After Anand emailed to me to say that Jugni was not translated by him, and that he had just taken the English version from the linear notes of Shergill's album, my thoughts turned to the 1984 Sikh massacre (riot is a term that means more than simple large scale murder of one community by a somewhat, perhaps, different community), and what personal memories I may have of that nascent period of the self.

The first thing I think I remember from that time is Appu, that jolly baby elephant mascot of the 1982 Asian Games (Also picture of real Appu who apparently died!!!). This was right around when Doordarshan (pronounced Duur) or DD for short, brought the devil of TV to the Indian masses. Admittedly TV was still a benign devil then, with a grand choice of one scratchy TV channel, in black & white, broadcast from that remote capital of India, Delhi, from around 7 to 11 in the evenings, around which the semi-rural provincial families like mine, in this lead by my TV addicted sister, attended to, with some degree of awe and wonder. (Also something from a dialogue in a movie "Before Sunset" last night, in which Celine, the female lead, reminisces about a trip to Communist Warsaw, and the effects that media freeze - no billboards, no ads, no news media other than Party propaganda - had on her imagination and its encounters with itself)

As a further aside, I think someone - Anand, the historian, willya dude? - should take up the challenging task of leading an archeological dig into, and then archive, these DD memories of the Indian Baby Boomer Generation to which I, and many Indians of my generation, belong to. My DD memories, in no particular order, would consist of various TV ads: Lux Beauty Soap, Cinkara Syrup, Bru Filter Coffee, Three Roses Tea, Rin Detergent Soap etc, and TV soaps or serials: those goofy special effect arrows in the kitschy battles of Ramayana, which definitely had better special effects vis-a-vis Mahabharata - the great Indian (I purposefully avoided writing Hindu) Epics made into Sunday morning TV soaps; those wonderful R.K. Laxman's cartoons and the accompanying title music of Malgudi Days.

Yet going back to 1984, what do I remember of that time? I would like to think that I do remember the Golden Temple with the Granth Sahib wafting in the air, in Amritsar, turned into a battle zone with tanks and field artillery, its domes cracked up like egg shells. I would like to think that I do remember the news of Indira Gandhi, the then Indian Prime Minister, being shot at by her Sikh bodyguards coming over the All India Radio that morning, and her subsequent death later in the afternoon reported on a live telecast.

I would also like to think that I remember her grand funeral - corpse carried on the gun carriage, and her body lying on a stack of sandalwood - this sandalwood business really boggled my mind the most, in that how can those damned fools use so much fragrant sandalwood to burn a body. Rats! And don't I also remember that glass cage around the stain of blood where Gandhi's body had hit the ground.

But of that subsequent large scale Sikh massacre I have no, even assumed or approximate, memory. What happened? How can there be this blank spot in my head? Is this because this was before I started reading newspapers, and these massacres were whitewashed away by the government controlled TV? Is this because living in a city that was far removed from Delhi, my life had never personally crossed with anyone else's changed or shattered by that year?

Or is this because those other memories were strengthened by watching reruns in the media of those former events; when the Indian Army was sent back into the Golden Temple complex a few years later (was this Operation Blue Star? Or Red Star? Or Death Star?), or when Indira's son Rajiv was done away by a bomb strapped to a human body?

What about massacres someone asks inside of me? It's hard to keep track of them another replies. They all seem to blend into one single blob of blood in the killing fields of recent history, of collective memory as claimed and understood by this self. Those various riots spread across years, in the Old City of Hyderabad, centered around the Charminar - which I saw more often on cigarette packages than for real, for wasn't that a place where a conflagration could start any minute? - filtering through to the edge where we lived, like bad dreams that happen only elsewhere, to someone else, as a happy and welcomed closure of schools.

