OF CABBAGES AND KINGS |Are citizens really ‘blind’ to poverty, sense of hierarchy in India’s society? | Farrukh Dhondy

“That moon was under eclipse all these years

Though it had occurred to me that it was there

Was this eclipse inhibitions and fears?

And suddenly I knew I was aware

That when and once I struck out to be free

Of the desire for love I realise

The shining of that moon awaited me…

A touch, a kiss, a phrase opened my eyes

The light of that moon wrapped around, embraced

Me… In its trance, of one thing I was sure

The enchantments of the past seemed a waste

As this infatuation seemed secure.

So, should the past be gone without regret?

No moon is brighter than a star… And yet…?

From Sonnets for The Dawn

This last week saw the vernal equinox, which some thousands of years or so, the Zoroastrians, having invented God and trousers, have adopted as the beginning of the year. We Parsis (surviving Zoroastrians in India) call it Jamshedji Navroze. However, sometime in the ninth century AD, when the Zoroastrians fled from the Arab invasion of Persia and settled in India, the idiots forgot to count and extra day every four years. In other words, relative to the Roman calendar. Of course, this loss of the leap year day caused the “new year” of our Parsi calendar to move one day back relative to the real calendar.

So, Parsis celebrate two days as new year. The one which is stable at the vernal equinox on the 20th or 21st of March, depending on where you are longitudinali, and the other itinerant one which has reached a date in August, soon to traverse July, June and one day reach the vernal equinox.

Gentle reader, believe me, while I see the error of our historical ways, I have no objection to celebrating two new year’s day each year -- bring it on -- cheers!

The second moveable new year is called “Papeti”, which, I was told is a distortion of the word “Pateti”.

As a child and as a teenager, I dressed in white and a pious cap and went with the family to the fire temple with hundreds of other Parsis. At the gates of the fire temple, we would be accosted by a regular beggar on our street who would cry in Marathi “aamchi popti!” in the anticipation of identifying with the festival and receiving generous alms from the fire-temple-goers.

And the memory of him and the other regular beggars on the streets of our neighbourhood prompts me, gentle reader, to declare the more serious intention of this column which was suggested/provoked by an essay by the writer Vinati Sukhdev, who writes about her daughter asking her why Indians are characteristically blind to the poverty and hierarchical contempt that pervades the nation’s society.

Of course, Sukhdev goes on to list films that she says contradicts the blindness her daughter has noted.

My own experience of growing up in India was, I protest, devoid of any such blindness. The shameful poverty of caste and class differentials of my motherland were very prominent in my consciousness, and even conscience. It was the observation of abject deprivation of poverty on our streets that induced me into finding out about and embracing egalitarian aspirations and then directed the socialist and even Marxist convictions from my early teens. There’s been no turning back.

Gentle reader, I crave your indulgence as I reproduce here a sonnet-story from my book Grannies Gripes and Growing Up of the sort of experience that dominated this observation:

TOP AND TAIL

We used to call them ‘ladies’ fingers’ or

In the markets ‘bheeda’ or ‘bhindi’

While speaking in Gujarati or Hindi.

The cook would fetch them from the market for

A dinner dish of bheeda par eeda

The chopped vegetable with eggs on top

With onions and tomatoes and a drop

Or more of chilli oil -- indeed a

Dish which I thought of as my favourite till

I saw two young boys following our cook

From market. Their eyes had a searching look

As they stood by our gate. And they were still

Hanging about, so I asked our Hukam

Ali, the cook, who said “Leave them, they come

Following me when they see I have bought

This bhindi which I have to top and tail

And chuck those bits into the kuchra pail

They want those bits. So, I feel that I ought

To cut larger bits off the bhindi’s ends

For them to gather in their shirts and take

The wretched bits to eat. For heaven’s sake!

Did you see the older one’s stomach bends

Inwards as though it would meet his back bone

That’s where, our Farrukh, this country is now

The politicians babble on but how

Is this going to ever change? God alone

Knows. Not me, my imagination fails

When I see those boys begging tops and tails!”

India has undoubtedly moved on and there are no more street boys begging for tops and trails of bhindi. But have the political dispositions of today’s Bharat Mata dedicated themselves to

eliminating that grinding poverty in cities and rural India? It’s a question, not a rhetorical assertion that they haven’t.

I write this from Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam. I was only accosted by one armless beggar on the street. There are so many on the streets of London today. There were so many on

the streets of Poona where I grew up!