The Last Morning With Those Who Could Not Speak
There are partings that are announced with speeches, with embraces, with long promises to write and to return. And then there are partings that take place in silence, because one side has no words at all, only large, trusting eyes, and a warmth that has leaned against your shoulder every winter morning of your life.
In the villages of Kashmir, before 1990 broke the valley open, a cow was never merely a cow. She was Lil, or Gonur, or Heemal, or Sondhur, or Saanpa. Her calf was Lalaa, or Saaba. They had names because they had places. They were spoken to in the morning as one speaks to a child. They were called by name from the courtyard, and they came, unhurried, knowing the voice, knowing the hand that would feed them.
The old lady of the house was their keeper, their mother in all but birth. Before she had eaten herself, she had fed them. Before the family sat down to its own meal, their share had been set aside. She knew which one liked her voice low and soft, which one grew restless if her calf was taken too far away, which one would nudge her sari with her head until she turned and stroked her forehead. They recognised her footsteps. They recognised her smell. They recognised the sound of the brass vessel she carried, and they would low, softly, not in hunger alone, but in welcome.
For the family, milk was not bought. It was given. It was a gift exchanged between two kinds of life that had learned to trust one another completely. The cow gave milk because she felt safe. The family gave care because they felt loved. That was the whole economy of the home, and it was more honest than any market in the world.
Then came the winter of 1990 when everything had to be left behind.
No one had told the animals that they were to be abandoned. How could they be told? They could not be told where their people were going, or why, or for how long, or whether they would ever come back. They stood in the courtyard that morning as they had stood every morning, waiting to be fed, waiting to be milked, waiting for the familiar routine that had held their small world together.
And so the family did what broken hearts have always done. They performed a farewell that was also a prayer.
They fed them first, one last time, with their own hands, as if by feeding them they might somehow make up for the days to come when another hand would feed them. They garlanded them with marigold, their necks bright with colour against the grey of that frightened morning. They applied tilak to their foreheads, red and trembling, as one does for a departing traveller, as one does for a goddess. The old lady pressed her forehead to the cow's forehead and wept, not quietly, but with the deep, tearing sobs of a mother who knows she is leaving her child in a world she cannot protect.
The children clung to them. They buried their faces in their warm flanks. They kissed their muzzles. They called their names again and again, Lil, Heemal, Lalaa, as if by repeating them they could keep them from being forgotten. The animals looked on, bewildered, patient, innocent. They did not understand why the hands that stroked them were shaking. They did not understand why the eyes that looked at them were full of tears. They only knew that something was wrong, and they stood still, as animals do when they sense grief, offering the only comfort they had: their nearness.
Some were handed over to neighbours, with folded hands and a choked voice: Please, look after her. She likes warm water in winter. She gets frightened in thunder. Please, do not let her calf go hungry. Promises were made that could not be kept, because no one knew if the neighbours themselves would stay. Some animals were left standing in the courtyard, watching their people walk away down the lane, carrying a single bag, not looking back because to look back would have been unbearable.
Many wanted to carry them along. Oh, how they wanted to. But where were they going? They themselves did not know. They were fleeing to save their lives and their honour, with no home waiting, no shed, no courtyard, no field. To take a cow on that journey would have been to condemn her to a suffering worse than parting. And so they left them, and the cruelty of it was that it was done out of love.
That is the particular pathos of this separation. A man can explain his leaving. A woman can promise to return. A child can write a letter. But a speechless creature cannot be consoled with reasons. She cannot be told that this is not abandonment, that this is compulsion, that her people wept for her long after they had left her. She can only watch the gate close, and wait, that evening, for a footstep that does not come.
For the first time in any film on the tragedy of the Kashmiri Pandits, Maharaj Shah has dared to film what was never been filmed before ; not just the leaving, but the loving. The farewell to the cows, the garlands, the tilak, the tears, the packed bags, the waiting truck, the neighbour stepping forward to receive what a family could no longer carry. In that one dawn scene, he has captured an entire civilization’s grief, faith, and dignity.
This is why this scene in Maharaj Shah’s film Azadi moves one so deeply. It does not invent grief. It remembers it. It shows what history books forget: that exile is not only about houses and land and temples. It is about the breaking of a thousand small, daily loves. It is about an old lady’s empty hands in the morning. It is about a cow, garlanded and blessed, standing in an empty courtyard, waiting for a voice that will call her name, and will never call it again.
( Avtar Mota )
CHINAR SHADE by Autarmota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 India License.
Based on a work at http:\\autarmota.blogspot.com\.
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