, he also hung a light bulb from a wire on a pole so that in the evenings the place was well lit.
“They used to place the list here on this side. It used to be a different sight then. All along the road, cars were parked. The traffic got crazy as people came to see the list,” he said.
Now, he leaves early. Mostly by 8 p.m.
Now he doesn’t stock the little shop with snacks – patties, cakes and biscuits. The business was different then. He was hardly able to leave before 11 p.m.
“I sold a lot of tea. Now, hardly anyone comes to see the list. They see it on the internet,” he said. “Then the grief is not public.”
A few more trickled in. They were curious passers by, a few relatives, and some friends. An old man studied the list closely. He wasn’t searching for any name in particular. He was just partaking of their success. It made him feel good to see the list, to see so many had made it through.
Rajesh Kumar was on his way home from the Home Ministry office where he works when he jumped off the bus near the UPSC building. He saw some excitement around the place, a lot of television crew and he knew the list was out. His brother Ajay Kumar had taken the examinations and he wanted to surprise him with the good news.
“I hope his name is there,” he said as he scanned the list, meticulously going through every name.
Anup Pandey was already on the phone. His friend Jaishankar Upadhyay had made it to the list. As he was in Gorakhpur, he had asked Anup to look at the list for him. Sometimes, the excitement and the anxiety are too much for the candidates to see the list themselves. They are nervous of the fear, of the extreme possibilities – dejection and exhilaration.
“He is very happy. This was his last attempt,” he said. “He is rank 412.”
On Thursday, the list was put up at around 2:30 p.m. A few people came to see the list in the afternoon but by evening, it was deserted.
Jyoti, a woman guard said last year she had seen a few women last year celebrating outside the building.
“One of them had made it and they came to confirm. They had seen the list online but they wanted to see it on paper outside the building. Then, it wouldn’t be wrong,” she said.
“But this year, it is so silent.”
Monday, May 03, 2010
In Masada's narrative, Israel begins to live and convince
I wrote the piece after I got back from Israel in December. Masada stayed with me after I left the country. Its beauty enchanted me and its story made me wonder about the other side, the side I was so not willing to explore.
An edited version was published in Sunday Eye (Indian Express) on May 2, 2010.
Chinki Sinha
Masada
It’s in Masada that Israel begins to make sense. Because in this region where there are only two extreme identities – of the oppressed and the oppressor – in Masada the roles are reversed. And you must let Masada tell you its story. You must listen, and not ask questions. That will break the spell.
As we drove in the desert towards the fortress, Zivit Sari, our guide, stuck her neck outside and shouted she could see Masada. All we could see looming in the distance was a cluster of sandstone-colored mountains. Somewhere in the middle was a flat-topped mountain, Dead Sea in front, the desert in between them.
Then it began to slowly emerge - the three terraces of King Herod's grandiose palace on the north tip precariously balancing themselves down the rock like the gardens of Babylon. It came out of the rock, blended in, and yet carved out of it. Here’s where nature helped man forge a getaway fortress from its belly - beautiful, delicate, and yet so formidable. Masada sat in the mountain like an embryo – protected and enigmatic.
Masada is where stands the refuge palace of Roman King Herod, who was himself Jewish, built by him in 38-4 BCE, and this was where a thousand Jewish refugees died centuries ago defending the "last stand" of Israel. During the First Jewish War, the Jewish rebels captured the mountain as they fled from the Romans after Jerusalem was captured and the Temple was burnt. It is not like Caesarea where there are shopping arcades, and restaurants amid the ruins.
Only Masada remained because it was built to intimidate, and it was inaccessible. But in 73 AD, Roman General Flavius Silva besieged the fortress after camping there for months. The Jewish refugees, as the myth goes, killed themselves preferring death at their own hands rather then be enslaved by the enemy they so loathed that they wouldn’t even use the Roman bathhouse built by King Herod. While they stayed there, they built their Jewish baths around the ancient bathhouse and the ruins are a testimony to this.
The Roman armies destroyed the wall around the fortress, and then they burnt the new wall the refugees had built of wood. That’s when the Jewish refugees understood they could not hold out any longer. But embracing death was a calculated move, too. Zivit told us how they left the storage area intact to show to the enemy and to the world if they came to document the incident that they had enough food to last them for years, that they didn’t commit suicide because of the threat of the enemy but because they chose freedom and pride and rejected enslavement as narrated by Josephus in the The Jewish War .
As we waited for the cable car that would take us up the mountain and into the refuge fortress complete with a Roman bath and a palace overlooking the Dead Sea, I found the narrative getting to me, and I started believing in the myth, too. It was Masada enchanting me, charming me with its sadness, its magnificence and its fate. It was staring at me, it was in my face convincing me with all that was left of it, and when I looked down from the top, I knew why it was so beautiful in its remoteness. The Dead Sea, its blue water, the Jordanian mountains reflecting in its waters, changing colours, stretched across from the fortress. The desert was beneath it. The hills closed in on it, the rains had carved the limestone mountains when they gushed forth in the rainy season, pulled down by the earth’s force. This place had everything and maybe that’s why Herod came here, lured by its promise of everything.
Masada ’s appeal has only increased over the years. Conde’ Nast Traveler magazine rated it as the world’s most popular tourist side recently.
Of course Zivit had internalised its tragic story, passed it on to her children and didn’t once mention the controversy about the Masada myth of Jews sacrificing their lives to dodge enslavement by the Romans that diluted the story of heroism because then it would mean negating their own struggles, their beliefs and their place under the sun, her own time serving in the Israeli Army always trying that Masada didn’t fall yet again.
The battle of Masada was lost. But the settlers saw that the idea could help in recruiting a force, and Masada resurfaced, and remains as important as it ever was.
It is in Masada, perched on a flat-topped limestone mountain, that the Israeli Defence Force recruits held swearing-in ceremonies shouting “Masada shall not fall again” from the 1927 poem by the Ukrainian poet Yitzhak Lamdan for many years until doubts about the accuracy of the Masada story itself was challenged by a scholar.
The idea of Masada trained soldiers to do anything; it became a symbol of Israel surviving among enemies, and occupied a place in the collective memory.
The fact that Israel has mandatory army service, it is a nation constantly on alert, trying to defend its borders and expand them, too. They are surrounded with countries that have denied its very existence.
It is here in Masada that I began to understand why Israel can fight the way it does, aggressively, ruthlessly, to defend the piece of land that’s their home and refuge and a place where Jews from all over the world can return to.
On most holidays, Zivit would pack her children in the car and drive over two hours to Masada in the Judean Desert, and the children would climb up the Snake Path and listen to the narrative of the Jewish refugees. They needed to be inspired, to look forward to the army time, and they needed to believe in the cause, feel sorry for the victims, she told us.
Because this is the age of doubt and doubt corrodes faith, she added.
The story that was relevant almost 2,000 years ago still holds ground. Surrounded by countries that have not recognized its existence , it is the perennial source of inspiration and dozens of children still climb up to the fortress, their mothers prodding them on, their teachers exhorting them to climb faster.
Zivit’s children too had soaked in the story, walk through the ruins, and listened to their mother saying how they should always be brave and never fear death.
That’s a ritual that Jewish mothers believe in. It’s part of the Jewish upbringing, a way of preparing their sons and daughters for the army, a service that is mandatory for the youth in Israel, she said.
“Because then they will never show their backs on the army and fight,” she said. “That’s how we raise our children.”
