Footnotes to a Conversation, August 30, 2021
“We swallow greedily any lie that flatters us, but we sip only little by little at a truth we find bitter.” – Denis Diderot
Friends and Enemies
I am grateful for a week full of sunshine, flowers, friendship, and ocean waves, but I’ve also done some serious reading.
Rwanda, Armenia, India, Pakistan – countries ripped apart, not by external forces but from within. I’ve been reading Remants of Partition: 21 Objects from a Country Divided by Aanchal Malhotra and am both horrified and comforted. The author talks to 21 people who were forced to abandon their homes due to the partition of India and Pakistan. Preet Singh was 8 years old when her family was forced to leave Quetta (now in Pakistan) and she vividly remembers staying at her uncle’s house en route to a permanent home in India. “The roof of our uncle’s house overlooked the station. One day, from atop the roof, we saw a train arrive, carrying no vegetables or fruits, but a cargo of the dead. Those who had boarded the train alive from our land that was to become Pakistan had arrived in India dead. I can remember to this day the pile of bodies extracted from that train, the mountain of flesh, the smell of burning limbs and bones, the dark cloud of smoke that covered the city after, and the river of blood that drenched the tracks.” Another family boarded a train only to find it full of the dead, forced to sit on the corpses, the blood sinking into their clothes, the smell of death surrounding them.
How did neighbours turn on neighbours in this way? Lt. General S. N. Sharma says, “The Empire dissolved, leaving us with an aching need to affirm our own nationhood – both India and Pakistan. It was power. Not religion. The hunger for power and authority is what drove us to madness.” Professor Sat Pal Kohli says, “We had demanded Independence and we received it. Though the consequence of that Independence was unimaginable, we took responsibility for it, we learnt from it.”
Although the horror of Partition is central to the book, it doesn’t shape it. Instead, the author focuses on the individuals, describing in loving detail their facial features and the far-away gaze in their eyes as they remember the past, the homes that they loved and lost, but also happy childhood memories. Their hands follow the lines of the few items they were able to take with them as they fled, the physical memories of their past that, while insignificant in and of themselves, have the power to conjure up times and places long since left behind. These individuals have not forgotten, but they have moved on with their lives. Sitara Faiyaz Ali says, “It is not always possible to remember everything. . . Things that were once so deeply embedded in you – a house, a landscape, a possession. . . Time swallows the past, life folds over it. Eventually. Seamlessly.”
Still Useful, Still Beautiful
Our society venerates the young and new over the old and broken. And yet, perhaps we can learn a deeper appreciation of the old from this group of artists and artisans. Artist Aya Haidar “embroidered images of migrants’ journeys on to the soles of their worn-out shoes. “The shoes physically carried refugees across borders and across lands. . . They were so worn and torn that they were not fit for purpose, but instead of throwing them away, I embroidered images of their journeys on to their soles, adding another layer of meaning. I couldn’t return the function to those shoes, but I could tell their story and show their value.”
Chris Miller’s company, Skinflint, “has saved 50,000 lights from landfill, making them safe and functional and then giving them what Miller calls a ‘light touch’ restoration, maintaining the patina of their age. [The Guardian]
“Do not watch the petals fall from the rose with sadness, know that, like life, things sometimes must fade, before they can bloom again.” – Anonymous
Footnotes to a Conversation is a weekly Monday feature covering an assortment of topics that I’ve come across in the preceding week – books, art, travel, food, and whatever else strikes my fancy.
If you share my love of nature, I suggest you also read EcoFriendly Sask that I publish in collaboration with my brother, Andrew. Check out EcoFriendly Sask’s Nature Companion, a free nature app for Canada’s four western provinces (downloadable directly from the website).