Of Trails, Effigies and Drugs
Standing at the top of the Bunker Hill Monument, I could see the entire city stretch out before me. The slightly meandering Charles river split the landmass into two: the hustle bustle of sky-scratching Downtown Boston, and the quaint roads of Charlestown and Cambridge. Logan airport could be seen further out, as I saw wings of aluminium take swift flights into the air. It was a breathtaking sun-drenched view, and I felt humbled yet somehow proud to be a cog in the intricate human civilisation which lay in front of my eyes.
My friend and I made the 294 steps back to solid ground. We had just checkmarked the commencing pit-stop of the famous Freedom Trail of Boston. A red-brick marked path etching four kilometers in space and many years in the significant history of American Revolution. We knew we couldn’t cover all of it, and so we decided to follow Google Maps instead of the red bricks to cut our trip short, making it in time to the harbour at dusk. We somehow lost our way, and found it again, only to realise that the GPS path crisscrossed with the trail ever so often. It was then that we stumbled upon it, just as the Freedom trail met us again as we passed through Union Street.
They were six tall glass towers laid in a line, one after another, in a small park surrounded by otherwise towering buildings of the financial district. The sun had been eclipsed behind the brick and mortar, and the park was covered in the dark diffused light of the evening sky. And although we did not intend to make a stop here, the tall glass towers seemed to be calling us, and we made our way towards them.
remember
The word was a stark white, inscribed against the black granite floor of the monument. Above that single word was something written in Hebrew, and I fathomed it was the same word. Remember. I walked around the words, over to the first tower. I realised I wasn’t walking into a tower though. It was more of a glass chamber. And then, I saw white steam fuming from the grill beneath the tower. As I stood in the middle of it, looking up at the tower from within, the steam engulfed me without so much as a hiss. I realised I wasn’t standing inside a glass chamber. It was a burning gas chamber.
The glass panels had stories of holocaust survivors. They were simply worded, short, and heavyhearted. Some thankful for those who saved them. Some talked about their helplessness in aiding others escape their horrifying fates. Some silently saluted the memories of six million Jews who became the products of six death camps in Poland, leaving behind only their six-digit identification numbers, forever marked on the outside of these six glass towers.
The Freedom trail had led us from a building of towering liberty and human value to that of terrible crimes and human devaluation.
To remember their suffering is to recognize the danger and evil that are possible whenever one group persecutes another. As you walk this Freedom Trail, pause here to reflect on the consequences of a world in which there is no freedom — a world in which basic human rights are not protected. And know that wherever prejudice, discrimination and victimization are tolerated, evil like the Holocaust can happen again.
As I read this quotation which marked the end of the memorial, I felt humbled and ashamed to be the descendant of a human legacy which lay in front of my eyes. I walked to the other end of the park, crossing the same word which had welcomed me in. Only, it was inverted on my way out.
ɹǝqɯǝɯǝɹ
Dussehra was always a time of great joy and merriment for me as a child. I used to visit my maternal grandfather’s house in Dilshad Garden, a quiet colony on the eastern side of the Yamuna river in Delhi. He would take me and my sisters to the nearby ramleela maidan in evening, just in time for burning of effigies of Raavan and his kin, the human embodiment of evil in the Hindu epic story of Ramayan. The grounds would be brimming with people, the last act of the story in play: Ram, Lakshman and Hanuman dancing around the centre stage, engaged in battle with Raavan’s armies, but really just waiting for the sun to go down so that the fireworks could begin.
There was a lot of fanfare. Children, including myself, would be buying bows and arrows, re-enacting the dramatic theatre amongst each other. Until finally, Ram would shoot an arrow straight into Raavan’s belly, a firecracker suddenly bursting the towering ten-headed effigy into flames. With eyes wide open, sitting on the shoulders of their elders, children would gape at the orange fire consuming colourful paper models, watching them wither away to ash and dust. Once the tongues of fire had subsided, and the noise of crackers remained a mere ringing in our ears, we would make our way back home. Looking forward to consume sweets and shikanji that my grandmother had prepared for us.