When Zivit, who now works as a tourist guide out of Haifa, was a young girl, she had trekked the narrow and steep path, too. The story of Masada is an important part of Israel’s national narrative, a myth that sustains its ideology, its wars, and its space.
I had been to Jerusalem, walked in Jesus’ footsteps, the Via Dolorosa, the path that Jesus took when he walked to his crucifixion, stood outside the Al Aqsa Mosque and wrote my wishes on a piece of paper and stuck it in the Western Wall so they could be answered, and watched in silence the hundreds of Jewish women reading the Torah facing the Wailing Wall, the last remnant of the second Jewish Temple. But in the old city I found identities, its clashes. Religion hung heavy on us, but even in the tears of the Jewish women I saw praying at the Western Wall, I couldn’t find the idea of Israel convincing enough.
Until I saw Masada, I was still trying to understand the Jewish mind. There were memorials scattered throughout the country, there was the Holocaust Museum, but it needed more, at least for me. Because in Jerusalem, past the security checkpoints, past the heavily-armed gunmen, it didn’t take much to see why Palestine needed its own place. This was their space denied to them.
In Masada, I knew why Israel needed to exist, too. Because here I saw how the Jewish refugees struggled to defend Israel after everything else had been taken over and how they died in the hopes that Messiah will gift Israel back to them. According to the account by Josephus, they killed each other until the last man killed himself while the walls burnt around them believing that God was punishing them for not being able to defend Israel. When they reclaimed Israel, they knew they were only trying to get what had been theirs. It’s another story that in the intervening 2,000 years, others had come to inhabit the region – the Palestinians.
In Israel, the first immigrants after the Nazi Germany hounded them and persecuted them, established communes called Kibbutz, pushing the boundaries of their country into the deserts, into hostile neighbor’s territories, incurring the wrath of those who were uprooted, and the world that often criticized them. They needed to sustain the zeal, and wanted their children to grow up believing in the struggle, and their victimization.
And this is why they needed Masada, and its heroic narrative.
For years, the schools have been bringing students to the fortress, narrating to them the story they have heard at home, that they will grow up with, and which will kill their doubts on war.
Masada is key to understanding the country’s insecurities, its youth and its transformation as its old generation gives way to new, the ones who are growing up in an age of aspiration.
Masada was rediscovered in 1838 by two American travelers, Edward Robinson and E. Smith, in 1838.
And from the 1930 onwards, after the Jewish National Fund bought it, it was a destination for Zionist youth. It wasn’t excavated until 1960s and at once became the centre of national interest, a site of pride for settlers who derived their sense of clan and community living from those Jewish refugees who came here. It injected Israelis with heroism needed to survive in a hostile environment, Zivit told us.
But Israeli new historians like Nachman Ben Yehuda have debunked the Masada story saying only a few skeletons were found in excavations later and Romans could not have waited out the whole night to get into the fortress whose walls they had burnt already.
But anyone visiting Israel, who needs to understand the Jewish people, needs to walk in the ruins of Masada and let it enchant you, and let it explain to you why it should not fall again and why they won’t let it fall again and why its beauty is so tragic and so convincing.
Facts about Masada
The Israel Nature and Parks Protection Authority has restored Masada’s ruins and adding to the historical site a museum consisting of nine rooms that house statues and other finds to help tourists reconstruct history was opened in 2007.
Masada was incorporated in the UNESCO’s World Heritage Site list in 2001. While Masada presents spectacular scenery in the night when the moon is strong and the ruins glow with its light, the sunrise viewed from the top of the flat mountain is equally famous. An audio-visual light show chronicling Masada's history is presented at the night time during summers. The dramatic show takes place during March and October and documents the last days of the rebel’s in the cliff-top fortress.
While a cable car has been built, a winding snake path built in those days to ferry people and supplies is still used by the people. The Snake Path opens about one hour before sunrise but is closed during extreme weather conditions. The treacherous path was built by Herod to get food and raw materials up on the 450 meters fortress. It is very narrow and steep and many still wonder how the palace was constructed and how slabs of stones were carried to that height. But there is what seems like a mining quarry that suggests the stones used to build the palaces were from the quarry.
Masada, with its myth and its conflict, will also host Verdi’s opera “Nabucco” in June. It will be produced by the Israeli Opera.
The fortress that sits in the mountain like an embryo was voted as the most popular tourist site in Israel in 2008 by Dun and Bradstreet.
Also known as Metzada, the fortress is on the western shore of the Dead Sea and is in the Judean Desert. Its east and west edge’s measure between 400 meters and 90 meters in height. This is where the Sicarii, the Jewish rebels, fled to after being hounded by the Romans centuries ago.
It was largely undiscovered until a Hebrew poet’s poem called Masada in 1920s generated interest in the site. Then, in 1960s Yigael Yadin started to excavate the region and the site became one of symbols of Israel.
An edited version was published in Sunday Eye (Indian Express) on May 2, 2010.
Chinki Sinha
Masada
It’s in Masada that Israel begins to make sense. Because in this region where there are only two extreme identities – of the oppressed and the oppressor – in Masada the roles are reversed. And you must let Masada tell you its story. You must listen, and not ask questions. That will break the spell.
As we drove in the desert towards the fortress, Zivit Sari, our guide, stuck her neck outside and shouted she could see Masada. All we could see looming in the distance was a cluster of sandstone-colored mountains. Somewhere in the middle was a flat-topped mountain, Dead Sea in front, the desert in between them.
Then it began to slowly emerge - the three terraces of King Herod's grandiose palace on the north tip precariously balancing themselves down the rock like the gardens of Babylon. It came out of the rock, blended in, and yet carved out of it. Here’s where nature helped man forge a getaway fortress from its belly - beautiful, delicate, and yet so formidable. Masada sat in the mountain like an embryo – protected and enigmatic.
Masada is where stands the refuge palace of Roman King Herod, who was himself Jewish, built by him in 38-4 BCE, and this was where a thousand Jewish refugees died centuries ago defending the "last stand" of Israel. During the First Jewish War, the Jewish rebels captured the mountain as they fled from the Romans after Jerusalem was captured and the Temple was burnt. It is not like Caesarea where there are shopping arcades, and restaurants amid the ruins.
Only Masada remained because it was built to intimidate, and it was inaccessible. But in 73 AD, Roman General Flavius Silva besieged the fortress after camping there for months. The Jewish refugees, as the myth goes, killed themselves preferring death at their own hands rather then be enslaved by the enemy they so loathed that they wouldn’t even use the Roman bathhouse built by King Herod. While they stayed there, they built their Jewish baths around the ancient bathhouse and the ruins are a testimony to this.
The Roman armies destroyed the wall around the fortress, and then they burnt the new wall the refugees had built of wood. That’s when the Jewish refugees understood they could not hold out any longer. But embracing death was a calculated move, too. Zivit told us how they left the storage area intact to show to the enemy and to the world if they came to document the incident that they had enough food to last them for years, that they didn’t commit suicide because of the threat of the enemy but because they chose freedom and pride and rejected enslavement as narrated by Josephus in the The Jewish War .
