When yesterday becomes today, once again

One has sometimes been called the ‘Grim Reader’ on account of some of the books that I read. This is not a very complementary take on the Grim Reaper, who is always busy and never ever takes a holiday. It was just the one volume that set me off on this path — though there have been constant and cheerful digressions. When I was about 13 or 14 years old, a friend of my father handed me a book. I vaguely remember his words: “You are at about the same age as the hero of this story. It will, forever, influence the way you think.” I doubt if one gave any attention to that statement then. No matter how world-weary one may pretend to be, in one’s early teens, one hardly thinks of ‘forever’. The book had a bleak, dark cover; it was not like the flashy ‘westerns’ and thrillers that I devoured at the time. It did not have an interesting title like ‘Death Rides a Horse’ or ‘Mystery of the Haunted House’. The author was a Russian and, to the best of my memory, till then, I had not read a Russian writer. One had heard of Chekhov or Tolstoy, but they wrote ‘serious stuff’ that grown-ups read, and teachers taught. The book, ‘Babi Yar’, came home with me, but lost out to the competition that murders and mysteries held. A few days later, my father’s friend came home and asked if I’d read the book. Lying through my teeth, I said that I had.

“What did you think of it?” he asked.

“Very nice,” or words to that effect was my answer.

“That means you’ve not read it. I can take it back if you are not going to read it,” he said through his bristly Colonel Sahib style moustache.

That rankled. One stammered and stuttered and said that one would read it. And I did. My father’s friend was right, that book has impacted me, and continues to do so, in more ways than one. Written in the first person by Anatoly Kuznetsov, this book is in the form of a story based on living on the periphery of a Nazi death camp. It is the story of how, in the ravine area of Babi Yar in Kiev (Kyiv), almost 34,000 people, almost all of whom were Jews, were massacred in just two days in September 1941. This was the single largest massacre of the Holocaust.

The boy, Anatoly, has not reached his teens when the story begins and is just 14 when it ends. He and his friends play at a short distance from the extermination camp where machine-gun fire is constant. His family lives a somewhat normal life in the shadow of the killings that are taking place, just a short distance away. Seeing my reaction to the book, my father told his friend that he should not have given it to me as I was too young to process what it held. But that book led to reading about other events and stories that war and war crimes beget.

Let me now come to why this still resonates. Half of my ancestry is from the town of Mirpur in what is now Occupied Kashmir. The story of Mirpur is one of the lesser known horrors of Partition. Between November 25 and 27, 1947 — after our Independence — thousands of men, women and children were massacred in Mirpur. Estimates of those killed go up to 18,000. Others are believed to have met a fate worse than death. Those who survived, moved to Jammu and other places. My mother, after marriage, moved away from J&K, but I still have family in the state. Some of my happiest memories are of the childhood spent in Jammu. There are a couple of strange ones too. One goes back to the time of a family excursion to the lake and tourist spot of Mansar. We had just crossed Samba, close to the border. when one could hear what I thought were firecrackers. “Oh nothing, the Pakistanis are firing again and we are firing back,” was what one was told. Very matter of fact. The family carried on for its picnic. This was a generation that had borne the brunt of the massacres of Partition and still lived on the edge of conflict.

All this has again come home during the last ‘hit and run’ that our recalcitrant neighbour has tried. A cousin’s husband lost a close relative in the shelling of civilian areas in Poonch. An uncle had the debris of a drone shot down by our forces land near his house. A cousin and I were speaking even as enemy drones were being eliminated over Srinagar.

For those who are reading this piece and who may wish to pick up ‘Babi Yar’, which was first published in the 1960s, I do not want to play the spoiler and say more. There is just this one phrase of warning with which the book ends: “Let me emphasise again that I have not told about anything exceptional, but only about ordinary things that were part of a system; things that happened just yesterday, historically speaking, when people were exactly as they are today.”

— The writer is a Shimla-based author