And we would repeat this each year, it was a childhood ritual which I have fond memories of. Till I became too old to believe that firecrackers were more fun than pollution. But the story of Dussehra, and our elders’ chant which came along with it, has stayed with me. It is a festival that marks the victory of good over evil. Burning away of ten bad qualities that endanger humanity: self-pride, attachment, anger, injustice, to name a few.
But the festivities did not stop here. Twenty days from Dussehra, sometime in the months of October or November, lies the holiest and most auspicious occasion of the Hindu calendar. Diwali, the festival of lights. When diyas are lit in every household. Families pray in unison for prosperity and good luck. Relatives meet over home-prepared dinners, exchanging gifts, sweets and dry fruits. Millions of rupees are spent by elders all over the country, on buying firecrackers for their kids to play with: aerial rockets, shooting stars and ground swivellers. The most popular cracker being, by a big margin, the sparklers, which everybody could play with. Fights would often break out between children while trying to claim more and more sparklers for themselves. While some would hoard packets beforehand, others would claim ownership by simply lighting all of them to fire, at once.
“I laid my hands on them first! I lit fire to them first! They are mine!” they would shout, while holding out a bunch, like swords or light sabers. Parents would laugh over their kids’ playful banter, intervening only to ensure that their children played cautiously with fire, holding the sparklers at a safe distance, from the correct wiry end. Unbeknownst to them, the children fought for a battle long lost though. Because the sparklers belonged to none of them. Rather, they belonged to more than one innocent children whose hands had already touched the wrong gunpowder end of the sparklers, long before they caught their fire.
Facebook notified me today that it was “International Day of the Girl”. That “all girls deserved equal access to healthcare, education and basic human needs,” and I could add a frame around my profile picture to show my support for girls everywhere. I scrolled further down, and went on to check my messages. Some of my friends were discussing on a group chat, whether they’ll ever indulge in recreational drugs. There was a lot of talk about values imbibed into us while growing up, principles that we were brought up with. When we start to deviate from them, why, and at what level of the individual, family, or society as a whole. Where did we draw the line between being liberal and experimental, and holding fast onto beliefs that we stood for?
One of them pointed out a common argument pro recreational drugs, or any other human indulgence, “I’ll try something out for fun, as long as I don’t get addicted to it, and it doesn’t harm anybody.” But sure enough, those conditions are hard to take control of. An occasional alcohol drinker could be silently giving his life away to liver cirrhosis, and hence his family to poverty and the emotional turmoil of loss of a loved one, without even realising it. We barely comprehend the impact of our actions on our own lives, let alone on the lives of others.
It was then that a frightful question popped up in the conversation. If our principles could be so misinformed and flexible, then do we stand up for anything at all? For ourselves, or for anybody else? And if we do, when does that principle feel threatened in the face of a new experience? Another friend had a simple answer to this worry: “I’m a simple common man. I can try to be a good individual, good to my family, to those around me. Do my job well. Everyday I gather new beliefs, and check their consistency against those beliefs that I hold onto. And so, when you ask me these questions, I evaluate my beliefs and claim that I am anti drugs. Or that I am pro women’s rights. Etc.” It was true. There was nothing overly profound in what had just been spoken.
Except, maybe there was.
Maybe our principles and beliefs and the game of keeping them in check was the wrong game we were playing. Taking life on a case-by-case basis, is a lazy test of what we stand for. Neither can we know all that we stand for, nor will it always be consistent. And it’s not difficult to come up with artificial pathological cases to render any belief we hold as inconsistent. Crafty questions that expose the gray edges of what humanity still doesn’t agree on, and so it bounces across the border of inconsistency and hypocrisy.
Alas, humanity’s hypocrisy might just be that invisible eleventh quality, which we can never set fire to. If this unsettles you, then hold onto this belief. Don’t feel bad for the loss of integrity in your beliefs, rather feel empathetic for the belief itself. And consider it, very carefully. Debate about it, loudly. Pull it away from the edge of hypocrisy, to the centre of your beliefs and attention.
There have been times in history, when the oppressed have stood up for themselves; their leaders came from within their ranks. While outsiders stood witness to the oppression, till it came to their own doorstep. Do not wait for that time to come. Because even though you can’t gauge every impact of your actions on others, some impact can always be intended.
And so,