As we waited for the cable car that would take us up the mountain and into the refuge fortress complete with a Roman bath and a palace overlooking the Dead Sea, I found the narrative getting to me, and I started believing in the myth, too. It was Masada enchanting me, charming me with its sadness, its magnificence and its fate. It was staring at me, it was in my face convincing me with all that was left of it, and when I looked down from the top, I knew why it was so beautiful in its remoteness. The Dead Sea, its blue water, the Jordanian mountains reflecting in its waters, changing colours, stretched across from the fortress. The desert was beneath it. The hills closed in on it, the rains had carved the limestone mountains when they gushed forth in the rainy season, pulled down by the earth’s force. This place had everything and maybe that’s why Herod came here, lured by its promise of everything.
Masada ’s appeal has only increased over the years. Conde’ Nast Traveler magazine rated it as the world’s most popular tourist side recently.
Of course Zivit had internalised its tragic story, passed it on to her children and didn’t once mention the controversy about the Masada myth of Jews sacrificing their lives to dodge enslavement by the Romans that diluted the story of heroism because then it would mean negating their own struggles, their beliefs and their place under the sun, her own time serving in the Israeli Army always trying that Masada didn’t fall yet again.
The battle of Masada was lost. But the settlers saw that the idea could help in recruiting a force, and Masada resurfaced, and remains as important as it ever was.
It is in Masada, perched on a flat-topped limestone mountain, that the Israeli Defence Force recruits held swearing-in ceremonies shouting “Masada shall not fall again” from the 1927 poem by the Ukrainian poet Yitzhak Lamdan for many years until doubts about the accuracy of the Masada story itself was challenged by a scholar.
The idea of Masada trained soldiers to do anything; it became a symbol of Israel surviving among enemies, and occupied a place in the collective memory.
The fact that Israel has mandatory army service, it is a nation constantly on alert, trying to defend its borders and expand them, too. They are surrounded with countries that have denied its very existence.
It is here in Masada that I began to understand why Israel can fight the way it does, aggressively, ruthlessly, to defend the piece of land that’s their home and refuge and a place where Jews from all over the world can return to.
On most holidays, Zivit would pack her children in the car and drive over two hours to Masada in the Judean Desert, and the children would climb up the Snake Path and listen to the narrative of the Jewish refugees. They needed to be inspired, to look forward to the army time, and they needed to believe in the cause, feel sorry for the victims, she told us.
Because this is the age of doubt and doubt corrodes faith, she added.
The story that was relevant almost 2,000 years ago still holds ground. Surrounded by countries that have not recognized its existence , it is the perennial source of inspiration and dozens of children still climb up to the fortress, their mothers prodding them on, their teachers exhorting them to climb faster.
Zivit’s children too had soaked in the story, walk through the ruins, and listened to their mother saying how they should always be brave and never fear death.
That’s a ritual that Jewish mothers believe in. It’s part of the Jewish upbringing, a way of preparing their sons and daughters for the army, a service that is mandatory for the youth in Israel, she said.
“Because then they will never show their backs on the army and fight,” she said. “That’s how we raise our children.”
When Zivit, who now works as a tourist guide out of Haifa, was a young girl, she had trekked the narrow and steep path, too. The story of Masada is an important part of Israel’s national narrative, a myth that sustains its ideology, its wars, and its space.
I had been to Jerusalem, walked in Jesus’ footsteps, the Via Dolorosa, the path that Jesus took when he walked to his crucifixion, stood outside the Al Aqsa Mosque and wrote my wishes on a piece of paper and stuck it in the Western Wall so they could be answered, and watched in silence the hundreds of Jewish women reading the Torah facing the Wailing Wall, the last remnant of the second Jewish Temple. But in the old city I found identities, its clashes. Religion hung heavy on us, but even in the tears of the Jewish women I saw praying at the Western Wall, I couldn’t find the idea of Israel convincing enough.
Until I saw Masada, I was still trying to understand the Jewish mind. There were memorials scattered throughout the country, there was the Holocaust Museum, but it needed more, at least for me. Because in Jerusalem, past the security checkpoints, past the heavily-armed gunmen, it didn’t take much to see why Palestine needed its own place. This was their space denied to them.
In Masada, I knew why Israel needed to exist, too. Because here I saw how the Jewish refugees struggled to defend Israel after everything else had been taken over and how they died in the hopes that Messiah will gift Israel back to them. According to the account by Josephus, they killed each other until the last man killed himself while the walls burnt around them believing that God was punishing them for not being able to defend Israel. When they reclaimed Israel, they knew they were only trying to get what had been theirs. It’s another story that in the intervening 2,000 years, others had come to inhabit the region – the Palestinians.
In Israel, the first immigrants after the Nazi Germany hounded them and persecuted them, established communes called Kibbutz, pushing the boundaries of their country into the deserts, into hostile neighbor’s territories, incurring the wrath of those who were uprooted, and the world that often criticized them. They needed to sustain the zeal, and wanted their children to grow up believing in the struggle, and their victimization.
And this is why they needed Masada, and its heroic narrative.
For years, the schools have been bringing students to the fortress, narrating to them the story they have heard at home, that they will grow up with, and which will kill their doubts on war.
Masada is key to understanding the country’s insecurities, its youth and its transformation as its old generation gives way to new, the ones who are growing up in an age of aspiration.
Masada was rediscovered in 1838 by two American travelers, Edward Robinson and E. Smith, in 1838.
And from the 1930 onwards, after the Jewish National Fund bought it, it was a destination for Zionist youth. It wasn’t excavated until 1960s and at once became the centre of national interest, a site of pride for settlers who derived their sense of clan and community living from those Jewish refugees who came here. It injected Israelis with heroism needed to survive in a hostile environment, Zivit told us.
But Israeli new historians like Nachman Ben Yehuda have debunked the Masada story saying only a few skeletons were found in excavations later and Romans could not have waited out the whole night to get into the fortress whose walls they had burnt already.
But anyone visiting Israel, who needs to understand the Jewish people, needs to walk in the ruins of Masada and let it enchant you, and let it explain to you why it should not fall again and why they won’t let it fall again and why its beauty is so tragic and so convincing.
Facts about Masada
The Israel Nature and Parks Protection Authority has restored Masada’s ruins and adding to the historical site a museum consisting of nine rooms that house statues and other finds to help tourists reconstruct history was opened in 2007.
Masada was incorporated in the UNESCO’s World Heritage Site list in 2001. While Masada presents spectacular scenery in the night when the moon is strong and the ruins glow with its light, the sunrise viewed from the top of the flat mountain is equally famous. An audio-visual light show chronicling Masada's history is presented at the night time during summers. The dramatic show takes place during March and October and documents the last days of the rebel’s in the cliff-top fortress.
While a cable car has been built, a winding snake path built in those days to ferry people and supplies is still used by the people. The Snake Path opens about one hour before sunrise but is closed during extreme weather conditions. The treacherous path was built by Herod to get food and raw materials up on the 450 meters fortress. It is very narrow and steep and many still wonder how the palace was constructed and how slabs of stones were carried to that height. But there is what seems like a mining quarry that suggests the stones used to build the palaces were from the quarry.
Masada, with its myth and its conflict, will also host Verdi’s opera “Nabucco” in June. It will be produced by the Israeli Opera.
The fortress that sits in the mountain like an embryo was voted as the most popular tourist site in Israel in 2008 by Dun and Bradstreet.
Also known as Metzada, the fortress is on the western shore of the Dead Sea and is in the Judean Desert. Its east and west edge’s measure between 400 meters and 90 meters in height. This is where the Sicarii, the Jewish rebels, fled to after being hounded by the Romans centuries ago.
