Of courage in the face of death

Of late, I have been reading quite a few books on loss and grief. It all began with a brief from the editor of Women's Web for an article on 5 Books To Read When Dealing With Grief. There were a few books that I had read, but not many seemed to fit in with the aspect of healing after a loss. I looked around the blogs I usually read - approaching Indian Home Maker about the books that helped her to cope with the loss of her daughter, Tejaswee. I also asked a blogger friend, Vibha Sharma for her inputs. These were extremely helpful in deciding the books featured in the article.

Here is one of the books I came across in my search. Also cross-posted at Zealot Readers.

pic courtesy kobobooks.com.au

Mick...Send Me A Butterfly
Written by Lorraine Grennan
Revised edition published by Love of Books Self Publishing.

Death is always disturbing.  Even if the person has passed away peacefully after a long and productive life. Even when it is of someone one knows only slightly. Even if it is the death of a loved fictional character. Even if it is someone one has never heard of before. What makes us react this way to a death? Why are we touched by the finger of sorrow even if we have not directly suffered this loss? Isn't it the realisation of our own mortality?

The everyday news items about deaths in the newspaper disturb me - I make it a point never to read these pages early in my day, especially if it is the death of a child or a violent death that is featured.

So when it is a dear one whose death we are dealing with, it can be devastating. And when it is a parent who has to deal with a child's death, it becomes doubly so. Somehow we expect to die before our children. It is, we feel, the natural order of things. After all, life goes on in a forward direction. Children are born of our bodies, and are our hope for the future. A way for nature to ensure that we do not disappear into nothingness. A way to keep a part of us alive on this beautiful earth. In a strange way, we become immortal through our children, and our children's children, and so on. So, it is terrible indeed, when things go the other way. When a parent has to see the suffering of a child, and the relentless descent into the big void of death. Whether it comes suddenly or after a long and debilitating illness.

Lorraine Grennan's book, 'Mick...Send Me A Butterfly' is a memoir of her son Michael Stewart Grennan's fight with Chronic Myloid Leukaemia. He was diagnosed with the disease on 29th August 1981, and passed away on 23rd March 1983 at just 20 years of age - a period of one year and seven months of facing the monster. 23rd March 2013, was the 30th anniversary of his death, and this is a tribute to his fighting spirit. One that has surely touched many lives that came in contact with his courage and forbearance.

At 18, Mick was your regular teenager, having a girlfriend and a job at a gas station, plenty of friends and a loving family. He had his whole life in front of him, when the disease crept up on him unbeknownst. It was diagnosed after a series of tests for symptoms that seemed like arthritis. It was a punch in the solar plexus, to put it mildly. Ms Grennan writes about how they all coped with the reality of impending death in their own ways. It was devastating, and something that they never could come to terms with. At such a time, Mick showed a maturity beyond his years and became the source of his family's strength, preparing them for his death and the time after it, in unusually thoughtful ways that Ms Grennan has put down with complete honesty of emotion. It does not fail to move, and I had to put the book away at times to bring my own emotions to order. She recounts the shock, the denial, the coping with the treatment (with its own consequences) and the bewilderment of a layperson thrust into the unending medical visits. She speaks of her faith and that of her family and friends, that gave them the strength to cope with the inevitable - both before and after Mick's passing away.

Ms Grennan also writes very honestly about the feelings of loss, guilt, and helplessness that overcame her and the other members of her family after Mick passed away. How every person grieves in a different way, a way very personal to that person, the way they perceive their loss, the way they deal with it. The way that coping with grief does not have a timeline, and that even after we learn to let go, the grief is still very real for the bereaved person. And that healing does come, in its own way to each person.

After his passing away, Ms Grennan was introduced to The Compassionate Friends, a group started by similarly bereaved parents, and it helped her deal with her feelings of grief. Intense feelings that she often wondered about- if they were normal. Ms Grennan has since worked extensively as a volunteer in its chapter in her hometown in New South Wales, Australia. Her work since has helped thousands of bereaved people come to terms with their loss.

This memoir, which is written in almost a diary-like fashion, draws the reader into their lives. A peek into the extraordinary courage of ordinary people. It has been a privilege.

A tale of two friendships

Sometimes, some friendships take a life of their own, don't they?

A had a 'best friend' at school in the early primary years, and the two girls were inseparable, though as different as chalk and cheese in temperament, interests and disposition. They were in the same class for 3 years, and we had innumerable playdates together. Sometimes I would just drop A off at her place on a weekend to spend the day. AM, the friend, has pet rabbits and lovebirds, and A, starved for a pet of her own, (sorry, baby, this is one thing that you will have to grow up and have for yourself.) would have a lovely time. Sometimes AM's mother would drop her off at our place. Sometimes I would take the two girls with me for some outing- a visit to our library being among the most enjoyed- followed by lunch at whichever place the girls wanted.

