Monday, July 12, 2010

Writing JAHAJIN

It all started the day I happened upon the Saranga story.

An old woman who had come to Trinidad from Basti with her mother had started telling it to me one afternoon.  Just the beginning.  I wanted more: I could already sense that the story was unusual. 

A Bhojpuri tale with a woman at the centre!  A woman driven to journey across an irreversible divide leaving her mate behind!  That was the sort of idea that can fire your imagination even when you are still young and when these struggles are far in the future.  But the old woman was not confident about taking the story further.  So when I went to continue the recording the next day she took me to meet a friend of hers who told me a slightly different version, and that was the Saranga story that lived with me for the next thirty years and became the first of the three strands that would braid together to make Jahajin.

Over the next few years the next strand began to emerge.  As I found myself in the grip of a commitment to migrate to India, I kept returning in my mind to Saranga in her early avatar as the monkey who leapt into the river when the stars were right and ended up transformed into a woman, suddenly nostalgic for the mate she had left behind.  I knew by then that life was not simple: that it was possible to wonder why you were leaving the Garden of Eden, to agonize over all you were about to leave behind, but yet to know at the same time that you simply had to go.  That there was a much older programming at work: an urge to head, lemming-like, for the big world across the ocean.

The final strand emerged much later, when I was already living in India I met a feminist who told me that most of the women on the boats to Trinidad had come alone, and that many of them had actually left husbands behind in India And then I recalled that I had even met some of these women during my field work.  Again: unusual women, and unusual times.

I have always been fascinated by quirky resemblances.  A tale with multiple readings, all correct. Broad strands of narrative which recapitulate each other.  The magic of the slipstream.  I remember imagining, when I was in labor, that the contractions were waves: I could either surf them or get tumbled by them, if I didn't breathe right.  And when I rode the waves, I still had a sense of a lot of churning going on down below, pain that I had managed to block out.

Jahajin has had a long journey.  When I first began to see a story, I thought in terms of a book. Then I got into television work, and began to imagine it as a film.  And years and years went by, during which I drifted far away from film, and I would sometimes wake up from a doze and sit bolt upright, thinking of all the time that was a-passing, panicked that my story might never see the light of day.

And then one rainy evening, when I was ready to start writing a screenplay, I thought again of a book.  And the whole universe around me settled into a kind of peace.  Why had I been thinking all these years about a film?  I didn't even go to films!  And as the dream of a film drifted away, new possibilities began to float up to the forefront of my mind.

The first two chapters were easy.  I just had to retrieve the shots from my memory.  But since the beginning of the story was so alive for me, the rest simply grew out of it.  At first I had only a hazy idea of the incidents that would go into the book, beyond the fully-formed Saranga story.  Even the ending evolved slowly, as I began to see images of an old man, though the possibility of a loop-back to the start of the story only struck me when I was almost there.  I felt like a nocturnal animal walking step by step along a wild path, fearlessly, because the road before me glowed in the dark.  I could simply walk, not thinking too far ahead.  I would come home every day, turn on my computer before I even sat down, and start writing.  The first draft took just two months to write.

I think of languages and stories as living things.  A real story gestates in your mind for as long as it needs to, and then it emerges into the light with its own logic, its own journey, its own constraints. You can dress it in fine clothes, style its hair, trim its nails, feed it, love it, tell it everything you know, but if you venture too close to its core you put its very life at risk.  Just as human intelligence cannot construct a language with the broad sweep of a natural language, with its redundancies and open-endedness, I would not dream of trying to build a story purely out of my imagination.  A living story needs more than just the one parent.  Just as the body is wiser than its inhabitant, a living story must be wiser than its writer.  There must be 'aah!' moments when you suddenly notice things you didn't consciously put there, but which appear as upshots of the story logic.

The most precious thing for me as a storyteller is raw material I have gut instincts about, because I am not outside of it.  And I believe a story happens when the normal routine of life is disrupted, and something new becomes possible.

In Jahajin I call this a 'time outside of time'.

Where, then, is imagination in all this? you ask.  Well, I can't easily pinpoint the elements that came out of my imagination.  I have lived so long with Jahajin that I am not sure any more what actually happened and what is purely my invention.  As images took up residence inside my head, over the years they began to connect organically, and soon they became so real that I am now confused.  But sometimes I remember.  One of my readers told me he was happy that I reminded him of things he had forgotten. Great, except that they never really happened.  They simply could have happened!

There was an old man in eastern UP who was made to sing for me.  And I think I remember an old man in an Indian village looking at me strangely as I played a Trinidadian tape to him.  Were they the same man?  I don't know.