It was largely undiscovered until a Hebrew poet’s poem called Masada in 1920s generated interest in the site. Then, in 1960s Yigael Yadin started to excavate the region and the site became one of symbols of Israel.
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
The road to justice for 1984 anti-Sikh riots
An edited version of the story appeared in the Indian Express on April 27, 2010.
Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, April 27, 2010
Outside the Karkardooma Court Complex, a group of Sikh men and women burnt the effigies of the two Congress leaders, one of who was let off by the court on Tuesday after it accepted Central Bureau of Investigations’ closure report in a case related to Jagdish Tytler’s alleged role in the 1984 anti-Sikh riots. On each hearing, the group has collected outside the court complex, anticipating a verdict that would avenge their loss, and their frsutration. On Monday, after Tytler's clean chit was upheld, they said they had no hope in the courts and on Friday, they would march to the Supreme Court in their final bid to get justice.
An elderly Sikh man beat his chest, and pointed to the black charred mess on the street saying this is how the Sikhs were set on fire 26 years ago in a carnage that killed more than 3,000 members of the community. The outrage was expected. The court had just let off Jagdish Tytler saying there was not sufficient material to send the Congress leader to trial.
On one side, Lakhwinder Kaur, who had opposed the investigating agency’s closure report giving clean chit to Tytler in April last year, was trying to muster more strength to go on. Slain Badal Singh’s wife’s counsel Rebecca John said this was not a final order and they would either challenge it in the High Court or the sessions court.
She said the CBI had ignored Surinder Singh’s statement where he had named at least three more witnesses who were present at Gurudwara Pulbangash in north Delhi on the day of the murder of Badal Singh. One of them, Alam Singh, works at a gurudwara in California, she said.
“CBI almost became a cross-examiner. They picked on the two witnesses,” John said.
Vrinda Grover, a Delhi-based Human Rights lawyer, said this was not an honorable discharge of the case.
“In many situations, the agency is capable of manipulating investigation. CBI investigation in this case is extremely suspect. They have pitted witnesses against witnesses. They were acting as a defense counsel in this case,” she said. “They have protected them for 25 years. Surinder Singh was alive for 25 years but Tytler managed to drag the case.”
Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate Rakesh Pandit said the statement of Jasbir Singh, who is in California, had no relevance to the case of killing of Badal Singh and those of witness Surinder Singh were “self-contradictory”. Last year, the CBI filed an affidavit signed by Surinder Singh two days before his death in the court that said Tytler is innocent and was not part of the mob that attacked the gurudwara where Badal Singh was killed. But Grover said the case was never heard in the court.
“That affidavit we can’t prove whether it is right or wrong. It provided no twist in the case. It was not examined by the court. It is not on record,” she said.
John had asked the court to order further investigations in the case related to 66-year-old Tytler’s involvement in the 1984 riots.
In its closure report, CBI had said the two witnesses’ statements were “false and concocted.”
Tytler's role in the case relating to the killing of three persons, including Badal Singh near Gurudwara Pulbangash in north Delhi was re-investigated by the CBI after a court had in December 2007 refused to accept a closure report filed by the agency.
“The CBI has examined two other persons who said these three people were not there and the agency accepted that statement. We wanted further evidence. There are other witnesses,” Grover said. “Nobody wants to pursue the leads. It shows they want to protect him. We know one of the three granthis that Surinder Singh named in his statement is alive and is in California. It is the job of the agency to trace the other two. They haven’t done it.”
The counsel also said the CBI didn’t examine Satto Singh, father of Jasbir Singh.
In an affidavit filed before the Nanavati Commission, Jasbir Singh had deposed that Tylter of November 3, 1984, had instigated the mobs to carry out the riots, while Surinder Singh had said that Tytler was responsible for inciting the riots where three people, including Badal Singh was killed.
For Lakhwinder Kaur, it is yet another disappointment on the way to justice.
“Twenty five years is not a short time. I was so angry. Today, I feel like I am losing strength. Thoda hausla tootne laga hai,” she said. “But I will not give up.”
Kaur had been married two years when her husband was killed at the gurudwara by the mob. She was pregnant with a girl child and had a five-months-old daughter. She moved to Tilak Vihar where many Sikh families were resettled in the aftermath of the riots and now works as a peon in the education sector.
While Tytler was yet again given a clean chit, another Congress leader Sajjan Kumar’s trial continued in the same court complex on Tuesday with the CBI arguing that the two cases in which Sajjan Kumar is an accused – the Delhi Cantonment case in which five people were killed and Sultanpuri case where at least seven people were murdered in the riots of 1984 – must be taken up separately by the court. Counsel for the Central Bureau of Investigation, R.S. Cheema also said they would press for sedition charges against the Congress leader and base it on the testimony of Nilpreet Kaur, a riot victim, who later joined the Khalistan movement after she lost her father in the carnage.
Sajjan Kumar, Khushal Singh, Girdhari Lal, Balwan Khokhar, Mahender Yadav, Maha Singh, Capt Bhagmal, Santosh Rani and Krishna Khokhar were named as accused in Delhi Cantonment case.
The CBI field the chargesheets against Sajjan Kumar in January in two cases for allegedly making provocative speeches that instigated the mobs and led to killings of Sikhs.
The five named in the chargesheet in the case relating to killings of seven people at Sultanpuri in north Delhi are Congress leader Kumar, Ved Prakash Pial, Peru, Khushal Singh and Brahma Nand Gupta.
The case that was transferred to Additional Sessions Judge Sunita Gupta’s court this month. The accused side will begin its arguments on Wednesday.
However, in both cases involving two Congress leaders, it is interesting to note CBI’s role and method. In Tytler’s case, as alleged, it didn’t examine witnesses and ignored many crucial leads. However, in Sajjan Kumar’s case, the agency has dug out FIRs filed 25 years ago and has traced four crucial witnesses so they could depose before the court, including Nilpreet Kaur.
Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, April 27, 2010
Outside the Karkardooma Court Complex, a group of Sikh men and women burnt the effigies of the two Congress leaders, one of who was let off by the court on Tuesday after it accepted Central Bureau of Investigations’ closure report in a case related to Jagdish Tytler’s alleged role in the 1984 anti-Sikh riots. On each hearing, the group has collected outside the court complex, anticipating a verdict that would avenge their loss, and their frsutration. On Monday, after Tytler's clean chit was upheld, they said they had no hope in the courts and on Friday, they would march to the Supreme Court in their final bid to get justice.
An elderly Sikh man beat his chest, and pointed to the black charred mess on the street saying this is how the Sikhs were set on fire 26 years ago in a carnage that killed more than 3,000 members of the community. The outrage was expected. The court had just let off Jagdish Tytler saying there was not sufficient material to send the Congress leader to trial.
On one side, Lakhwinder Kaur, who had opposed the investigating agency’s closure report giving clean chit to Tytler in April last year, was trying to muster more strength to go on. Slain Badal Singh’s wife’s counsel Rebecca John said this was not a final order and they would either challenge it in the High Court or the sessions court.
She said the CBI had ignored Surinder Singh’s statement where he had named at least three more witnesses who were present at Gurudwara Pulbangash in north Delhi on the day of the murder of Badal Singh. One of them, Alam Singh, works at a gurudwara in California, she said.
“CBI almost became a cross-examiner. They picked on the two witnesses,” John said.
Vrinda Grover, a Delhi-based Human Rights lawyer, said this was not an honorable discharge of the case.
