Essay by Navtej Bharati

Painting by [Harjinder Singh] Sidharth. 2005

This is about a poem I have left unfinished. Something happened. Though things do happen when I write---an ant zigzags through the letters, light goes out in the room, thunder bangs against my window---they hardly disrupt me. But what happened last week, late morning, was different. Surinder, my wife, came to the door—she rarely does during my writing---and gestured me to come out. There was something mysterious in her gesture. I followed her to the kitchen window that opens to our backyard. And there he was, standing twenty feet away under the mountain ash tree: an adult deer, ears up, big eyes fixed on us and left hind leg slightly bent with the hoof half-planted on the ground as if hurting. In his brilliant light brown coat, he looked like a reincarnation of Ramayana’s golden deer.

Surinder stood agape; I was mystified. The moment I looked into his eyes I could see nothing else; they bewitched.  ‘He and I’ were gone, the ‘who sees who’ became indistinguishable. We were ‘dead’ in the seeing, both of us.

The memory of Ishar flashed in mind, as he unbricked an old ruined well in my village some sixty odd years ago. A cobra had suddenly appeared before him, flexed his head two feet high and stared deep into Ishar's eyes. Ishar froze, eyes wide, unblinking. His hand, holding a trowel, hung midair. How long he remained in this trance, no one knows. Finally, Ishar's trowel fell on the snake’s head. The snake died, in the seeing. Ishar fell ill, convinced the snake was one of his ancestors or else it would have struck him. For two days he could see nothing but the ‘ancestor’ gazing at him. Ishar too died, in the seeing.

The deer was still gazing at us. Camera! Surinder whispered to me. As I rushed back with the camera he was already on the run jumping over the fence. I couldn't capture him. The golden deer had eluded me again. I guess he has never trusted me since the time of Ramayana. I felt sad, Surinder more. He would have stayed longer if we hadn't
frightened him.

The deer left me musing why he came to our house and gazed at us. I couldn't shrug it off as a coincidence; curiosity kept nibbling at me.  

This house sits between two others on a six acre parcel. Once it was a farm house. It had some wilderness around when we moved in twenty-four years ago. At the back was a large stretch of land dotted with trees, shrubs, puddles and mounds. Rabbits, groundhogs, cats freely roamed, trees hummed and birds sang. The city had not yet spread its jaws towards it. A kilometer south, ran a river called Antler river. The river still runs but is now fenced on both sides.

Centuries ago this area was home to Iroquois Indians who danced to celebrate corn, strawberries, and seasons; talked their pains to trees and wore masks to frighten evil spirits. Some miles further, the Ojibwa Indians celebrated snow shoes in a circle dance; their long black hair fluttered, drums thundered, wooden flutes sounded and their wild calls enchanted the sky. Here grandmothers nursed their children with age old wisdom told through ancient tales while deer drank from the Antler river.

And I thought perhaps the deer had come to visit what once was his home land; to drink from the river that nourished the thirst of his ancestors. Now he had to jump over fences and risk injury to enter.  He didn’t know that the trespassing of a private property is illegal, that it can be fatal. My neighbour gestured the pulling of a trigger when I told him of the deer.

We don’t know how the deer remembered that this was the place to which he was to come. We don't know how memory flows through things or whether it flows through humans only. People have always thought of physical objects as having something mythical in them. And have felt that some things are more mythical or sacred than others: Bodhi tree, Ganga, Banaras . When people bathe in Ganga they dip more into their cultural memory than into the water. Memory is a process of our re-membering in our cultural family.

I was shocked to realize that I had never felt this place living with memory as deer seemed to have. I have lived here for more than a quarter of a century, have relished apples, cherries and pears from its trees, grown vegetables on its soil, sat under the shade of its mountain ash and written poems. I have watched snow fall and the fall colours every season. I have raised my two children here, watched Sumeet chase butterflies and Subodh dunk the ball.

Even a mysterious encounter ten years ago failed to shake my sensitivity. It was a summer evening, shadows were growing darker and longer when an old man, pony-tailed, wrinkled, suddenly appeared at my door. He seemed tired, perhaps from walking. I went to him, gave him a chair, offered a glass of water and remained silent. I knew the natives use silence in conversation the way they use words; they leave long gaps between sentences so the words permeate into
the listener.

"Do you know where my children are"? he finally asked me.

Astonished, I replied: "No. I am sorry I don't. Were they left here around my house by chance?”

He looked at me in disbelief; his wrinkles got a touch darker. Scratching his forehead, he said: 'Someone from this city has stolen my children; you live here; and you say you don’t know who has them?"

I now realised why he had a look of disbelief in his eyes. He must have thought that all people here must know each other as villagers do. I told him people here don't know each other, even when they live in the same building. He stared at me, with eyebrows raised, as if checking to see if I was really of his kind. "How can you live together if you don't know each other?' he asked. In fact he meant: you can't live at all, let alone together if you don’t know each other. Then he stood up, looking more tired, and stepped out of the room without looking at me, without saying bye. I couldn’t see his pony-tail; the evening had grown too dark. He disappeared. I sunk into my chair, saddened, helpless.

The man with the pony-tail, who came to me ten years ago, was from the same people who once danced here to celebrate snow shoes; and the golden deer was from the herd that once drank from the Antler. Both came to the place that was once their home, the home I
now occupy.

Suddenly I stumbled into understanding why I have been dead to this place; why it has withheld its soul, its memories from me; Occupation. No place shares its memories with the occupier. And the occupier, on the other hand, tries to replace them with its own. Thus the Antler becomes the Thames river while the Mohawk phrase tkaronto, meaning "where there are trees standing in the water" becomes Toronto , which now means the capital of Ontario and “a proper place for a factory". 

The genocide of memory has no calculus. Ideological pragmatism aside, China 's cultural revolution is estimated to have swallowed 30 million lives. And India ’s 2000-year long shudra holocaust has no parallel in human history. The way Varna Asharm obliterated the sense of human dignity from the memory of millions, astounds imagination.

Incidentally the poem I was writing last week was on occupation; Israel 's occupation of Palestinian territories in particular. I had worked hard on it, but failed every time to capture the poetry of the situation. Instead I got entrapped in its politics, economics, sociology and more. The fault lies with me, I started wrong. The idea of occupation hadn't seeped into me; It was a borrowed idea and had come wrapped in non poetic idioms.

The poem had become a quicksand from which the deer had rescued me. And in fact, it had done more; it uncovered what I call a “thousand-headed shesh naag” that is occupation: occupation of air, water and sky; of mind, body and consciousness. I realized that there is nothing that is occupiable and is not being occupied. This is a Mahabharata of our time, more annihilating than the mythic one.

Even my unfinished poem was not spared; it was occupied by the Israel/Palestine conflict. It had to jump out of its own fence to grasp its own bondage. The quagmired can't really see the quagmire.

I left the poem unfinished. Perhaps not. It is being written in other forms and by others, including the man with ponytail, and the golden deer that jumped over the fence. I wish I had a poetics to understand how an unfinished poem is never unfinished really.

The author Navtej Bharti has got the Rs 2.5 lakh Anād Kāv poetry award for 2010. He is to share it with his poet brother Ajmer Rode and co-author of Leela, collection of poems and creative non-fiction in Punjabi. They both live in London Ontario  and Vancouver .

[Courtesy: South Asian Ensemble. Vol. 2 Number 3. Summer 2010]