Image: detail from photo by Gauri Gill.
1984
Persistence of Trauma
JASPREET SINGH
Does she usually read this way?
Always in the same room?
Is the tiny black object on the trunk (on the steel cabinet) really a bird?
Why exactly am I moved by this image?
There are 48 black-and-white photographs in my new novel, Helium, including this one by Gauri Gill, on an entire page.
Yesterday I showed it (without the original caption) to my father. “Parrhaee ho rahi hai,” he said. “A very humble family … She is trying to locate the past.”
He doesn’t know yet that the photograph carries traces of an atrocity. The caption would have disturbed him. Among other things it would have triggered his own memories of November 1984, the anti-Sikh pogroms.
Layers of cold ash.
In 1984 the two cabinets in the room would have failed to hide the victims. The phone, too, would have been equally helpless (because the cops in Delhi were extremely busy facilitating acts of cruelty).
She was not born yet.
When I first saw the photograph I felt its silence. Silence filled the whole space.
But, soon a detail broke the silence.
Her ear.
It made me pause, and I heard the hum of painful stories she must have heard over and over. The same ear, I felt, would have preserved the shape of her grandmother’s voice.
Postmemory – that messy archive of trauma and its transference. Outside the house, ironically, the same ear must have detected ongoing shamelessness and injustice.
Collective amnesia.
Whenever I revisit the photograph, my gaze is also perturbed by the earring.
But, is it really an earring? Perhaps what I see is a slow t(ear). And it refuses to fall down. I make a list of all the objects around her bed. They, too, are listening/ hearing devices. They will outlast her.
What book is she reading? Hope it is not a prescribed text of ‘history’.
“Why should young people know about an event best buried and forgotten” – The Indian Censor Board on awarding an ‘A’ rating to a film on the 1984 pogrom.
But this is not the exact reason why the picture wounds me.
Something within its space – and accumulated time – is broken, and will always remain so.
[Courtesy: Montreal Serai]
March 13, 2014
Conversation about this article
1: Kaala (Punjab), March 13, 2014, 1:04 PM.
I must confess, my blood boils when I read about what they did to our people, and with frustration that we are still helpless if this was to happen again. I wish we had an army our own, we shall then see who comes to attack our people and our places of worship. This is the direct result of the incompetent leadership we had in 1947. The question that pesters my mind is, how could the Sikhs of Guru Gobind Singh allow this to happen, to become impotent in front of petty and puny criminals?
2: Kaala Singh (Punjab), March 16, 2014, 2:43 AM.
Sikhs are forgetting the events of 1984 as our foes want us to, by shedding crocodile tears and offering hollow apologies so that we become complacent and neglect our security as we did in 1984. But Sikhs need to learn the lessons of 1984. We have already been threatened several times that this will happen again. Each of us, individually and collectively, should acquire such capabilities and strength that nobody dares do this again. We should become a "Vietnam" for those who plan to do this again. That is the only guarantee for security and survival.