And during a particular tense period of motorcycle bound knifings, staying close to home after dark, taking large detours and using alternative routes to go around Moula Ali, that nest of the viperous other - the Attar Sahib, the perfumed Muslim, perfumed because popular provincial lore had it that "they" didn't bathe regularly like "us", i.e. the Hindus, and thus used perfume to mask the body odor. Also vehement denials and chafing at the teasing and ribbing by cousins from the Costal Andhra Belt, which was relatively "Muslim free", on our use of Hyderabadi Telugu, "infected" as they claimed with Urdu, that language of the Attar Sahib, the other, a graceful language of Ghalib and Faiz that I now regret for not learning or knowing.

How then to reconcile such disunities (borrowing from Agha Shahid Ali's terminology for the Ghazal) within, to understand the shadows of historical time I have lived under, the histories that I have lived through, and to which I was mostly blind to? Reading William Darylymple The White Mughals to discover Moula Ali as something more than a black granite hillock a mile or so away, good for climbing in school vacations, but also as a site for a large scale multi religious "urs" (or festival), a rock which both the Hindu and the Muslim women climb to petition Inman Ali's footprint for children? Or an Kushwant Singh's article on the Gadhar movement, centered in the 1920s Californian Sikh community, and its role in the Indian anti-imperialist project?

Sat Sri Akal!

It has been raining in these southern latitudes of this sprawling country for two days now, where I have found myself stranded for half a decade - the fifth year was completed yesterday, August 8. This remembrance of dates came to me quite suddenly, as I was reading Anand's translation of Jugni from Punjabi:

Jugni blazed into Delhi, Where she forgot, in the crowd, Where she came from and where she was going All was forgotten...

When she came to her senses Her time was up

The cancellation of dates, and the erosive habits of this river of time. I wander through the blog world, to pick up words on my tongue, and to attempt remembrance of a country that has become this memory of a certain smell of rain. And I realize I can't evoke this with the same immediacy or sharpness as once I could. So is all lost, and must be found again?

Also, as I have been told, with a certain undercurrent of accusation amidst gentle ribbing by a certain little friend (who is now herself, negotiating that 'foreign' city known as London) about my changed, and changing English accent (a root that now has become a rout when I deliver talks on truck deliveries, and I always think of how we mocked and mimicked a professor with an American PhD, who did this those many years ago in India), perhaps I have after all mutated into a firangi, the foreigner, swimming - butterfly stroke and half drowning, through all these years.

The face in the mirror answers to my interrogation only with the hair lost on the upper lip, and the thinning forest of the scalp. Also more lines around the jaw, and on the forehead. And eyes like fossilized amber, reflecting certain foolish imported day dreams and illusions that appropriately died, as well as now transmitting light through a certain self-consciousness of the self, a certain lens, perhaps writerly, through which to look at the world, which is both within and without, and that keeps brimming with amusement and sadness.

Or since A.H asked me, through her poem this morning:

Hobby

Third, that he is a crow finding a bun corner left in the rain, or a dead squirrel with eye unplucked. He sorts our detritus with the patience we didn't have, redeeming what can be. As he moves on to the next receptacle, adjusting his pipe and shaking his giant plastic maraca to settle the cans I think I hear him hum.

am I just this, a crow, a bum who feels much older than the one who preceded him by half a decade, a scavenger of memory?

[1] Among the many ways you torture Me, at night, lying in bed: First that grim sentence of guillotine, Of your eye not meeting my eye, Pretending a wily abstraction of thought, And as I turn around to face the page Of my book, instead of letting an axe Fall on my neck, a single mischievous Droplet of a caress across the nape.

[2] In the morning dark waking Next to you, my first glance Is of you, a Zen cat dressed In a clock of mist, circling your Arms, leveling your long bow, And then that swift swoosh of A green glance torpedoing me To the reef of your body.

[3] As you swamp me with throaty laughter, A rollicking sea crashing over the gunwales, I silt walk my thumb and index finger, A lone desert ship up and down the dunes, Towards your humid belly, that indigo Cave of Swimmers at Gilf Kebir.

[4] Caught in a sudden rainstorm, in the middle Of a run, I huddle under a mimosa, sweat pouring Out my pores, and run the pink flamed brushes Of its fallen flowers across my face, and call your Name to each crash of thunder, a skin bag of water Poured into the coals of this thirst for you.