A Lyrical Portrait of Young Adults Coming of Age in A Turbulent Country
In On Photography, Susan Sontag observes that every photograph invites the viewer to penetrate its two-dimensional likeness to uncover the three-dimensional riches that gave rise to it. As Sontag puts it, the photograph seems to say, “There is the surface. Now think – or rather feel, intuit – what is beyond it, what the reality must be like if it looks this way.” With an acute understanding of how language, like a camera, both reveals and conceals, Mishi Saran artfully composes the story of her passionate photographer protagonist, Asha, in The Other Side of Light, yoking it to snapshots of a country that is, every now and then, frothing with imposed Emergencies, riots and terrorist plots.
Starting around the time when Indira Gandhi was first elected, Saran refracts the bigger events through the tinier, equally significant happenings in Asha’s life. She is born in the late 60s to a fiercely political mother (Amma), who consorts with revolutionaries in her living room, and a father, who seems to support the Cause in an abstract sense, but is also jaded by the sheer world-weariness of having to work and prop up his household. Asha is both affectionate towards and somewhat disdainful of Amma’s zeal: “She felt a vast and endearing responsibility for the state of the world.” Quite naturally, Asha almost seems to grope for the opposite: an academic or artistic distance from the world (and perhaps, metaphorically from her forceful mother too).
But well before she encounters the contraption that would proffer her a way in which to dispassionately examine her world and surroundings, the child Asha already seems to possess a still photographer’s knack for observing enchantments in the commonplace. For instance, when Indira Gandhi called for an attack on Pakistan, to support East Pakistan’s thrust towards autonomy, and all windows were taped over with newspapers or brown wrappers, Asha ignores the planes hurtling across distant skies and focuses on a different battle: between a gecko and moth. “The lizard flicked its tongue up and out; in a flash the moth was gone, leaving a whitewashed moment in time.”
Like most novels set in earlier times, the pre-consumptive era moves at a gentler pace. Asha, like other children of that less-satiated period, is easy to please. When Amma escorts her to a tailor shop to get her Diwali outfit, Asha relishes the gift as much as the moment: “She took me up circling stone steps, through narrow doors, on to the balcony where the tailor sat, surrounded by the gurgle of pedal-pressed machines that stitched up my heart with happiness.” Games are conjured, as they once were before the advent of flashing devices and electronic gizmos, with the simplest of objects. A shard of pottery is used to draw the lines of hopscotch squares, across which an already imaginative Asha treads forward or diagonally, quivering with trepidation, as one hopping across “barbed wire or hissing snakes.”
Seemingly distant events continue to reverberate into their lives. At the end of 1983, Bhindranwale confines himself in the Akal Takht, a kind of armed self-imprisonment that was to explode into the near-future, in inconceivable ways. The next year, Indira Gandhi called on the army to invade the holy temple. A few months later, she was killed by her own security guards. It was an assassination that sprouted like a firecracker, bursting with hundreds of tit-for-tat massacres – Hindus and Sikhs killing each other in a senseless rampage, a violent orgy reminiscent of past communal riots and the nation’s one-time Partition. Asha watches her father’s friend, Charan Uncle, transform overnight from a proud Turban-sporting Sikh into a wrathful but subjugated “cut Surd,” his lopped hair symbolic of his new shrunken identity: “I understood then it was possible for a man to appear physically smaller after a trauma.”
Adolescence ushers the inevitable self-consciousness about one’s bodily imperfections, like Asha’s harelip scar, that was nearly invisible to others, but agonizingly prominent to the young adult. She also enters a college in Delhi, where she meets the three other women, whose lives would become fatefully intertwined with hers. She meets Kabir, the slender young man, lit by a flaming idealism, as hell-bent on changing the world, as Asha’s parents once were. The sparky discord, at a first meeting, gives into the gravitational tug they exert on each other. But it’s an inter-religious relationship, the kind of forbidden love that she is afraid of disclosing even to her radical parents.
But Asha’s other love – photography – fostered by a camera gifted by an artist, helps her transcend the high and low tides of a relationship, that is already tested perhaps, by Kabir’s tenacious and somewhat cocksure commitment to his causes: “He wanted to change the world; I merely wanted to photograph it.” She heads to Switzerland, to study under the offbeat, taciturn Jean – a teacher, who was unbeknownst to him, equally in need of a pupil, or of anyone who could break him out of the apathy enforced by his daughter’s death.
In that country, where Asha is ripped away from familiar languages, and is compelled to confront the starkness of the mountainous terrains or the glassy shine of sun-dazzled lakes, she learns to guide her lens beyond the trite and obvious. Training her eye and perhaps listening to her focal self, away from the banter and noise of the familiar. The aggravating and not-so-easy-to-please Jean propels her, to discover that interplay between light and lens, and her own manner of seeing the world. To achieve the elusive middle-ground that evades most artists, between tautness and letting go.
There is also the forging between Asha and her new place. The Switzerland that was once an alien and foreign terrain, now feels a bit like home. In a letter to her sometimes-on, sometimes-off boyfriend, she writes: “Maybe you leave bits of yourself in the places where you have grown, piles of skin cells that fell off unneeded, a few dead, useless thoughts that caught on tree branches.”
The distance might have helped her relationship too. On her return to India, she meets Kabir at a tea plantation in Assam. An encounter that is almost as magical as their one-time rendezvous at the Qutub Minar. Then one early morning, he is shot dead. A shell-shocked Asha is dragged through police inquiries and bureaucratic trials, even as she struggles to recover the feeling of that one day and night. If only thoughts and feelings were like photographs, easy to dredge up, recover or tack onto plasticky pages. Asha survives, she meets another man. She heads into a new life.
But returning again, to the first meeting between Asha and Kabir, to a conversation that can do with many retellings. When Kabir dismisses Asha’s participation in Romeo and Juliet, an irrelevant angrezi play, Asha retorts: “Are you saying love is irrelevant to us?” An untenable inter-community love? Just for that, but for many other reasons as well, The Other Side of Light, is a must-read. Moreover, it’s written in a poetic, lyrical style, with Saran’s slant on words, as sly, as ineffable as the falling sunbeams that are trapped by her protagonist’s lens.
References
Mishi Saran, The Other Side of Light, Harper Collins India, New Delhi 2012