“In many situations, the agency is capable of manipulating investigation. CBI investigation in this case is extremely suspect. They have pitted witnesses against witnesses. They were acting as a defense counsel in this case,” she said. “They have protected them for 25 years. Surinder Singh was alive for 25 years but Tytler managed to drag the case.”
Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate Rakesh Pandit said the statement of Jasbir Singh, who is in California, had no relevance to the case of killing of Badal Singh and those of witness Surinder Singh were “self-contradictory”. Last year, the CBI filed an affidavit signed by Surinder Singh two days before his death in the court that said Tytler is innocent and was not part of the mob that attacked the gurudwara where Badal Singh was killed. But Grover said the case was never heard in the court.
“That affidavit we can’t prove whether it is right or wrong. It provided no twist in the case. It was not examined by the court. It is not on record,” she said.
John had asked the court to order further investigations in the case related to 66-year-old Tytler’s involvement in the 1984 riots.
In its closure report, CBI had said the two witnesses’ statements were “false and concocted.”
Tytler's role in the case relating to the killing of three persons, including Badal Singh near Gurudwara Pulbangash in north Delhi was re-investigated by the CBI after a court had in December 2007 refused to accept a closure report filed by the agency.
“The CBI has examined two other persons who said these three people were not there and the agency accepted that statement. We wanted further evidence. There are other witnesses,” Grover said. “Nobody wants to pursue the leads. It shows they want to protect him. We know one of the three granthis that Surinder Singh named in his statement is alive and is in California. It is the job of the agency to trace the other two. They haven’t done it.”
The counsel also said the CBI didn’t examine Satto Singh, father of Jasbir Singh.
In an affidavit filed before the Nanavati Commission, Jasbir Singh had deposed that Tylter of November 3, 1984, had instigated the mobs to carry out the riots, while Surinder Singh had said that Tytler was responsible for inciting the riots where three people, including Badal Singh was killed.
For Lakhwinder Kaur, it is yet another disappointment on the way to justice.
“Twenty five years is not a short time. I was so angry. Today, I feel like I am losing strength. Thoda hausla tootne laga hai,” she said. “But I will not give up.”
Kaur had been married two years when her husband was killed at the gurudwara by the mob. She was pregnant with a girl child and had a five-months-old daughter. She moved to Tilak Vihar where many Sikh families were resettled in the aftermath of the riots and now works as a peon in the education sector.
While Tytler was yet again given a clean chit, another Congress leader Sajjan Kumar’s trial continued in the same court complex on Tuesday with the CBI arguing that the two cases in which Sajjan Kumar is an accused – the Delhi Cantonment case in which five people were killed and Sultanpuri case where at least seven people were murdered in the riots of 1984 – must be taken up separately by the court. Counsel for the Central Bureau of Investigation, R.S. Cheema also said they would press for sedition charges against the Congress leader and base it on the testimony of Nilpreet Kaur, a riot victim, who later joined the Khalistan movement after she lost her father in the carnage.
Sajjan Kumar, Khushal Singh, Girdhari Lal, Balwan Khokhar, Mahender Yadav, Maha Singh, Capt Bhagmal, Santosh Rani and Krishna Khokhar were named as accused in Delhi Cantonment case.
The CBI field the chargesheets against Sajjan Kumar in January in two cases for allegedly making provocative speeches that instigated the mobs and led to killings of Sikhs.
The five named in the chargesheet in the case relating to killings of seven people at Sultanpuri in north Delhi are Congress leader Kumar, Ved Prakash Pial, Peru, Khushal Singh and Brahma Nand Gupta.
The case that was transferred to Additional Sessions Judge Sunita Gupta’s court this month. The accused side will begin its arguments on Wednesday.
However, in both cases involving two Congress leaders, it is interesting to note CBI’s role and method. In Tytler’s case, as alleged, it didn’t examine witnesses and ignored many crucial leads. However, in Sajjan Kumar’s case, the agency has dug out FIRs filed 25 years ago and has traced four crucial witnesses so they could depose before the court, including Nilpreet Kaur.
Sunday, March 21, 2010
In the land of the forgotten, a place of memories
When we climbed up the stairs and they unlocked the gates, I was nervous. I didn't know if the women in the mental shelter would like my presence. Renuka Puri, our photographer, had been there before. She knew them. They had become used to her. But I was a stranger. They looked at me from behind the iron grill and they smiled. So, I knew I had nothing to fear. I wish I had spent more time with the women.
An edited version of the story was published in the Indian Express newspaper's Real Page 3 section on March 21, 2010.
Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, March 12, 2010
In the land of the forgotten, upstairs in an old government building, beyond three iron gates, 18 women have been resurrected, reclaimed, and renamed.
Because they didn’t remember their names. Names didn’t matter in the streets, in the dumps where they lived, their bodies full of maggots, their lips muttering incoherent tales of their lives.
In the corridors of their memory, no windows opened. They just couldn’t tell. Only their scars screamed about their damned lives.
So, in Sudinalaya, a shelter home for women who are abandoned and are mentally disabled, they started calling the woman with short cropped hair, but with large lucid eyes, the one who covered her face always, and who had mood swings “Imli”.
Imli never talks. She just raises her eyes, the sorts that are deep, and dark, and calm. But then when she is upset, the watery eyes flood, and the anger spills out. Then, she screams and shouts and cries.
“Imli is the soul of Sudinalaya. She is sweet and sour. She laughs and she cries,” Sreerupa Mitra Choudhary, founder and chairperson of the NGO, said. “All their names signify their behaviors.”
The large hall, bare except for a television mounted on the wall, and 25 iron beds, is full of stories, fantasies, outbursts of rage, longing, and love.
Anju insists that they call her “Janu”. That’s what her husband, her lover called her. She is old now. Her hair is peppered with gray and white. And wrinkles on her face are like little rivulets, each containing within its folds the many mysteries of her life.
She was found at a petrol pump near Okhla.
Anju never recovered fully. The shelter isn’t a destination but more like a passage where once the inmates are able to recall their addresses and other details about their lives, the staff tries to rehabilitate them.
“Where will I go from here,” Anju says. “Pankaj will come to pick me up. I know I will find him one day. One day I will meet him.”
So, she is waiting. Waiting for her lost lover – real or imaginary. He makes her blush. Anju is in love. She has always been in love. In her reborn state, where age doesn’t matter, this love and longing is her only bridge to the past.
Bano is longing, too. She wants to go home to her husband in Sitapur in Bihar. Her little children are waiting, she says.
Bano was rescued almost two and a half years ago from the streets. She was crawling, the staff recalled.
For months, she was on a wheelchair. And then, she held the walls of the large room, and learned to walk slowly. Her burns have healed, too.
She had a husband who worked in Delhi and she left her village to come here to see him. Now, she wants to see him again.
Then, almost in the same breath, she says he beat her up, and sold her.
But it is her children that call her home. And she pleads and begs the staff to send her home.
“Only when we find your house. We are trying to get reservations,” Inderjit, who looks after them, tells her.
“I am not mad,” she says. “I can walk now. Take me home.”
It’s not easy being here.
It a tough place, a place where memory is fragile, brittle. It requires patience, and lots of it. It also demands that you learn to believe, even though the stories transform overnight, and it demands that you remain unfazed even when they come at you, eyes full of rage, their teeth clattering.
