What it means to leave

Is it really possible to write about your life without thrusting a blunt knife in your belly? What do readers want, blood spills on the page, says literary critic Aamer Hussein in his essay in ‘A Stone Thrown in a Pond — Essay and Poems on the Enigma of Leaving’, a new anthology edited by publisher Ritu Menon.

Aamer grapples with living with cancer, of not being afraid of death, of a dying friend, of not leaving to die in the city of his childhood, “the fading sound” of his language wresting the blunt knife to bleed on the page. He is not the only one. Blood-soaked, loss-tinged and deeply felt, ‘A Stone Thrown in a Pond’ has writers laying themselves bare in a literary laundry list about leaving.

It begins with a body blow by Geeta Patel, a professor at the University of Virginia, a feminist, and a writer. In ‘The Way of Dreams’, she writes quietly, devastatingly beautifully of childhood, of the pearl bazaar of Hyderabad “sunny with the sounds of Urdu”’, of Shahrazad spinning scenes at night for her and her brothers, and of rape.

“None of those stories were what saved me, though,” she writes. Her darkest moment — “my father’s salacious hands” — is revealed in a “sparse” sentence, almost whispered not like a secret, but as Shahrazad would tell a story in words that are ordinary, gentle and unforgettable. “He started raping you when you were so small. You were beginning to read. He raped your brother,” she writes about her mother telling her. That bare description set her free.

“Those sentences, sent on such quiet feet, were my relief. One, just one thing in which I saw my story. The beginning of leaving something behind, with no moral coin that I had to pay,” she writes.

Her candour, clarity and courage leave you breathless, the essay haunts you. Not for what happened, but by her vulnerability that is defiant.

Poet Gagan Gill’s ‘Somebody Else’s Love’ sowed the seed for this book. “Sometimes somebody else’s love would drift into our lives,” she writes. “To get over it, we would wait for some other love. And sometimes, we would even leave our own love behind at somebody else’s door.” It is this poem that haunted Ritu, she writes in a note that begins the book. Years later, in search of an answer, she got writers to explore this mystery of leaving. “After all, every day we leave something behind, and every day we return to something we had left earlier,” she writes. It is an eternal one — the leaving that you do, before the final exit.

Scattered across this anthology are these personal journeys. Painter and writer Bulbul Sharma writes evocatively of the gardens she had and now only exist in her head; journalist Anita Anand of 26 homes and poet Gagan of a train that leaves Sialkot in 1947.

“When parents die, you hunt for clues/in strips of Sorbitrate, immaculate handwriting, unopened cologne,” writes poet Arundhati Subramanian, breaking your heart with ‘Finding Dad’. Her poems are about leaving-without-any-possibility-of-return — death.

“It gets easier, friend, with age, to delete, plan breakfast, turn the page,” she says in ‘Deleting the Picture’. “It would have been easier still/if you hadn’t deleted the sun.”

The enigma of leaving isn’t just the finality of death. There is escaping a life to live. Sabyn Javeri’s ‘Leaving the Good Girl Behind’ focuses on her leaving her marriage, the “internalised script of the ‘good girl’” narrative and the desire for “acceptance”, to find herself in writing.

Sabyn married young and spent her life trapped in a prison of ‘likeability’. It is writing that sets her free. “At first, fiction gave me refuge, a place to bury things I could not say aloud,” she writes. “But then it became an act of resistance. I did not know yet that fiction, too, could be a form of emancipation.”

This freedom comes at the cost of leaving the safety of everything she knows. “For years, I lied to myself to stay small, to be safe,” she writes. “But now, as I stand at the edge of fifty, I am choosing truth. I am choosing to begin again.”

Ritu’s deeply moving essay goes back to a different beginning. She revisits her adolescence to write tenderly of the way of life that is lost. The big P — Partition —- lingers on the margins. Her grandmother left the keys of her house in Lahore with her neighbours, telling them she would be back. She never did. ‘What is Left’ conjures up the Delhi she grew up in, with Connaught Place at its glittering centre. She invokes the names of iconic shops — Cottage Industries Emporium for silk; Kwality’s for a treat; Roopchand, in D Block, where her mother bought jewellery from what she saved from housekeeping. With each name, she stitches details of her mother and her life.

Her delicately embroidered handkerchiefs; Hillman Minx (DLA 1491), the car she drove; her prized No. 10 Aero knitting needles. Each summer, Ritu and her sister were taught how to embroider, chain stitch, cross-stitch, hemming — all on tiny pieces of voile. “Nothing sloppy passed muster,” she writes. It is why she is still an expert in hemming — another poignant remnant of that life that has gone and can never return.

The book is filled with women who wear “their stories like second skin”, as Sabyn describes them. But there are also men. Jerry Pinto’s ‘A Stone Thrown in a Pond’ — the essay from which the title of the book is taken — explores why men leave and women stay. It is classic Jerry. Peppered with popular culture references of the itchy-feet men — ‘Chala jata hoon kisi ki dhun me’, as Rajesh Khanna crooned — it fashions the brief of leaving into a philosophical piece on men and the fantasy of the unending road. “Even when men do not leave, they dream of it,” he writes.

This free-spirited adventurism is in contrast to the forced leaving of Sidi Mubarak Bombay (1820-1885). Ranjit Hoskote turns the life of the enslaved African explorer into a poem. Kidnapped by Arab traders when he was 12, he eventually accompanied writer and traveller Richard Burton on an expedition to find the source of the Nile. “I should go home now, but I forget where that is,” he writes in his poem.

Stephen Alter traces his missionary grandparent’s journey from home in America in 1916 to India, a decision not to be taken lightly in his essay ‘Leaving Kashmir.’ He writes evocatively, adding letters that Martha, his grandmother, wrote home of travelling to Srinagar. He juxtaposes their story with the fictional story of Jesus visiting the Valley, and ultimately, his own trip when he was involved in the filming of ‘Haider’.

Perhaps, award-winning Palestinian Adania Shibli’s essay ‘Of Place, Time and Language’ is the most urgent. She writes of when she visited Jenin, a refugee camp, “the city” of her childhood, for a reading after seven years. It is a long time, she says, during which thousands of lives were terminated, thousands of acres confiscated and thousands of homes destroyed. “I try to imagine the ground I’ll be walking on. The only time I was in the camp the ground consisted of rubble,” she writes. “I remember the shoes I wore… After that visit I threw them away, together with all the destruction they stepped on.”

The strength of an anthology depends on the writers, but the editor is the puppet master. Crafted with heart and meant to be savoured, the collection is the proof of the relationship Ritu Menon shares with the writers, her stock and trade as a publisher, and friends. Each essay offers an intimate detail of the writer — a different shade of mourning in black, grey, purple, blue and white. Each threaded with love and vulnerability that is rare. As Aamer writes about what his friend Hanan tells him after reading passages of this memoir: “I love you enough to let you leave this city, this country, even this world.”

— The writer is a literary critic