AM has a twin who is a special child. A lovely boy, he became someone very special for A. Every time we met, A would spend some time holding his hand, talking to him, and he, too, would always have a smile for her.

AM's mother S and I have become close friends. We have a lot in common - a similar educational background, and we are also both SAHMs inspite of it, and a lot of mutual affection.  S is a woman I really admire. She has had a lot on her plate, but her enthusiasm for life is to be seen to be believed. Of course there is sorrow in her life, but as she puts it, she has been blessed to be chosen as the mother of this soul.

Last year, the two girls were in different classes. Somehow the trajecteries of their friendships and interests have skewed away from each other. AM has become a part of the in-crowd, and A has gone further along the route to be labelled a 'nerdy' child.

There have been many instances where I have had to comfort a bewildered and hurt A, who could not understand what had happened to her 'best friend' AM. Where had she gone? Obviously the girls were both growing up, losing bit-by-bit that innocence of childhood. Making different choices. It saddened me to see it happening.

We did, however, continue to make trips out together with the girls, and at these times, we could see the original friendship still there beneath all the problems that they were having.

A, in the meantime, had another friend, someone so well suited to her- their temperaments and interests coincided. They are both book-mad. Their mothers, too, both gelled. Again, they had a lot in common, books featuring at the top of the list. Both pairs of friends got on like a house on fire. I could see that this was going to be a friendship for life. But...

Yes, there is a but. This friend, too, moved away. Not mentally, like AM, but physically, to another school. A was heart-broken. Everyday, she would speak about this friend. Every time she read something she loved, she would want to talk to her. We do manage occasional meetings, but somehow it is never enough.

The two different pairs of mothers, though, still remain friends. Their bond, too, I hope, is for a lifetime.

Yesterday, we had planned a trip to a kitchen gardening workshop, Oota from your Thota. A wanted to ask AM if she could come, so we called. That is when we came to know that her twin had been seriously ill for a few days, and was still in hospital, though fortunately recovering.

That was it. We put our plans for the day aside, as A wanted to go and meet her friend and her twin, as did I. So we went.

I hope SOMEONE UP THERE is aware of my little one's golden heart, and will not let it be hurt so often.

Book Review - THE OTHER SIDE OF SILENCE: Voices from the Partition of India

Pic courtesy flipkart.com

THE OTHER SIDE OF SILENCE
Voices from the Partition of India
Written by Urvashi Butalia
Published by Penguin Books
1998.

Urvashi Butalia, the writer, has impressive credentials. Along with Ritu Menon, she set up Kali for Women, the first feminist press in India, in 1984, and later, Zubaan Books. Born to in Ambala, India, to parents who were refugees from West Punjab, now in Pakistan, she grew up hearing stories of  the Partition, which tore apart the Indian subcontinent at the time of its freedom from British rule.

She began her research as a process of making sense of her family's personal tragedy. One thing led to another, and over time she realised that what 'history' tells us of the Partition are the bare political facts: tales of warring political parties and the British involvement in the whole gory process, the loss of property and lives, the statistics of the largest mass migration in recent history and violence in the riots between the Hindus, the Muslims and the Sikhs caught in the unfortunate event.

There was not much data on the renting apart of the closely enmeshed fabric of society and the actual sufferings of the flesh-and-blood people caught in the crossfire. The feminist in her also became aware of the huge conspiracy of silence (this term has also been used in reference to the victims of that other regrettable horror of the same time, the Holocaust) that enfolded the suffering of those considered to be of 'not much account' and therefore on the margins of citizenry- the women, the children and the harijans.

"But the 'history' of Partition seemed to lie only in the political developments that led up to it. These other aspects - what had happened to the millions of people who had to live through this time, what we may call the 'human dimensions' of this history -- somehow seemed to have a 'lesser' status in it. Perhaps this was because they had to do with difficult things: loss and sharing, friendship and enmity, grief and joy, with a painful regret and nostalgia for loss of home, country and friends, and with an equally strong determination to create them afresh. These were difficult things to capture 'factually.' Yet, could it be that they had no place in the history of Partition? Why, then, did they live on so vividly in individual and collective memory?"

Ms Butalia takes us through these events as pieced together from first-person accounts of survivors. The stories seem fantastic, the violence, the bloodiness ant the loss inexplicable, as does the almost mythological account of a society where the different religions had lived together in harmony, love and trust. Surely something had gone seriously wrong somewhere for the anger to have erupted as it had, killing and maiming millions, and creating a legacy of communal disharmony, and an almost pathological enmity between the two countries which were once part of one whole. A whole that had effectively driven their colonial rulers away.

The feminist in the writer notes some very interesting aspects of the problem. Even the interviews were necessarily taken in a family setting, where men did most of the talking, and women were often silenced. While men spoke of the politics, the killings, the violence, the women's experience of Partition was largely defined by the death of children, abductions, sexual violence, honour killings, forcible co-habitation/marriages with their abductors, their making peace with it, especially after children were born of these relationships.