Vimla ran away once. That night, Indira got wild. She beat up everyone, and she screamed. Vimla, one of the staff, locked herself in a room.
“At these times, you don’t know what to do,” she says.
But Asha, who stays overnight at the shelter, has over the years learned that the women, old, delicate, vulnerable, are like children.
“You don’t fear them,” she says.
So, when Asha cooks, she calls the women inside the kitchen and they cook together.
Where they live, somewhere in between memory and loss of it, the inmates have all learned to lean on each other.
Munni, who they named so because she is like a child, and laughs all the time, cries when someone is hurt. She will come to them, hold them by the hand, and cry and point to the person.
Sometimes, Munni sings, too. An old Bollywood song. She has been in the shelter for years. The shelter was established in 1989 by Choudhury who now runs 11 such shelters across the country. Three are in Delhi. One caters to about 50 men who are mentally disabled and two others to women. Choudhary who worked the crime beat in a city newspaper says she wanted to help the women she saw on the streets – abandoned, and vulnerable because they were mentally disabled.
It has been a tough road for her, too. It’s difficult to find committed volunteers. Her organization has sustained only on the basis of donations, and goodwill of others.
The women are referred to them by AIIMS, Safdarjung Hospital, Delhi police and citizens.
“There was an urge to support victims,” she says. “Then I started this initiative. These women were easy preys for organ dealers.”
In one of the corners, an elderly woman is muttering in English. Shikha was rescued from the INA market by Choudhury several years ago. When she saw Choudhaury, she asked her to sit and in an agitated state called out to “Pappu” to bring in sweets and fish curry, Choudhury recalls.
“She talked about mosaic and servants,” she says. “She is from an affluent family.”
But there is no way to tell. Because the shards of memory are not enough to fill in the gaps. So, they go back and forth, shuttling between memory and forgetfulness.
In yet another corner, Dhapu, named so because she said “Dhap, Dhap” all the time, is calling out for Rani, her daughter.
“Rani has gone to school. They should bring her here,” she says.
When they found her, she had a young child who she held close to her. Even at the shelter, she would not leave the child. Then, they took Rani away and put her in a school and a childcare center.
But the mother only remembers her lost child. And amid laughter, and songs, her wailing is hard to miss.
They have clung on to the past or whatever remains of it with a ferocity. After all, the new names are not all that they stand for.
An edited version of the story was published in the Indian Express newspaper's Real Page 3 section on March 21, 2010.
Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, March 12, 2010
In the land of the forgotten, upstairs in an old government building, beyond three iron gates, 18 women have been resurrected, reclaimed, and renamed.
Because they didn’t remember their names. Names didn’t matter in the streets, in the dumps where they lived, their bodies full of maggots, their lips muttering incoherent tales of their lives.
In the corridors of their memory, no windows opened. They just couldn’t tell. Only their scars screamed about their damned lives.
So, in Sudinalaya, a shelter home for women who are abandoned and are mentally disabled, they started calling the woman with short cropped hair, but with large lucid eyes, the one who covered her face always, and who had mood swings “Imli”.
Imli never talks. She just raises her eyes, the sorts that are deep, and dark, and calm. But then when she is upset, the watery eyes flood, and the anger spills out. Then, she screams and shouts and cries.
“Imli is the soul of Sudinalaya. She is sweet and sour. She laughs and she cries,” Sreerupa Mitra Choudhary, founder and chairperson of the NGO, said. “All their names signify their behaviors.”
The large hall, bare except for a television mounted on the wall, and 25 iron beds, is full of stories, fantasies, outbursts of rage, longing, and love.
Anju insists that they call her “Janu”. That’s what her husband, her lover called her. She is old now. Her hair is peppered with gray and white. And wrinkles on her face are like little rivulets, each containing within its folds the many mysteries of her life.
She was found at a petrol pump near Okhla.
Anju never recovered fully. The shelter isn’t a destination but more like a passage where once the inmates are able to recall their addresses and other details about their lives, the staff tries to rehabilitate them.
“Where will I go from here,” Anju says. “Pankaj will come to pick me up. I know I will find him one day. One day I will meet him.”
So, she is waiting. Waiting for her lost lover – real or imaginary. He makes her blush. Anju is in love. She has always been in love. In her reborn state, where age doesn’t matter, this love and longing is her only bridge to the past.
Bano is longing, too. She wants to go home to her husband in Sitapur in Bihar. Her little children are waiting, she says.
Bano was rescued almost two and a half years ago from the streets. She was crawling, the staff recalled.
For months, she was on a wheelchair. And then, she held the walls of the large room, and learned to walk slowly. Her burns have healed, too.
She had a husband who worked in Delhi and she left her village to come here to see him. Now, she wants to see him again.
Then, almost in the same breath, she says he beat her up, and sold her.
But it is her children that call her home. And she pleads and begs the staff to send her home.
“Only when we find your house. We are trying to get reservations,” Inderjit, who looks after them, tells her.
“I am not mad,” she says. “I can walk now. Take me home.”
It’s not easy being here.
It a tough place, a place where memory is fragile, brittle. It requires patience, and lots of it. It also demands that you learn to believe, even though the stories transform overnight, and it demands that you remain unfazed even when they come at you, eyes full of rage, their teeth clattering.
Vimla ran away once. That night, Indira got wild. She beat up everyone, and she screamed. Vimla, one of the staff, locked herself in a room.
“At these times, you don’t know what to do,” she says.
But Asha, who stays overnight at the shelter, has over the years learned that the women, old, delicate, vulnerable, are like children.
“You don’t fear them,” she says.
So, when Asha cooks, she calls the women inside the kitchen and they cook together.
Where they live, somewhere in between memory and loss of it, the inmates have all learned to lean on each other.
Munni, who they named so because she is like a child, and laughs all the time, cries when someone is hurt. She will come to them, hold them by the hand, and cry and point to the person.
Sometimes, Munni sings, too. An old Bollywood song. She has been in the shelter for years. The shelter was established in 1989 by Choudhury who now runs 11 such shelters across the country. Three are in Delhi. One caters to about 50 men who are mentally disabled and two others to women. Choudhary who worked the crime beat in a city newspaper says she wanted to help the women she saw on the streets – abandoned, and vulnerable because they were mentally disabled.
It has been a tough road for her, too. It’s difficult to find committed volunteers. Her organization has sustained only on the basis of donations, and goodwill of others.
The women are referred to them by AIIMS, Safdarjung Hospital, Delhi police and citizens.
“There was an urge to support victims,” she says. “Then I started this initiative. These women were easy preys for organ dealers.”
In one of the corners, an elderly woman is muttering in English. Shikha was rescued from the INA market by Choudhury several years ago. When she saw Choudhaury, she asked her to sit and in an agitated state called out to “Pappu” to bring in sweets and fish curry, Choudhury recalls.
“She talked about mosaic and servants,” she says. “She is from an affluent family.”
But there is no way to tell. Because the shards of memory are not enough to fill in the gaps. So, they go back and forth, shuttling between memory and forgetfulness.
In yet another corner, Dhapu, named so because she said “Dhap, Dhap” all the time, is calling out for Rani, her daughter.
“Rani has gone to school. They should bring her here,” she says.
When they found her, she had a young child who she held close to her. Even at the shelter, she would not leave the child. Then, they took Rani away and put her in a school and a childcare center.
But the mother only remembers her lost child. And amid laughter, and songs, her wailing is hard to miss.