I remember an old woman in a white orhni sitting on a hammock under a house on stilts.  And my father taking me to meet a woman, years earlier, also sitting on a hammock under a house on stilts.  And I remember a woman who said she ran away and left her husband behind in India And another woman who said she was 110 years old, and whose father got her married and then left her wedding to return to India, leaving his pugri with her.  In the crucible of time these images melted like old gold coins, and got transformed into new images.

In popular songs, with an alternating structure of verse-and-chorus, there comes a passage two-thirds of the way into the song known as the bridge.  The bridge is a place where the flavour, chord structure and often even the key of the music will change, and the lyrics seem to come from a place with a more panoramic view of the emotions in the song.  After the bridge the verse-and-chorus structure resumes, but with a new sense of urgency and focus.  We are into endgame now.

In Jahajin the bridge is the eighteenth chapter.  Deeda's history tale is over.  Now the young narrator assumes the role of chronicler, seeing over a vast swath of history, and sums up in quick vignettes the time between Sunnariya's wedding and the present, tracing the descent line from Sunnariya to herself, gaining a better view of the journey that has been scripted for her from the very start.  After this chapter the verse-and-chorus structure resumes, but the arrow points unwaveringly at the young narrator's departure from Trinidad, and her onward journey to India to do as Deeda has asked.

When I was writing chapter eighteen a friend in Trinidad wrote and said that he saw parallels between our ancestors' exile from India and the banwaas at the heart of the Ramayana.  He wondered whether there could be a Trinidadian Ramayana too.  And all of a sudden I saw something winking back at me from my computer screen.  Two of the women in Deeda's story were named Janaki: Sita, the daughter of Janak.  The elder Janaki had even come with her sons from Ayodhya, thrown out by her husband's family.  I thought then of the two brothers from Ayodhya whose names I had not revealed so far. 

Ramesar (Lord Ram).  Ramcharan (the feet of Ram, or Ram’s follower).  Lakshman?
  
I typed in the two brothers' actual names, feeling a strange buzz, and a whole new subtext, a new reading of characters and events, emerged out of the background clutter for those who knew how to decipher the signs.  The story had generated a layer on its own, without my active participation.

But there was more to writing Jahajin than just following the trail of a story.  Many a time while I was writing my engine would grind to a halt.  I needed to know something in order to proceed.  About the train journey from Faizabad to Calcutta What would have been the exact route?  What lines on the railway map were in existence at that time?  I tracked down old railway men and asked.

I wanted details of the journey down the Hooghly by steamship.  I met an old marine engineer, and learned about daily tides, shifting sands on the river bed, the need for special pilots who knew where the deep water was from day to day.  Old steamships, bunkering supplies and coal, 'firing more coal' to the boilers to make the ship go faster.  The recklessly dangerous route through the Mozambique channel, before satellites were there to confirm that monster waves really did exist.  Food for the voyage, the routine on board, illnesses, ocean currents, winds.

And when the old Presbyterian liturgy used by the Canadian Missionaries was traced to the locked basement of a college library in Toronto, and I had to reconstruct the sort of Hindi that would have been used in a wedding ceremony, a Church of North India minister sat with me and we constructed, word by word, the sentences I needed.

I dogged the heels of two historians in Trinidad to find out about the journey from Nelson Island to Esperanza Estate, about the furniture in the barrack rooms, how the cane cutting teams were organized, and how the missionaries had operated on the estates.  I sent my uncle to scout and find the place where the sloop bringing the migrants to the estate must have stopped.  I asked a friend about the railway line to San Fernando, scrapped nearly fifty years ago.  I asked friends in Trinidad and India for the meanings of obscure Bhojpuri words I found in my tapes.  And I tried to retrieve from my memory little things like the joke my grandmother had once told me about her great-grandmother's first meal on the estate.

But my most constant traveling companion as I wrote was Google.com.  The things I found there were amazing!  For example, I knew the month and year my great-great grandmother's boat had reached Trinidad, but not the date: there was a hole in the paper on her freedom certificate at that spot.  Google knew the date.  I was able to Google into the old accounts of the estate my family was indentured to, and I found a bill for my great-great grandfather's hospital treatment.  I wanted to see the place where the sloop taking the migrants to the estate had landed.  Google showed me a number of photographs of the bay with its jetty!

My last thought as I look back on the experience of writing Jahajin is that I could not have written this sort of book if I had not lived all these years in India The person I was before I came here would not have had the same feel for the landscape the migrants left, the same facility with Bhojpuri and Hindi, the same contacts who could point me so easily towards whatever I wished to know.  And before I crossed the kala pani myself, I don't think I could ever have understood how Deeda would have felt, waiting all those years just to send a message back…

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