AN UNFORGETTABLE TRIP “Balzac and the little Chinese Seamstress”

I was lucky to visit Afghanisthan recently. I had the most unbelievable trip to Faizabad, Bharak and Jurm , on a project as a media consultant , for capacity building of local journalists. You are on the fifth page of my diary of that unforgettable trip.

***

It is kind of uncanny that the only book I picked up from the frugal library collection of the staff quarters of AKF had so much to remind me of mixture of strange excitement and thrill I felt from being in Faizabad, this remote capital of one of the most impoverished provinces of Afghanistan.

“Balzac and the little Chinese Seamstress” was an usually long name for this slender (less than 200 pages book) I intended to read during the quiet evenings. There was no permission to go out and I had no company after the workshops sessions got over, around four.

So when I decided to turn in early that evening with a cup of chai and this book I still had my head teeming with the days “rushes” of dusty tracks, prudent roadside shops, locals on mule back, men of varied expressions and age and faceless women floating like sorceresses in huddles of blue and white burkhas.

Unlike any other place the young children here did not come running at the sight of a tourist vehicle or posed to be photographed. They have had too many volunteer workers plying in and about to charm them anymore . The young girls invariably hid their face under their chador and made a quick exit at the sight of a camera. Not just in shyness but from the involuntary habit of remaining anonymous.

Anyway during that first evening in Faizabad, the book I had picked up to read came as a great surprise. It seemed to be an extension of those thoughts and impressions I was gradually creating in my mind about Faizabad…only the author Dai Si jie was a Chinese , writing about a time some 3 decades ago.

Towards the end of the 1968 the great Helmsman of China’s revolution Chairman Mao launched a campaign wherein universities were closed and all the “young intellectuals” were sent to the countryside to be “re-educated by the peasants”. This story was about the author and his friend Lou who were part of this grand human experiment and sent to one lost corner of a mountain. Banished to the mountain known as the Phoenix Of the sky.

There was no road to the mountain only a narrow path way threading steeply through the great walls of craggy rock. Hundreds of kms into its folds, near the banks of river Ya was the small town of Yong Jing was their temporary home.

If the remoteness of the place wasn’t a good enough reminder of the hamlet town I was visiting, the peculiar geographic conditions of Yong Jing that had led the local population to grow opium, certainly was. Incidentally even Yong Jing the opium growers were all armed men, flexing a degree of power over the locals ,like the warlords of Afg I guess, even if not half as dangerous.

If Yong Jing was along the new route to Tibet, Faizabad was not far from the silk route either.

Here too the villages were “scattered around the serpentine path along the depths of valleys” and many perched along the steps of the undulated hills. Only the valleys were not as green as you would like them to be. Yong jing, may as well been Faizabad along Kokcha, with crude uneducated villagers robbed of the gift of education and exposure. That’s exactly how I felt about Faizabad, when I had my first aeriel glimpse of it from the 8 seater Pactec flight that brought me here.

The description of the village and its remoteness from civilisation was one thing but the state of the young boys befitted my own journey to Afg in so many ways too– wasn’t mine a sort of re-education as well? Only in my case it was not an ordeal but a welcome exploration, and a wonderful adventure. The next few days however brought around several surprising revelations that forced me to modify some of these earliest “rushes” but the similarities between the book I was reading and my exp didn’t end yet.

Infact one of the biggest revelations found an interesting comparison. The story narrated how the villagers had shown an immense appetite and yearning for stories in the intellectually starved environment created by the communists. The two young boys had stumbled upon them from a world hitherto unknown. The boys in their turn secretly devoured the western classics they had discovered by chance. They transformed story telling to an art form akin to a movie for their eager audience. The villagers sat around them mesmerised and watched every little action of theirs, crying copiously and laughing in abundance, vicariously living a life totally denied to them.

However the real twist of the story lay in the underlying shifts taking pace in the psyche of the new generation. The little seamstress no more than an unrefined country girl at first gradually comes alive to the reality of her existence, through the words of Balzac.

The final denouement lay in her bold step to exert herself and fly out like a phoenix from the primitive and claustrophobic confines of the village which was the only home she knew for the longest time.

Where’s the comparison you would ask … Well to my amazement I discovered poverty or hunger, as you casually interpret it was not a major issue with the locals. They have lived meagrely for generations now. They are used to the hardships and scarcity that nature had doled out to them. What they are still trying to grapple with are the fetters the society continues to impose on them. Ravaged by outsiders as much as much as their own kinsmen they are hopeless souls in search of some light. Sometimes literally so! The desperate 2 lakh population depends on the local micro hydel project to supply them with a meagre 3000 watts power every evening. Naturally just about two percent are its beneficiary. The rest have bought cheap Chinese generators to bring a little light in their life.

More importantly these generators help them to connect to the happenings of the rest of the world. Happenings not as in serious issues as nuclear pacts. How could they be bothered? Apart from local issues surprisingly what interests them most are the movies and soaps from India. The new generation doesn't know a smattering of their history, (too painful to remember I guess) but in Tulsi , Kumkum,Prerena and Parvati Bhabhi they have found a vacarious existence. They are glued to the idiot box evening after evening, devouring the strange twists and turns of fate of their favourite actors. "Do they realy live like this in India ?" " No, not all of it is real", I would say. Tulsi who is their favourite have a lot of follwers but not all would like her to be such a forgiving diva. " She takes too much of nonsense and that is not good for her," explained one while theh other said "She must a little bold attimes and speak up," " I remembered to take those little notes to be passed on to the director if not to Tulsi herself.I also learnt that not just women , men were so taken up by these serials that they decided to wear "Anurag Kurta" this id.You will find little girls curling their locks and saying "nekka" imitating Komolika and young boys hooting signature tunes.

Amazing I thought. I had kept my daughter insulated from these serials not happy with the lifestyle they portrayed and here thousands of kms away ,in these dry deserts it was seeping into the minds of hundreds of beady eyed men and women,nurturing new habits and thinking.

Good or bad is another story.How long will be till one of them become the little seamstress and find the courage to throw away the burkha and claim her life I wondered.

***