There are “too many roots” to be gathered in one’s lifetime; through words, gestures, and most importantly, through the cinematic world that takes the time to bring together the various knots of cultures and civilisations. These may as well have been a whim wrapped in nostalgia. But if one were to set about finding their roots in reality, a majority of us would find ourselves with a real, countable number of roots. These numerous roots find their way to what has now become a singular national canopy, eventually making us rootless.
As lost as our writer in the novel, who is as likely to be our protagonist as Don Quichotte, the significance of maps is important to chart the ways in which he has lost and found his earlier home in Mumbai, living now in the United States. A change that has occurred due to the municipal and national importance given to naming certain ‘dead-end’ lanes (nameless no longer for that dead-end lane Sahakari Bhandari Lane) in Mumbai; a city whom people’s memory still chooses to call by its former colonial name Bombay. But these places seem to appear or disappear according to the license granted by the concerned authorities, in the case of India it is the Survey of India in Dehradun (UK), so was my supposed artistic representation of my grandfather’s path towards survival when he fled Pakistan and for which I could not get a license. However, according to the makers of maps, yes, my father and my grandfather are in a way cartographers, I dared to make a map of international boundaries with our neighbouring countries, which even if wantonly drawn incorrectly could have me pay a 100 crore (INR 1 billion) fine or a 7-year jail, both of them not very feasible options for me, so I tore that acrylic masterpiece. But in the hindsight, this made it quite clear that now no citizen would ever possibly lose their way in a country or across national boundaries, especially as long as Google maps existed and paths were strictly named and renamed by the then government authority. The writer in the novel remembers familial memories and says, “Ma was the one to move out and after that, there was a second apartment in children’s lives in Soona Mahal(real name), on the corner now officially called “something else”.
Netflix and chill for us are what Quichotte’s beloved — the TV sensation Salma is for him, an entity for which he decides to go through several realities of the world. Similarly, what has become the multiple realities of our world is the internet. Cultures, nations, and homes become smaller, personal identities exemplified, identified, and amplified only while browsing the internet based on the algorithms that show you the most relevant search results. The internet is a world language, if not universal, having been born much like the English language with a continual erasure of cultural memories.
But as far as memories are concerned, while watching the Twelfth Night, our protagonist writer’s estranged sister feels all memories and the cause of her trouble dawning upon her as if she never did understand the meaning or the cause of her misery at all. Many times, we too forgive ourselves for forgetting what troubles us or what has ailed us for so many years. The main source of our misery kept hidden until we find a semblance in something and we burst with uncontrollable emotions recollecting nothing in tranquility. This semblance could be anything, but it is perhaps one of the scariest, as we try consciously to hide it, so much so that it becomes a part of the 15,000 to 30,000 average number of decisions that we take every day.
This also reminded me of the time when, while watching the Ariadne like thread of Rabindranath Tagore’s short stories taking me from one aspect of the Bengali Society to another, I froze. Hot tears enveloped the unfolding of the next Netflix episode of Kabuliwallah. But, then, what was it that so moved me? Was it the eventual separation in the story? Or was it the question of paternal severance caused by the “things you are likely to feel in a pandemic?”, Or was it just sheer nostalgia of Kabuliwallah, and a history of a nation reaching as far as Afghanistan, (it is the ease of the word nation that now gets to me but which comes out as easily) that showed up once in my Hindi Language syllabus in school. All of it came out in pain and fear resulting in their most likely form of eruption, but still being something not very comprehensible to me.
However, it is always ‘Somebody - yes - making him the way he made me. Somebody putting his life, his thoughts, his feelings, his memories…,’ says Sancho, who is Quichotte’s son in Rushdie’s version of the Spanish classic. There exists a blueprint in us that is manifested through our lives. This, we find out about only later in a series of events unravelling the person that we are made into as we grow up. Sancho’s existence is also a solemn summing up of our existence. He is the figment of Quichotte’s imagination, much like we are of our parents. Already born in ideas though having none of his own, and then thrown into a couple of OTHER(s) ideas, where he gets to know that the first idea of him was not what he was, but rather a continual mirroring-stage (from Jacques Lacan’s philosophy).
The only actual difference is that they are mirrored as people in the idea of others. This personality takes form only after he finds that he is already the idea of the Other, that too, ‘an other that other people were disapproving of.’ Interestingly, Sancho is already a lot of things when he enters the world without him knowing it. And funnily enough, I too was a lot of things when I went to a different country, based on some human algorithms; I was a Columbian, an Australian, an Ecuadorian, but never an Indian in Spain if I had not stated it clearly before. Therefore, the reference of these worlds has different centres, but once we decide to enter these worlds, thinking that we do not fit in, lo and behold, we do not even have to try, and these ‘unreal realities’ which Rushdie elaborates for Quichotte and Sancho, already exist around us. These realities also lead the pair to confront racial discrimination and related happenstance on their journey in Southern America.
While Rushdie ruminated a little more on the idea, he also brought me back to the new world of realities that awaited me when I post-graduated. By then, I had actually started experiencing those bathetic words of the movies and news articles all around me in real life. They were protests that took place in India in the January of both 2020 and 2021, loathsome quarrels of domesticity, but they were also, and all of them the stuff of movies, which Quichotte knew only too well. They were all part of the multiple realities that I had not inhabited yet, but they existed all the same. Just like Sancho existed for Quichotte, Quichotte existed, barely having lived his own life, around the reality of TV.
The book has a lot of familial trauma, as is most of our lives and conversations today, helping us understand more and more why and how we are the way we are based on our relationship with our parents, and brothers, and sisters. Thus, the two narratives, one that of the writer in the book who is trying his hand at the new genre wherein he is writing about Quichotte, and one of Quichotte’s, both turn out to be equally fictional. Both are estranged from their sisters, both are not used to the worldly ways anymore, until it all breaks and spills over their fictional reality in Quichotte’s world wherein he crosses the seven valley’s for his beloved and the writer’s work; the book that he is writing about Quichotte. Both compliant with real life and what has been served them, yet ready to make up for it in whichever little way they can.
For who knows, in these uncertain times, why did Quichotte or we rely on the reality of life?
Comments