Where the Mind is Free
By Sandhya Rao
These Covidian times have allowed me to luxuriate in my favourite occupation without an iota of guilt: lay back on my comfortable bed, thinking. Not sleeping, mind you. Fully awake, fully abluted, fulfilled-ly breakfasted and bathed, in dressed-for-the-day readiness, lying horizontal, thinking. Ruminating. Reflecting. And, since I live alone, undisturbed except for the call of the magazine-wala or the young man from the Corporation’s health department who regularly checks in on all of us in the neighbourhood.
I feel like Astrid Lindgren’s Pippi Longstocking, the nine-year-old who lives all alone in a cottage called Villa Villekulla with a horse and a monkey, cheerful about the fact that although her father’s away at sea and her mother’s a star in the sky, and she’s pleased there is no one to force bitter medicine down her throat when she’d rather be eating chocolates. My home is no Villa Villekulla and I have neither monkey nor horse for company, but I have books and shows, and my mind. I’m privileged, I know, and I’m grateful for all the access accorded to those like me so that while I’m alone, I have no cause to be lonely. My splendid isolation provides grist for thoughts, eyes open or closed. But not shut off to the world or inner consciousness.
Much of the time my mind is blank. But sometimes, in this ambience of forever amber, I hear voices. Questions surface to the top like churning butter. Sometimes observations. At other times, memories rise up like moving pictures. An old memory reconstructs the scene at the home of a Swedish friend. We’re having a party and as happens in homely parties, there’s music. Someone starts singing a song, others join in. Then my friend turns to me and says, sing us an Indian song? Caught up in the moment, I nod an okay and then stop. Sing, she says. But what shall I sing? The only songs for which I remember the lyrics are sing-a-longs to Shiva and Ganesha and Rama. And yes, there’s the odd classical song learned in childhood. Hindi film songs? Can’t remember the words. What about Tamil? The situation’s grimmer there with respect to lyrics and tune past the first two lines. The only ‘item’ I can perform at the drop of a hat, awake or asleep, is a folk song from the hills — of Nepal! No, not Indian.
Meanwhile, my friend gets impatient. You mean to say you have no songs that you sing together? That you know? And she knows I like music, that I can hold a tune. The expression on her face conveys a thousand words, mainly expressing total incomprehension.
This memory leads on to further wanderings in the mind. Thanks to Rabindranath Tagore and Nazrul and the Bauls, the Bengalis have their repertoire ready and alive. The indigenous people of Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and the like keep those musical flags flying. Then there are festival songs and seasonal songs and wedding songs… For all the music I think I have, I realise I have nothing really. Yes, there’s classical Carnatic to a very small degree, but my body reacts literally physically to belting out something so patently religious and elitist to boot. Silence seems more appropriate.
While all this is going on in the head, another memory surfaces: this time it’s a question asked by several 10 and 11 year-olds during that same visit to Sweden. Why do you have castes in India? The first time I get asked this question, I don’t understand. Why do you have castes in India? I am shocked. First, what is this question? Second, where did these kids get this from? What follows is a discussion of the caste system with the kids shooting question after question at me. Questions for which I am unable to find answers. Questions that leave me burning with shame. Questions, again, for which silence seems the most appropriate response.
Turns out, the information is from their geography/social studies textbooks that has a lesson on India. It begins with a sentence that translates into something like India is divided on the basis of caste. It then goes on to list them: Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya, Shudra…
While the knowledge that this is how small children in a foreign country perceive India is distressing, what’s worse is that all of this information is true. More than 70 years after Independence, these notions have been driven deeper into the collective Indian psyche. Discrimination, prejudice, sheer hate are being mined relentlessly across the Indian landscape. No one and nothing is spared. Migration to other lands and settling into other cultures, has made very little difference to this mindset. My surname very clearly indicates my so-called lineage. We seem to survive — or not — by our markers.
Another time, another observation. Anxious parents, worried at their child’s refusal to read. Do the parents read? Or, invested parents — my child writes beautifully. What should I do? We want our children to be achievers, performers, accolade-gatherers — basically, noticed by others. But children really need to simply be children. Besides, as my mother was always fond of saying, quoting a Tamil proverb: kakavin kunju pon kunju, which literally means, “the crow’s baby is a golden baby”. Our children are special; they don’t have to do anything to be special, they don’t have to be any other way, they don’t ever have to prove themselves in our eyes. Extend this to the classroom, the school, the neighbourhood, the city, the state, the nation, the world… Extend it, it’s the future you’re talking about. It’s our future, the space our children will occupy and carve out for their children.
I’m not dreaming as I lie upon the pillow, gazing upon the windmills of my mind. Yet I am dreaming, dreaming about dreams, different dreams for different people, each one vivid and valid. Your dream is not mine, nor mine yours. Only the right is ours, equally, so we may soar. Held hostage by the fear of a virus attack, we can still fly. As Gandhiji so memorably said during one of his many unique acts of resistance that landed him in jail, his bones could be broken but his mind could not be imprisoned. He would think what thoughts he wanted to. I don’t know if he had read Langston Hughes who wrote: “Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly”.
This time of being imprisoned mostly within the four walls of our homes has been one of maximum flying hours… it has the potential for great flight. Yet, even as I write this, the image that comes to mind is the flight by foot of thousands and thousands of men, women, children, babies… carried forward only by the thoughts of home and the fear for their lives. I sit up, shaken forcefully back into the real world. We are broken-winged.
Sandhya Rao likes reading and listening to stories. She lives in Chennai, a city she loves.