During their interviews, Ms Butalia tried to listen to the unsaid, the silences, the sudden breaking-off of the narrative, the nuances. "In my work, the more I looked at women's voices and found them inserting themselves into the text, the more I realised that the silences did not exist only around women, but also around others, those whose silences have been even less important to society. The search for a history of women was what then led me to a search for a history of others. The voices of women, of children, of untouchables, to me provide not only a different perspective on the history of Partition, but they also establish this history as a process, a continuing history, which lives on in our lives today in a variety of ways." 

Then there was the ultimate insult to injury- the Abducted Persons (Recovery and Restoration) Act, 1949. A lot of this has been pieced together from accounts of social workers who were actively involved in the operation. Ostentiably to recover abducted women and children and return them to their families, the Act would not take into account the women's choice in the matter, something that all citizens were given upto the late fifties. After being abducted, these women often got assimilated into those families, bore children out of those relationships, but were torn from these children when they were 'recovered' to return to their families of origin. The original families would often refuse to accept these 'children of sin' which were left with their abductor-fathers. Quite often these children ended up on the streets with the other children who had been displaced or orphaned in the Partition. Both the women and children were refused the 'choice' that citizens of both countries had at the time.

First-hand accounts by some of these children, adults at the time of interviewing, underscore the same conspiracy of silence. Many of them glossed over their accounts, unable as adults to relate their memories of the horrors. Some of them, like a Sikh survivor who was just 9 at the time of Partition, had memories overshadowed by one particular incident- the death of their own familiy's hands of almost a hundred girls and women to 'save' their honour - an incident immortalised in the book and later movie Tamas.

In fact, most of these personal stories have been found to a large extent in a multitude of short stories and novellas written by many noted authors who have lived through the Partition- Amrita Pritam (Pinjar), Saadat Hasan Manto (Toba Tek Singh, Kingdom's End and other stories), Gulzar (Raavi Par and other stories), Khushwant Singh (Train to Pakistan), Bapsi Sidhwa (Ice-Candy Man), Bhisham Sahni (Tamas), and more. Many of these stories have been made into film, reaching a larger audience. Many bollywood movies, too, speak of the Partition or 'Batwara' as it is called in Hindi.

History, as told in history books, however, sticks mostly to the bare facts and statistics of the Partition. 'The other side of silence' tries to address this deficit in a more factual way, that can be corroborated, than the fictionalised accounts. Showing us that the fiction is not a very long way off reality.

More than twelve million people left their roots and migrated, about ten million of these crossing the western border. Around two million died in the violence. An estimated  75,000-1,00,000 women are thought to have been abducted and raped by men of religions different from their own (and indeed sometimes by men of their own religion). An estimated 50,000 children were born to the abducted women, an an unaccounted number of children were abandoned or simply lost. "People travelled in buses, in cars, by train, but mostly on foot in great columns called kafilas, which could stretch for dozens of miles. The longest of them, said to comprise nearly 400,000 people, refugees travelling east to India from western Punjab, took as many as eight days to pass any given spot on its route."

Ms Butalia has very honestly admitted that her work does not represent the whole of the history of Partition, but is a very personal history, her reading of the interviews she took. She also candidly admits that it is probably a very one-sided view of the whole thing, as by 1984, when she began her research, it was no longer possible to obtain access to those on the other side of the border, and cautions communal groups from using her research to reach their ends.

Here are some more excerpts from the book.

Am entering this book in the 2011 South Asian Reading Challenge at S.Krishna's books.

Twinkle, twinkle, O bright star!

Today is a year since a bright star coming up on the blogging horizon was lost after a brief and entirely preventable illness. Tejaswee Rao, daughter of the incredibly sensitive, yet courageous and formidable lady we know as Indianhomemaker passed away with complications following dengue.

Like many others, I, too, had been following IHM's blog for some time before that. I remember reading about Tejaswee's illness, and also the fact that I could not believe what I was reading. I did not know much about her then, but over the next few days, I hopped over to her blog and read quite a bit of it. Here was this promising young woman, already showing signs of becoming a force to reckon with, and she was dying?

I am sure, IHM, prayers went up for her recovery from all over the globe. But sometimes God prefers to remain unmoved. We human beings are not able to fathom his mysterious ways. She did not make it.

But she, and IHM, will continue to be an inspiration. She will for ever be a guiding star. In her characteristic way, IHM has ensured this immortality by instituting the BLOGSARS -The Tejaswee Rao Blogging Awards, Tejaswee's legacy to all women.

Imagine, if this is the effect she has had on someone who did not know her very closely, how much she must have touched the lives of those that knew her!

Peace be with you, bright star.