Of Stories, Memories and Escape
I’ve been thinking about stories a lot these past few months. Reading has felt like a challenge, especially of late and holding on to the thread of a tale in the maze of real-life distractions and too-real horrors has felt like a herculean task. My mind repeatedly jitters back to wondering what a story is, the many things it can mean, and the even-more that a story can contain once it’s been told. Because until it’s been told, a story doesn’t really exist. It may be an idea, it may be history, but for something to be a story, it has to be told and only then does it take shape. Only once it’s taken shape can a story contain meanings — obvious, subtle, unexpected — and its lines can morph to become another shape, gain layers, lose meaning; transform to reflect the imaginations around it, and be what a reader needs a story to be at that time, in that place.
What story will you turn to when one part of the world remains mundane and unruffled while another is reduced to rubble, crushed bone and spilt blood? Does every memory get woven into a story? When there’s nothing physical to remember something or someone by, what is a story and and what is history? In biology, the memory cell is produced as a response to the specific antigens on a pathogen. Should the pathogen resurface, the body is able to get its guard up swifter because of the memory cells. In this way, memory becomes a key part of a body’s defence and at a cellular level, remembering becomes a sign of good health. Is that true of stories that leave us devastated, and what of the others that offer the escapist comfort of forgetting temporarily? Can we remember without stories? Could stories rooted in memory be part of a culture’s system of defence? Or are they part of a rebuilding project? Can they be both?
Illustration by Akira Kusaka
You would’ve guessed by now that a lot of this is coming from being a second-hand witness to the genocide and second Nakba in Palestine. For most of us, the only thing we can do is watch — from the comfort of homes that are not vulnerable to air strikes, in neighbourhoods where water and bread are not scarce, and where hospitals are not being turned into graveyards by Israeli missiles. Though it turns out geography won’t necessarily save you. A friend in London told me about an acquaintance who was brutally beaten up by a group of white men who stopped him because he was carrying a Palestinian flag on his way home from a recent march. The men asked him his name, which is unmistakably Muslim, and then knocked his teeth out while shouting slurs at him. In Bengaluru, a pro-Palestine gathering was shut down by the police and in Mumbai, despite the protest being sparsely-attended, there were reports of a handful of protesters being held in a police station for hours. “You want to protest? The van is right here,” one policeman, blatantly dangling the threat of arrest to a friend who had said he had come to attend a protest.
For us in India (or those of us who follow the news), the genocide in Gaza is the terrible climax of a year soaked in sadness and loss. There was nightmarish ethnic violence in Manipur (along with an internet shutdown to restrict information being circulated to the rest of India). Encounters in Kashmir; bomb blast in Kerala; train collision in Odisha; floods in Sikkim, Himachal Pradesh and Punjab (Pakistan was devastated); heatwave killed hundreds in Uttar Pradesh; riots in Haryana — and that’s just what I remember off the top of my head. We’ve reached the point where the ongoing war in Ukraine is becoming a blind spot.
Ironically, finding out what’s happening in Gaza has been comparatively easier than getting news from Manipur — not that this makes processing either set of horrors easier. For those of us who enjoy the privilege of not being directly impacted, our role is limited to consuming the news, watching the footage and listening to people’s testimonies. All we can contribute is our attention and a commitment to bear witness (and maybe money by way of donations). In times of genocide, this may leave us feeling useless, but perhaps it isn’t entirely so.
Journalists and civilians in Gaza (many of them painfully young) have shouldered a terrible burden by tirelessly showing the world the reality of Gaza. The least we can do is watch and imprint this nightmarish reality upon our memories. “I step away from time to time to find the strength to return to the news,” a colleague had told me some years ago. I found myself remembering those words as I gratefully dived into the new (and delightful) Percy Jackson adventure, The Chalice of the Gods. Riordan gets everything right with this breezy little adventure, which is why it’s easy to let the book draw you into that familiar world where ancient Greek myths layer the regular reality of New York and nearby areas. It felt like a blessing to retreat from the real world for a bit. “News flash: Nothing’s changed in the time that it took me to finish The Chalice of the Gods,” I wrote to a friend. “Wars are still warring, genocide continues, and if there’s a god of democracy, they must be feeling suicidal at the sight of how they’re being failed by all those world leaders who profess to be democratic.” My friend wrote back, “100% relate to god of Democracy. Would prefer apocalypse to this current shit.”
Early-ish in Israel’s campaign to destroy Palestine, I thought I’d draw up a Palestine-themed reading list and reached out to friends for suggestions. Quite a few people sent me names, but I still haven’t been able to compile the list. I hadn’t realised back then how every day’s updates from Gaza would leave me feeling a little bit more battered and how exhausting it felt to go about my day appearing cheerful because that’s easier than explaining to unfamiliars that I’m the sort who gets affected by tragedies happening to strangers in strange lands. Weeks later, today, more parts of me feel paralysed by sadness and rage because I don’t want these feelings sublimated into something that feels more digestible. Time will inevitably force us to heal/ scar/ manage or maybe even forget, but for now, I don’t want to lose sight of how little I’ve been able to do or how leaden this sadness feels. The other reason I’ve held back from putting the reading list together is that I feel very uncomfortable earning currency from tragedy, albeit unwittingly. If you really are curious to read up on Palestine, then I’m not the one to whom you should turn. People like Fatima Bhutto are putting out fantastic resources and authors like Adania Shibli, who was abruptly disinvited from the Frankfurt book fair this year (where she was supposed to receive an award), are the kind of people you should look up.
Me, all I can do is follow the news, sit with my books and my feelings, and forage for little joys. A few days into November, these lyrics shuffled their way into my playlist:
“Let's become the lovers we want
Banging our heads in the fog
Flowers will close and open
Life going by like we care
One day is whatever we make
(Whatever we make)
From pieces off the side of a road
(Whatever we make)
Walked on our map of what hurts
What hurts worse
Let's become the lovers we need.”
As I listened to the song, I felt myself sitting up straighter and the next thing I knew, I’d opened up a new folder and titled it “NaNoWriMo”. When I told a friend, she asked what I was writing. “Crime?” she said, hopefully.
I shook my head. “Romance,” I told her, “low pressure, full escapism.” She laughed because she knows as well as I do that escaping is anything but easy, especially in these times. Still, it’s worth a spin of an attempt. After all, where would we be without fantasy and the hope that veins its restless heart? Later, at another time, on a comfortable perch of hindsight, we’ll sit and talk about what we deliberately kept out and what unexpectedly crept into our stories from this present. For now, while witnessing unimaginable hate, I’ll try my hand at a love story.
(The song is “What Hurts Most”, by Iron and Wine, for anyone interested.)
This newsletter was a bit off-track (in addition to being very late), so if you patiently read till the end, thank you for reading. Dear Reader will return with regular programming next month, godpromiss.