|
|
|
November 3, 2002
Review: Shattered dreams
GRANDMOTHER Dhanna who, all for the sake of bearing a child, braves the overgrown wilderness around a long forgotten well, to bathe in its icy waters at midnight because a dream vision has ordained so. Mother Katyayani whose greatest bane in life is a daughter of marriageable age at parallels with an attic overflowing with a trousseau laboriously put together after years of self sacrifice. Sudha Koul the daughter who grows up by the old world values of “live and let live” only to see her dream world be shattered into smithereens as militant uprisings become the order of the day.
Committed to carrying on the legacy of land and life as bequeathed to her, it is she who as narrator paints the journey from idyllic peace and beauty to times of religio-communal strife. Weaving their lives against a background of the beautiful Kashmiri landscape, any one or all three women get to become embalmed in the essence of The tiger ladies. Hence the rather fierce name of Koul’s book.
For as followers of the Hindu religious tradition, all three women have lived under the protective shadows of the Mother Goddess. Durga, Ragnya, Sharika or Bhawani and it is always ‘She who fears nothing’ sitting astride a tiger who has protected their world.
The tiger ladies at first glance appears to be more of a personal memoir moving through the lives and times of three generations of women from a Hindu Pundit family of Kashmir. In which case it can be read as a trilogy of sorts. The grandmother, the mother and finally the daughter who in this case is the author herself, with each becoming the signature of an enlarged chapter.
The men have their presence too, for they head the family units, but it is the women around Koul who take up the heavy mantle of preserving cultural tradition. As their lives unfold under Koul’s penmanship, they entrance with mythical narrations. They nurture traditions of religion even as the world moves on. They oversee the pickles being made even as Mother Kashmir is torn apart at the breast.
They preserve and pass down their Pashmina shawls, holding them as dear as hard currency. The women of Koul’s landscape are in essence the Kashmir of yesteryears...picture perfect, living in peaceful harmony with the waters and vales of their land. So that even as Lahore and its Anarkali bazaar become Pakistani property grandmother Dhanna innocently believes it will always be the place to shop for shoes.
Indeed, Koul reads like a fairy tale. More so, when read against today’s geopolitical backdrop of marauding troops, raped women, bomb shattered children with rosy cheeks and beheaded young men. Born in the year that India was partitioned, author Sudha Koul grew up in a Kashmir, which must be ‘the most beautiful place on earth’, even as the Indian subcontinent is being torn asunder.
Blissfully unaware of the bloodbaths and the torn limbs strewn all over, the traditions and their loyal practitioners dance gracefully through the cultural collage of multi communal living that has evolved into an ideology. “In any event, the valley cradles us in her beauty and love songs, and does not leave us with much time or desire to hate anything.”
Schooling under the tutelage of the Irish nuns reached daily by a ride in ‘Habibas’ shikara, the first cognitive encounter with the menacing possibilities of hatred comes at age ten. Out for lunch at a Muslim friend’s house Koul sees the burning effigy of Nehru in the front lawn! Short years later the portending change becomes manifest when a group of mountain children crassly shout “Long Live Pakistan” to the backs of the college group from Srinagar. For Koul writes, “ Extra territorial loyalty exists. We all know that. We don’t talk much about it but like a subterranean rumble it grows all the while.”
Written in a homely first person present tense, the first two chapters of The tiger ladies are plain sailing in a land whose men were content to call themselves the ‘Lotus Eater’ and where time had stood still over centuries. But the course changes almost vehemently as Koul goes into teaching college at Delhi and later becomes the first Indian woman to be selected in the prestigious Indian civil service.
From here the book deals a hard blow as tumultuous changes in the political and the personal turn it into a lachrymose detail of the unfairness meted out to Kashmir. For the first time, her being Indian and Hindu shows through, as Koul talks of ‘outside infiltrators’ perpetuating endless misery in the vale. Coming from the pen of the very same author who earlier in the narration has admitted the presence of a Muslim majority in the area and supported Kashmir’s right of self-determination to the extent of deriding its non-Muslim ruler, the about turn smacks of a newborn nationalism, almost as a personal vendetta; albeit politely tempered down because of her bureaucratic training.
The tiger ladies ends on melancholia in a New Jersey suburb where Koul currently lives with her husband and two daughters. She paints and writes to her heart’s content since her daughters moved away to live the lives of bonafide American citizens. Yet Koul rather unsure of what she can or cannot do to pass on the essence of Kashmir to her children, still values mint flavoured Kashmiri tea and rice grains that swell seductively in the cooking pot. She still watches the bubbles rise in the pickle jars because ‘being Indian is a habit she cannot shake off’.
From the little girl in Kashmir who fell to grief over inner legs burnt courtesy a “Kangri” to the woman with greying hair listening to Indian songs in a world so different from native Kashmir, Sudha Koul’s book can also be read as history to remind us all what was Kashmir and what it today is.
The tiger ladies
By Sudha Koul Hodder
Available in Pakistan at Liberty Books (Pvt) Ltd, 3 Rafiq Plaza, M.R. Kayani Road,
Saddar, Karachi. Tel: 021-5683026
Email: libooks@cyber.net.pk
ISBN 0-7553-1116-7. 218pp. RS695
|
|
|
|
