Of rising above a parent's life-choices

How many parents think about how their life choices affect their children? I am not speaking of parenting choices here. I am speaking of choices that we make for our self, or those that are made for us by significant others in our life. How much will my not working, despite a professional degree affect my daughter's life? Would that bare fact mold her thinking, or will the reasons behind that make a difference? Will she be able to see things from my POV?

Speaking for myself as a daughter, I began to really understand my mother only after I became a parent, and a lot more as I am growing older. I can now look beyond the strict parent whose strictures I so resented to the woman behind the facade. She is an intelligent, strong, principled woman, unfortunately married into a family that could never understand her - yes, my father's side was, and still is strongly patriarchal, and has managed to stifle my mother. I have very recently begun to appreciate the fact that her choices were often not real choices, and a lot of what I remember was a function of the times she lived in. Of late, I have been having conversations with my father about how he could have done differently by her. He, too, I realise now, was a victim of the system, and actually thinks that things were fine. He listens to me, fortunately, me being the favourite daughter.

Children like to make up stories. Watch a bunch of kids play-acting and one is amazed at the imagination and creativity they come up with together. What if there is the possibility that the story might be real? What if the story turns your view of the world upside down?

Here's a book that made me introspect: what do my actions convey to my daughter? Do my unfortunate choices taint her life? Do the good ones uplift her? How much is it possible for a child to lift themselves above the effects of their parents' choices?

pic courtesy flipkart

Hitler's Daughter
Written by Jackie French
Published by HarperCollins Children's Books
Ages 8-12

Mark, Anna, Tracey and Ben play a story game as they wait for their school bus every day. They have stories of fairies, of ball games and of horses. Until one day Anna decides to tell a story. It is an amazing story set on the fringes of a great war. It is the story of a child growing up tucked away from all the action, a privileged child who is kept safe despite not being the blue-eyed, blond, tall Aryan ideal, a child hungry for family and love, holding on to memories of the few-and-far between visits of her father. A father who obviously is somebody important. Important enough that people around her who have always taken care of her are in mortal fear of displeasing him. We are told early enough that the child, Heidi, is Hitler's daughter.

Anna's story focuses on the genocide from the outside in, raising many questions in Mark's mind. What if one's parent or child has done something really evil- how does one deal with such a parent/ child? Does one love them regardless? Do the sins of our parents taint us irrevocably, or is there redemption? Do the actions of someone dear reflect on us as individuals? How does society look upon those who stand in evil's shadow? Is a bad thing really a bad thing, or are we just victims of our convictions? Do we have a right to raise our hand against someone else's questionable behaviour if we, too, might be in the wrong in our own time?

These are very profound existential questions, and Jackie French, (whom ST has interviewed here), in her inimitable chatty style, raises them through Mark's thoughts, without thrusting them at us. There are also references to Australia's own genocide-  the colonial actions against their Aborigine population.

It has been so realistically told that we are left wondering if Hitler indeed, did have a daughter that no-one knows about. Also, it is an unusual look at the Holocaust; a great book to introduce them to it, along with Number the Stars and When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit. There are no grisly portrayals of the deaths, as the point of view is of a privileged, though unfortunate girl.

This page-turner of a book was devoured by A in an afternoon. She has been, since, recommending it to many of her friends.

Cross-posted at Saffrontree.

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.

Review: Oranges in no man's land

Pic courtesy books.google.com

Oranges in no man's land
Written by Elizabeth Laird
Illustrated by Gary Blythe
Published by  Macmillan Children's Books
Ages 8-12 years.

10 yr old Ayesha lives with her mother, grandmother and two brothers in Civil war torn Beirut. Her mother gets killed by a bomb that also destroys their home, and they become refugees living in a shelter. Here Ayesha makes a friend, the deaf-mute girl her age, Samar. Life goes on, her grandmother their only parent.

Until one day, her grandmother becomes seriously ill. She has been ill for a long time now, and had medicines that she took for it, given to her by Dr Leila, for whom she had worked for many years. But now her medicines are over, and Dr Leila lives beyond the Green line, on the other side of the divide, beyond the 'no man's land' that lies between their portion of the city and hers.

