Manufacturing Memories

My memories do not go so far back as that.
I do not even remember the 80’s agitation –
The Axam āndolan.
I would like to believe I do
But I would only be impinging
On āitā’s wide-eyed memories
Of how there was ‘the smell of blood in the air. And fear’.

Āitā had ten children
And a fair sprinkling of grandchildren
By the time of the āndolan. I was one of them.
I would like to believe I remember her ample figure
Standing guard at the front gate, three-not-three in hand,
Her limbs trembling, her mouth dry,
As she waited for the militant migrants to come
With daggers and dās to fall on her brood.
But I don’t.
I only have a piece of conversation with me.

Āitā: I couldn’t let that happen; I had to save what was mine.
Me: But āitā, you don’t know how to work a gun!
Āitā: It would have gone off somehow.

Being a poet, I need no more.
I build on it and shape for me
The memory of the life and times of
Sushila Kumari Misra, dārogā’s daughter,
Fiercely proud, and still believing
She’s queen of a scattered tribe.

What I narrate could be
The true story of Sushila Kumari,
Arrogant but not unkind daughter
Of a colonial serviceman whom everybody feared,
Married off to a man, who led other men
To reclaim land and open a frontier –
He became the arbiter among communities,
The patron whom everybody revered.

This might really be how life took shape
For Sushila Misra nee Debi
Whose hands were never idle
Even while she received her regular feed
Of community gossip
From ādhiār’s wives and the headmistress
Of Kopati High School.
She knitted and kneaded and sifted and sorted
While doling out advice and some money
To distressed women whose husbands
Dared not approach the patriarch
Whose progeny she had borne.

What I actually know though,
Is that she is today a queen without a clan,
The queen who weaves even now
That her husband is no more
(He only wore clothes she wove).
She weaves even now
When all she can see is her dead son’s ghost.
Because she has been weaving forever,
Even when she was mistress
Of five elephants, ten granaries, and thirty-nine servants.

She weaves furiously
As though not to weave would be
Not to be able to hold it all together.
As though all of it is still together
Only because her māku flits in and out
Of the threads of diverse lives –
Lives she had saved
At gunpoint one day…

And I of her progeny,
Realise as I weave her story
That it is very easy
To manufacture memory.
***

[Axam āndolan – Assam Movement of 1979-85 against illegal migrants in Assam; āitā – grandmother; dā – big cutting blade; dārogā – policeman; adhiār – sharecropper; māku – shuttle used in the handloom for weaving.]

***

Published in Muse India 18/2008