They have clung on to the past or whatever remains of it with a ferocity. After all, the new names are not all that they stand for.
Monday, February 01, 2010
Inside the Afghan bakery
At a friend's place, we were offered Afghan bread and he suggested I should visit the bakery, which I did and I wrote its story.
An edited version of the article appeared in the Real Page 3 of the Indian Express on Sunday, January 31, 2010.
Chinki Sinha
January 28, 2010
New Delhi, January 27, 2010
Long ago in a little bakery in Kabul, Aqa Sayed learned to knead the dough, cut it into pieces, then weigh it on a scale, flatten it and gently put it inside a stone-lined fire pit.
An apprentice to his father, a baker, Sayed came to his father’s shop in the afternoons after school, to learn the art of making Afghani roti.
Many long years have gone by since.
Now, Sayed, 48, is reclaiming from memory the bread-making skills he learned as a child in a little rented shop where an Afghan bakery has recently opened in the crowded Bhogal market.
Outside the shop called Afghan Nanwaee (the bread maker), a queue of Afghani people has formed. Most of them came to India as refugees, fleeing the perpetual state of turmoil in their homeland where the smoke and splinters from a bomb blast, and soldiers wielding Kalashnikovs and marching in the streets and on to their lives, are part of everyday living.
But home is an idea and like time and place, is a keeper of sanity. Familiarity, a semblance of what was destroyed, left behind, is what the refugee seeks.
So, inside the bakery, the four Afghani men have recreated their homeland, lining its sooty walls with tapestries of a countryside village, a mosque in its background, and pewter plates with Koranic verses on them. A broken part of a bed that once belonged to someone in Kabul, and has pink roses carved on it, that a refugee packed with his meagre belongings so he could keep a piece of his former life with him always, hangs near the entrance.
The oven, the fire pit or Tandoor, was bought here in Bhogal, but the bread that comes out of it, is intrinsically Afghani with little designs made by poking tiny holes, the size of a dot.
At fifteen, Sayed, a Tajik, gave up on school because there was no hope of finding a job as one war bled into another one in his homeland, and he stopped counting how many bloody wars ravaged Afghanistan, its people, the schools, the hopes, and the bakeries, too.
“We never knew who was ruling us. It changed too often, it mattered too little,” he said, Ali Jan, a Hazara boy, interpreting for him.
His wife and two children died when a bomb exploded in one of those streets in Kabul. Bombs were forever exploding, and killing, and filling streets with blood of their children and women.
Sayed then came to India. In Kabul, his bakery shut down, too.
For a few weeks, he was barely making ends meet. The little money he brought with him lasted a few days only. Then he met Ainuddin, popularly known in the locality as Mullah Jan, who was running this bakery and needed men who could bake.
Sayed had been a bread maker. His hands knew the craft, the acrobatics of baking the perfect home bread.
He is a sad man, always brooding, they said.
Only when he plunges his hands into the flour and pulls and pushes, and leans into the fire pit to check on the bread, he smiles.
The bread that he pulls out is a connector of sorts, its smell transporting him to a life he loved, and his memory comes alive.
On a Wednesday morning, after they had baked the first batch of bread, the four men sat down for breakfast – rotis, fresh cream, and afghani chai. A woman stuck her face inside, and asked for bread. She was late but her daughter didn’t want anything but bread. Mullah Jan picked one from the stack of breads they’d eat for breakfast and gave it to her.
***
Mullah Jan, 36, came to India three months ago. At 10, he had left Afghanistan.
The wars were getting personal, he said.
He lived in Iran, and then in Pakistan for ten years. In Afghanistan, things only got worse in the meanwhile.
“When a child leaves home, the homeland becomes an alien city. It is difficult to reconstruct your life from the rubble,” he said.
Mullah Jan completed high school, and could have studied further had it not been for his refugee status in the world, and the limitations of it. When he returned to Afghanistan after Taliban left where his family still lives, he opened a restaurant in Khoust.
Then, one day a bomb went off.
“My restaurant was blown to pieces. A bomb had exploded in the market,” he said. “So, I came here. The Afghanis wanted someone to bake bread for them so I said I could do it.”
He paired with Mohd. Sarwar, another Afghan refugee.
Sarwar said the initial days were difficult. He came with a thousand dollars and after it was spent, he lived in the burial grounds near Nizamuddin for a week. When he figured that Afghani families needed a bread-maker here in Bhogal, he knew he could do it.
“I took out a loan from friends and set up the bakery with Mullah Bhai,” he said. “It’s doing well.”
At least three times in day, people queue come to the bakery to buy bread – morning, afternoon, and evening meals are not complete without the bread.
“We usually buy our bread and don’t bake at home. That’s our culture and tradition. Mostly men bake the bread in shops and women do it at home,” Mullah Jan said.
A few years ago, an Afghan refugee operated a little bakery in the back lanes of Bhogal. But when he opted for a third country resettlement in Canada, the bakery downed its shutters. Since then, the local families started getting their bread from an Afghan baker in Lajpat Nagar. In Tilak Nagar, where many Afghani refugees live, there are a few Afghan bakeries.
But Bhogal is the new Afghani ghetto. In its crowded alleys, rent is cheap, and in the evenings, an Afghan boy sells momos and soup outside the bakery and men smoke and chat as they had done in Kabul.
Mullah Jan will tell you the Afghanis are resilient people, and even if you left them in a jungle, they’d survive. Because they have suffered enough to know better.
For the Tajiks, India is home, and Delhi seems familar. They have grown up on a staple diet of Bollywood movies, lining the walls of their homes with posters of
Shahrukh Khan and Aishwarya Rai. The smattering of Hindi they speak was picked up from the films, and so assimilation was never so difficult.
There is no definitive number of Afghanis that live in Delhi. In Bhogal, there are upwards of 500 Afghani families, Mullah Jan said.
They rent out small rooms, most of them built in the fashion of a train corridor, one room leading into another dark room, and then to another. Most of them are unemployed, and short on money. Without the refugee status, they can’t find any jobs. And the waiting time to get the status stretches into months, years. So, they wait it out, pawning jewellery, working illegally in sweatshops, trying to get by.
Ali Jan is a Hazara boy with hazel brown and green eyes and rosy cheeks, who is learning English at an obscure school. In his free time, he doubles as a cashier at the bakery trying to earn his fees of Rs. 750.
“I hope I can get to college,” he said.
For Ali Jan and Sayed, the bakery is a relief, a means of getting somewhere.
Sarwar too has a plan. He wants to get married and that’s another reason he came to Delhi.
“The bride price is too high in our country and people like me can’t afford a bride. In India, we can marry because you don’t have to pay,” he said. “With the bakery money I can raise a family easily.”
For the families that have left their homeland, the bakery is a reminder of the happy times when life was normal in Afghanistan.
Ten years ago, at least 28 such bakeries dotted the city’s landscape. Then, people left for elsewhere and these bakeries were closed.
Now, as the war intensifies, and cars begin to blow up again and Taliban is once more active, more and more refugees are coming to India, and to Delhi.
Next to the bakery, there’s Kabul restaurant, which also opened recently. It sells Afghani food, and on most evenings, it is packed to capacity.
In the evenings, a steady stream of customers leave the bakery with rotis the size of snowshoes wrapped in newspapers.
Abdul Rehman was late. The bakery had shut for an hour. But he needed the bread because that’s what his mother-in-law wanted. She was sick and had peculiar demands.