So what is a mere 10 yr old to do? Does she manage to go to the good doctor and get medicines for her grandmother? How does she get past the armed solders gaurding the entrances to both sides and come back unscathed?

This is a touching story written by Elizabeth Baird, who lived in Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War which stretched from 1975-1990. It is based on some real life events and experiences, as she writes in her preface to the book.

The story brings home to us the fact that there are both good and bad people on both sides of any divide, and the common man usually wishes for peace, not war, so that normal life can go on. And that a war usually serves the few in power, with vested interests.

The sketch of Ayesha, running swiftly for all it's worth, looking furtively at something in the distance that she probably needs to be wary of, is a repeated motif throughout the book, at the title of each chapter. Done by Gary Blythe, (illustrator of other well known books like The Whale's Song, Rumer Godden's Miss Happiness and Miss Flower and Michael Morpurgo's I believe in Unicorns) they lend a sense of urgency to the books.

Crossposted at Saffrontree.

I am entering this book at the Reading The World Challenge 2011 over at Papertigers, for A. Under Fiction, Lebanon.

Morpurgo and More (part 1)

SINGING FOR MRS PETTIGREW
Written by Michael Morpurgo.
Illustrated by Peter Bailey.
Published byWalker Books.
ISBN 978-1-4063-0574-6.
Ages are not specified, but at a guess the stories could be read and appreciated by 10+

Image: Courtesy Amazon.

The book is a collection of eleven of his stories, in different moulds. We also have ten essays from Morpurgo about his storytelling. These speak about his experiences, and the germ of an idea that they provide for his stories. No less enjoyable than any of his stories.

This post will deal with the 11 stories, most of them on the backdrop of war, esp. WW2. There will have to be a second post on his 10 essays, which speak a lot to any reader and writer.

Meeting Cezanne

A boy, Yannick, staying for a while with his relatives who own a village inn in Provence has been told that the famous painter Cezanne had painted many of his landscapes at a place near their house. He helps at the inn, and his job is to clear the table and get rid of the paper tablecloth by putting it into the fireplace after a guest has left. One day, he does just that and and is at the receiving end of his pretty young cousin's aire. Reason: the guest was a famous painter who doodles a painting on the tablecloth if he is happy with his meal. And now the masterpiece has been destroyed. So how does Yannick make amends? And is the painter Cezanne or someone else?

The Giant's Necklace

Cherry, an 11yr old girl, is at the seaside with her family. She makes a necklace of 'glistening pink cowrie shells,' and on their last day there, it is a few inches short of what she had decided on. Her family leave her at the beach with the promise that she would hurry up and come back with the shells before dark. The day starts as a fine one, but it soon becomes stormy, and the tide comes in great waves and cuts her off. She tries to get back with her shells, but gets swept away by the waves. Resurfacing, she realises that she needs to climb the cliff and follows the source of a beam of light. She comes upon a pair of miners, father and son, who claim they are working a tin mine, and who help her. "But I thought the mine was closed a hundred years ago," she said nervously. "That's what I was told, anyway."  Who are they? What has happenned?

A read this story and was quite upset. She didn't want to read any more. Until we had a talk about what makes a good story. How the fact that the story disturbed her was a pointer towards the success of the narrative. I convinced her to read the next story in the book, and that one won her over.

I believe in Unicorns

Set during WW2, this is a story of Tomas, a 7yr old, who is taught the importance of books by a librarian who tells them stories sitting astride a life-like model of a unicorn. She tells them of a book which her father saved from being burnt by "wicked people in my town who were frightened of the magic of stories and of the power of books, because stories make you think and dream; books make you want to ask questions." One day the library gets bombed. How the books are saved makes up the rest of the story.

My one and only great escape

This one is reminiscent of school stories like 'Tom Brown's Schooldays'. Our protagonist, Morpurgo himself as a child (Pongo to his classmates) doesn't want to return to boarding school after the vacations. When he does, he runs away from school. He is picked up, soaking wet in the rain, by a "silver-haired old lady in a little black car."  Who tells him about her husband, who had been killed in the war, and who had told her that he and his friends were often scared.

