Mr kian’s dilemma

There was a little bundle, wrapped up in a shocking pink Thai Airways blanket, on my seat. It was going to be a long flight from Melbourne to Bangkok and I was keen to settle down with my book so I gave it a gentle poke. Something moved, and from under the folds emerged a head that must not have been a day older than 60. He was tiny, not an inch or more above 5 feet. His skin had that typical South-East Asian quality that suggested that you could rub it with sand paper and a towel for ever and a day, and you still wouldn’t be able to rub the oil off it. Bald on top, his hair seemed to have taken final refuge around his ears, but literally rooted out from everywhere else on his shiny pate. He wore his wispy sideburns long and had a straggler of a strand or two sticking to his chin like a forgotten relic. A square jaw, a strong chin and the dark rimmed glasses that sat lightly on the bridge of a broad nose seemed to suggest that he was a man who knew how to have his way, in spite of his stature.

I smiled and told him he was in my seat. He smiled, nodded his head and turned towards the window and gazed at the busy little lights on the tarmac and the darkening Melbourne sky. I clenched my jaw and repeated my words with restrained emotion. The head didn’t turn. I was about to poke him again when I saw the wires of an earphone peeping out of the blanket. ‘Humph! Senior citizen…might as well let him be’, I thought. I slid into the seat next to his and started fiddling with the touchscreen in front. The plane took off. And soon it was time for dinner. My neighbour punctuated his meal with oft repeated requests of “mo’ wed wine please!”. In the middle of his meal, he dropped his toothpick and then kept looking at it on the floor rather sullenly. I asked him if he wanted mine, twice, but he politely bowed, smiled and shook his head. After a while, he asked me if I would need my toothpick. I shook my head and handed it to him. He nodded and this time he took it.

“Whey you fom?”, he asked, as he folded the table away. “Ah, India!” his thin eyebrows danced when I told him. “Vewee smart! Many vewee good brain! Vietnamese boys no can compete… Indian boy vewee smart!” So he was from Vietnam. I wanted to go back to my book but I thought I should ask him a few polite questions as a courteous gesture, from one traveller to another. And so I did…His name was Kian and he had been an engineer with the army. Had he seen action? “Yes…yes…but not as engineer. I fight in Ho Chi Minh campaign and second Indochina (war) with great General Giap. You not know but he great General.” He was surprised to know that I did know about the General, who has been called one of the greatest war strategists of all time. “My leg”, he clutched his right knee, “not vewee good. Still hurt from war.” A war hero! He had my respect and attention now.

Kian lectures in various universities in South-East Asia and sometimes Australia. I asked him about his family. He was quiet. I did not push him. I half imagined a tragic story of a family lost to war, when he said, “Melbourne college want me to move to Australia with my family. Can’t go. My wife not good! Her health…not good…she paralysed…no can move…if I move her, she die…what can do…” For a while, I did not know what to say. “I hope she gets well soon and you can then all go to Australia together”, I offered. Kian closed his eyes and shook his head. “You not understanding…she never get better. Never! Everybody in her house die like this. Father, brothers, younger brother…they all die. But she…she still not die.” He looked sad, but now I wasn’t sure why… “If take her to Australia, doctor say she die…she like this for so many years. I say I want to go to Australia with my children but Australian government say I inhuman if I leave her…I spend so many money, so many years…I need to work in Australia for mo’ money but no can do…everybody in her family die, she still no die…what can do?” He sounded bitter. And I was shocked. He sounded like he was hoping his wife would die and set him free. “I can fight with America but no can fight God…how can do?” He shook his head and smiled a wry smile. An awkward silence followed.

The lights dimmed and I went back to Michael Clayton on the touchscreen. After a while, I glanced towards his screen, and there was Hilary Swank bouncing about in a boxing ring. I did not know what to make of the man. I still don’t...do you?

Love them to death

While Kian was telling me his story, I was persistently reminded of Michael Schiavo, who for seven years campaigned for the removal of his wife Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube because she had been in a ‘persistent vegetative state’ and there was apparently no hope of recovery. Michael succeeded, through a court order, and Terri’s feeding tube was removed. She died after spending practically all of the last 15 years of her life in a hospital bed.

Admittedly, it is impossible to put oneself in the same shoes as that of a Michael Schiavo or Kian, and may neither you nor I ever need to. And yet, one finds it impossible to believe that there can’t be hope. Incidentally, Robert Herring, an entrepreneur, had offered Michael Schiavo a million dollars to stop campaigning because he believed that stem cell research could have been a catalyst for Terri’s recovery. But now we’ll never know. Perhaps it is unfair but one can’t help but feel that maybe, albeit understandably, people like Michael and Kian just tire of waiting and that emotional exhaustion starts demanding closure. But does one man’s need for closure justify another’s demise?

We need more miracles to restore our faith in them, as do the Schiavos and Kians of this world. But perhaps what the miracles need are a bit of time and faith from us.