“She just wants to eat the bread. Can I have one, please?”, he asked.
Mullah Jan obliged.
An edited version of the article appeared in the Real Page 3 of the Indian Express on Sunday, January 31, 2010.
Chinki Sinha
January 28, 2010
New Delhi, January 27, 2010
Long ago in a little bakery in Kabul, Aqa Sayed learned to knead the dough, cut it into pieces, then weigh it on a scale, flatten it and gently put it inside a stone-lined fire pit.
An apprentice to his father, a baker, Sayed came to his father’s shop in the afternoons after school, to learn the art of making Afghani roti.
Many long years have gone by since.
Now, Sayed, 48, is reclaiming from memory the bread-making skills he learned as a child in a little rented shop where an Afghan bakery has recently opened in the crowded Bhogal market.
Outside the shop called Afghan Nanwaee (the bread maker), a queue of Afghani people has formed. Most of them came to India as refugees, fleeing the perpetual state of turmoil in their homeland where the smoke and splinters from a bomb blast, and soldiers wielding Kalashnikovs and marching in the streets and on to their lives, are part of everyday living.
But home is an idea and like time and place, is a keeper of sanity. Familiarity, a semblance of what was destroyed, left behind, is what the refugee seeks.
So, inside the bakery, the four Afghani men have recreated their homeland, lining its sooty walls with tapestries of a countryside village, a mosque in its background, and pewter plates with Koranic verses on them. A broken part of a bed that once belonged to someone in Kabul, and has pink roses carved on it, that a refugee packed with his meagre belongings so he could keep a piece of his former life with him always, hangs near the entrance.
The oven, the fire pit or Tandoor, was bought here in Bhogal, but the bread that comes out of it, is intrinsically Afghani with little designs made by poking tiny holes, the size of a dot.
At fifteen, Sayed, a Tajik, gave up on school because there was no hope of finding a job as one war bled into another one in his homeland, and he stopped counting how many bloody wars ravaged Afghanistan, its people, the schools, the hopes, and the bakeries, too.
“We never knew who was ruling us. It changed too often, it mattered too little,” he said, Ali Jan, a Hazara boy, interpreting for him.
His wife and two children died when a bomb exploded in one of those streets in Kabul. Bombs were forever exploding, and killing, and filling streets with blood of their children and women.
Sayed then came to India. In Kabul, his bakery shut down, too.
For a few weeks, he was barely making ends meet. The little money he brought with him lasted a few days only. Then he met Ainuddin, popularly known in the locality as Mullah Jan, who was running this bakery and needed men who could bake.
Sayed had been a bread maker. His hands knew the craft, the acrobatics of baking the perfect home bread.
He is a sad man, always brooding, they said.
Only when he plunges his hands into the flour and pulls and pushes, and leans into the fire pit to check on the bread, he smiles.
The bread that he pulls out is a connector of sorts, its smell transporting him to a life he loved, and his memory comes alive.
On a Wednesday morning, after they had baked the first batch of bread, the four men sat down for breakfast – rotis, fresh cream, and afghani chai. A woman stuck her face inside, and asked for bread. She was late but her daughter didn’t want anything but bread. Mullah Jan picked one from the stack of breads they’d eat for breakfast and gave it to her.
***
Mullah Jan, 36, came to India three months ago. At 10, he had left Afghanistan.
The wars were getting personal, he said.
He lived in Iran, and then in Pakistan for ten years. In Afghanistan, things only got worse in the meanwhile.
“When a child leaves home, the homeland becomes an alien city. It is difficult to reconstruct your life from the rubble,” he said.
Mullah Jan completed high school, and could have studied further had it not been for his refugee status in the world, and the limitations of it. When he returned to Afghanistan after Taliban left where his family still lives, he opened a restaurant in Khoust.
Then, one day a bomb went off.
“My restaurant was blown to pieces. A bomb had exploded in the market,” he said. “So, I came here. The Afghanis wanted someone to bake bread for them so I said I could do it.”
He paired with Mohd. Sarwar, another Afghan refugee.
Sarwar said the initial days were difficult. He came with a thousand dollars and after it was spent, he lived in the burial grounds near Nizamuddin for a week. When he figured that Afghani families needed a bread-maker here in Bhogal, he knew he could do it.
“I took out a loan from friends and set up the bakery with Mullah Bhai,” he said. “It’s doing well.”
At least three times in day, people queue come to the bakery to buy bread – morning, afternoon, and evening meals are not complete without the bread.
“We usually buy our bread and don’t bake at home. That’s our culture and tradition. Mostly men bake the bread in shops and women do it at home,” Mullah Jan said.
A few years ago, an Afghan refugee operated a little bakery in the back lanes of Bhogal. But when he opted for a third country resettlement in Canada, the bakery downed its shutters. Since then, the local families started getting their bread from an Afghan baker in Lajpat Nagar. In Tilak Nagar, where many Afghani refugees live, there are a few Afghan bakeries.
But Bhogal is the new Afghani ghetto. In its crowded alleys, rent is cheap, and in the evenings, an Afghan boy sells momos and soup outside the bakery and men smoke and chat as they had done in Kabul.
Mullah Jan will tell you the Afghanis are resilient people, and even if you left them in a jungle, they’d survive. Because they have suffered enough to know better.
For the Tajiks, India is home, and Delhi seems familar. They have grown up on a staple diet of Bollywood movies, lining the walls of their homes with posters of
Shahrukh Khan and Aishwarya Rai. The smattering of Hindi they speak was picked up from the films, and so assimilation was never so difficult.
There is no definitive number of Afghanis that live in Delhi. In Bhogal, there are upwards of 500 Afghani families, Mullah Jan said.
They rent out small rooms, most of them built in the fashion of a train corridor, one room leading into another dark room, and then to another. Most of them are unemployed, and short on money. Without the refugee status, they can’t find any jobs. And the waiting time to get the status stretches into months, years. So, they wait it out, pawning jewellery, working illegally in sweatshops, trying to get by.
Ali Jan is a Hazara boy with hazel brown and green eyes and rosy cheeks, who is learning English at an obscure school. In his free time, he doubles as a cashier at the bakery trying to earn his fees of Rs. 750.
“I hope I can get to college,” he said.
For Ali Jan and Sayed, the bakery is a relief, a means of getting somewhere.
Sarwar too has a plan. He wants to get married and that’s another reason he came to Delhi.
“The bride price is too high in our country and people like me can’t afford a bride. In India, we can marry because you don’t have to pay,” he said. “With the bakery money I can raise a family easily.”
For the families that have left their homeland, the bakery is a reminder of the happy times when life was normal in Afghanistan.
Ten years ago, at least 28 such bakeries dotted the city’s landscape. Then, people left for elsewhere and these bakeries were closed.
Now, as the war intensifies, and cars begin to blow up again and Taliban is once more active, more and more refugees are coming to India, and to Delhi.
Next to the bakery, there’s Kabul restaurant, which also opened recently. It sells Afghani food, and on most evenings, it is packed to capacity.
In the evenings, a steady stream of customers leave the bakery with rotis the size of snowshoes wrapped in newspapers.
Abdul Rehman was late. The bakery had shut for an hour. But he needed the bread because that’s what his mother-in-law wanted. She was sick and had peculiar demands.
“She just wants to eat the bread. Can I have one, please?”, he asked.
Mullah Jan obliged.
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