"So I asked him...why he didn't just run away. And he said: 'Because of my pals. We're in this together. We look after each other.' You've got pals, haven't you, dear?"
"Yes," I replied, "but they like coming back to school. They love it."
"I wonder if they really do," she said. "Maybe they just pretend better than you."

For all those who have back-to-school-blues or even back-to-work-blues!

My father is a polar bear

This is a story about two boys, brothers, and their search for their biological father who has disappeared from their lives after their mother re-marries. She does not like to speak of him and so he is persona non grata. He is an actor, and the boys use this fact to find him. So now they have two fathers. The one they call 'father' all their lives, and the one who is (has acted as) a polar bear. A heart-warming story.

The silver swan

This one reads like a parable, and in some ways, I think it is. It is a story of a silver swan told in the words of our protagonist. The swan meets a mate, the cob, and together they build a nest and have five cygnets. There is also a family of foxes nearby. In the winter, food is scarce, and the mother fox attacks the silver swan to feed her cubs. The cob tries to save her but fails. He is despondent, but brings up the cygnets on his own. One day, they fly away, and he is left alone. He stays in the place where his swan had been killed, almost losing the will to continue living. What happens next? Read to find out.

The Mozart Question

This story has been reviewed beautifully by Choxbox on Saffrontree. I don't think I will be able to add anything to it. Except for saying this: it moved me profoundly. I am, by my own admission, a sucker for any stories written on the background of the Holocaust. Strongly recommended.

What does it feel like

Sofia is a child living in Bosnia during its war. The story begins with an ordinary school day, which takes a horrifying turn when soldiers on tankers attack, and Sofia, hidden inside the toilet of a restaurant, watches from its window in horrified silence as the village is demolished and burnt around her, her mother and grandmother taken away with other villagers as captives. Sofia is saved by a good samaritan who realises she is inside, but loses her sanity, shell-shocked. Parental discretion recommended for this one.

Half a man

The story is about the morbid fascination a boy has for his grandfather who was badly burnt in the war, but who has survived to tell the tale. This grandfather's face has become a mask from which everyone, including his own daughter, the boy's mother, avert their eyes. Then one day the boy goes for a visit to the island where his grandfather lives. What happens next? Does the boy's curiosity about the grandfather's story get satisfied? Does he continue to be afraid of his grandfather's twisted face? Does the grandfather make his peace with it? Read to find out.

For Carlos, a letter from your father

Carlos has lost his father to the war when he was an infant. On his 10th birthday, his mother gives him a letter written by his father on the evening before he was killed, to be given to him when he was ten, old enough to understand what he wrote. And he wrote about his going to the war, the deprivations, the fear and the terrible things that happen. How the common man everywhere wishes only for a peaceful existence, and how war negates all that.

"I did not hate those I have killed and those who try to kill me do not hate me either. We are like puppets doing a dance of death, our masters pulling the strings,....War, Carlos, has only one result: suffering." 

Reminds me of another short story on the same premise, again by Morpurgo himself, The best Christmas present in the world. You can read the whole story here.

Singing for Mrs Pettigrew

Mrs Pettigrew is an old widow who reads a lot, and lives in a railway carriage next to a marsh. The surroundings are wild, very beautiful with a lot of birds and wildlife around. Michael, our young protagonist and his mother befriend her. Then the marsh is taken over by a company that wants to set up a power station on it. The villagers, lead by Mrs Pettigrew fight against the proposed monstrosity, but lose. Mrs Pettigrew, heartbroken moved away to live with her sister, and soon after, died. The story is narrated by Michael, now grown-up, who visits the village, which has changed and become unrecognisable after the onslaught of 'technology.' A sad story, well told.

And more: Found this site  which self-proclaims to be for serious readers of the Harry Potter books and also has a whole lot of related stuff. I feel it is for all die-hard Pottermaniacs (yours truly included) who have read and re-read and re-re-read the books. It is not just a fan site. Check it out, all you out there having Potter withdrawl.

And yay! Choxbox is back!