In Black and white

In the streets of big city Australia, there lurk the shadow people. You don’t see them on the streets but every once in a while you find their tracks, on the billboards, in a name, in the souvenir stores, and at a game. They are ghosts of the Aboriginese, the indigenous people of Australia. Once spread all over the island continent, now only a relative handful remains, swept away under the fringes of white Australia. Symbols of their culture reverberate in the strains of the didgeridoo (the long hollow pipe that sounds like a musically inclined elephant in heat), in names of cities and streets (Yuendumu, Woolloomooloo), in the flight of a boomerang, and in the cheers at a footy game (inspired at least in part by the Aboriginal game of Marn Grook) and yet you can’t see them... for they’ve just vanished…

Then one day, near Darling Harbour, I saw a green flag pinned to the seat of a bicycle. It said, in letters big and black – White Australia has a BLACK past. I wanted to know what it meant, and what it meant to have been a part of that past. As the flag fluttered up a hill and disappeared, I heard the sound of an elephant in heat. I chased the sound and found a man dancing by the harbour. His features were unmistakably Aboriginal. Behind him sat another man, younger and lighter skinned, his swollen cheeks blowing away for all they are worth, into what looked like the trunk of a small tree – the didgeridoo. They told me that a man called Russell Dawson could tell me what it meant, because that past was also his past.

Dawson is the leader of an Aboriginese dance troupe; his tribe – The Kamilaroi; and his bush name – Waaji Wallu Doungu Thanni Bunjalong Goomaroi. He is a big man with a big heart. When I called on him in Melbourne, he called me ‘brother’, and I believe he meant it. He thought I would understand his pain because I came from India – a country he “loved”, a country that had been a colony; a country that believed in peace. And I believed I would understand…

With the words “Shanti! Shanti!”, Dawson began his story. “You don’t see my people on the streets because there aren’t many who are still around. And that is because up until 1967, merely 40 years ago, we were treated like animals. We, the oldest civilisation on earth, one that goes back more than 40,000 years, were classified as fauna, as vermin, by the white administration. White hunters would go out with their guns and hunt our people down in cold blood… for sport. Hundreds of thousands of indigenous Australian men women and children have been killed, and no one was punished. We weren’t even worth a butcher’s goat. You ask me, so I’ll tell you, but these are difficult stories to tell…

they are not old enough yet, and they churn our hate… In many parts of Australia, white settlers would go in groups, round up a tribe, gather all the men and cut off their penises. Our fathers would scream and run and thrash about in pain, while the white man would laugh as he saw them bleed and die. The babies and the young children would be buried alive upto their necks in the earth and then white man, with his heavy boots, would kick and kick till their little heads came off. Then white man would get drunk on rum, drag out our mothers and rape them till their lust was slaked. Then they’d take red hot iron bars and burn them into the women’s vaginas, and beat them to death…”

I was quiet. “I know what you are thinking brother...” Dawson said. “You are from India, the land of ‘unity in diversity’, the land of non-violence, the land of Gandhi, and you wonder if such barbarism is possible. But it happens. Remember the Nazi holocaust…” Dawson was wrong. I know such barbarism is possible. Because my land is not just the land of Gandhi, it is also the land where Priyanka Bhotmange’s 17-year-old body lay, on the infamous soil of Khairlanji, with ‘rods sticking out of her genitals’. It is also the land where every other day a dalit woman is stripped, a minor dalit girl is gang raped, and where dalit men are hacked and murdered, and in almost every case, there are no witnesses, and no one is punished. And these stories aren’t 40 years but four days old.

Dawson twisted the knife. “India is beautiful. Her people, wonderful. The red dot your women wear on the forehead is a symbol of the red land of Australia. Like you, we believe in peace, in nature. We too have never raped our land or our women. We live in peace with other tribes as equals. If you look at our people, you’ll see that you and I, we are the same… beautiful and peaceful”, he said with a laugh and a pat.

I smiled and walked away… with the realisation that it isn’t just Dawson’s hurt that needs understanding…

It happened one night

The Great American Dream must pale in comparison to the Australian Dream. For, compared to the former, the visions of the indigenous Australian people have to do with all of this world, and everything within and without.

Many, many groups of indigenous Australians, collectively referred to as the Aboriginals, attribute the constitution of our universe to a phenomenon called the “Dreamtime”, with just a little difference in definition between tribes. Dreamtime or the All-at-Once Time is a multidimensional abstraction believed to be the fountainhead of this Creation, wherein the ancestor spirits broke through the surface of the earth, then dark and flat, travelled through space generating the sun, land, trees, water et al out of their ‘Eternity’. For the Aboriginals, it implies that all of nature is a manifestation of their forbears, and holds a spiritual value. So, to cite certain characters from Aboriginal mythology, Anjea is the goddess of fertility to whom the souls until they get embodied again; Bahloo is the moon man and Yhi, the sun. Legends relate that Yhi coveted Bahloo but he had spurned her advances, and then Yhi had enjoined the spirits of the sky to not let him get away, else he would sentence the world to darkness.