Editor’s Note
In They Won’t Say, Vanya Singh gets into the mercurial, sly-toned mindspace of an author reminiscing about her friend circle while giving an interview to an excited literature student – someone usually called in university slang as an ‘enthu cutlet’. It is the gaps between questions and answers where the author finds memories, swelling through her mind and infusing her thoughts, recalling the times when her friends battled censorship and violence.
Irony and nostalgia are not easy to balance, since the latter cannot but be shorn of that sincerity which gives memories its color and texture. One thinks of works like Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland with its characters’ many flashbacks of their heady 60s youth in the face of repression. Vanya’s text straddles the rhetorical and the aesthetic delicately, yielding somehow a mordant look from the present combined with a heartfelt tribute to past lives.
—Uday Kanungo
The Bombay Literary Magazine
They won’t say; the times were dark
Rather: why were their poets silent?
– Bertolt Brecht
INTERVIEWER: Food remains maybe the most common metaphor in your work. You come back to it again and again. Why is that?
J: Food is poetry! It’s all the same thing, it’s an extension of expression. Food is how we communicate. The chicken soup your father makes when you are sick. The tea you make for your mother. The new recipe you try when guests are coming over, and start improvising halfway through. The aunt who is known for one cake and never bakes anything else. The dal at your childhood best friend’s house. You get what I’m saying. Food is language, food is music. I see no difference between poetry and food, they belong to the same process.
INTERVIEWER: That’s beautiful! You say poetry is like food; but what is poetry to you?
A car honks outside. Honestly, Joyita thinks suddenly. The room is very sultry, and the hot breeze from the open window is only making it worse. I don’t know. Death. Life. Whatever word you want it to be. It is not difficult to say something profound.The car’s driver is doing credit to Delhi’s reputation. The interviewer gets up and shuts the window. The room is now both hot and airless.
INTERVIEWER: So sorry about that. You were telling us what poetry means to you?
Somewhere in the same city, a car is at this moment no doubt honking outside Atif’s house… What is poetry.
Joyita wants to laugh loudly into her cheap pin up mic. Laugh and laugh and laugh; till the interviewer gets scared, till someone throws a glass of cold water at her, till the end of eternity becomes her ringing laughter in this tiny, sagging, burning room.She thinks about the first protest, some thirty years ago. The four of them sitting around a table in a canteen they had just recently outgrown. A plate of dosa between them. Their voices still hoarse, the adrenaline still pumping. The memory of an angry policeman close enough to feel his spit sitting with them. Atif, looking at his camera and without glancing up, said suddenly, completely deadpan-
“I want back all the time and money I spent on the methodology paper.”
How all of them had burst into laughter at that, suddenly bound together in something warm and fierce. How there were clasps of shoulders, the aliveness of their bodies suddenly acute, the sun glinting on the steel plate blindingly bright.
J: Poetry is a turn towards the light.
It seemed improbable, she thought, that truth had ever felt so heavy in her mouth before. In the corner of the room she could see Atif the way he was twenty years ago, the sun in his hair, the lens of his camera the only thing not scuffed and weathered, the way he could outwork and outwalk all the rest of them.
“You intellectual types” he would say, setting down cups of coffee on his latest issue of The Sociological Review- “Need to go to the gym. Go for a trek. Change does not come from writing a poem and sleeping it off for the rest of the day. If the police are ever chasing us, I don’t have the money to bail all of you out.”
“Debo can literally outrun you”
“I am suing you for defamation”
God, the laughter. She had laughed far too much in her life so far, more than poets are supposed to, anyway. But what else could you do? What was it all for, if not that?
INTERVIEWER: You are often called a revolutionary poet, a poet of protest. But I have always thought your work is far more tender and nuanced, it certainly transcends the narrow service of one cause or the other. Do you see yourself as a writer first or as an activist first?
She looked at the interviewer. A third year, no doubt president of the literary club. Intelligent, that much had been obvious from the first email asking for the interview, and determined, as had been made clear by the subsequent ones. Stunningly attractive, she had just now noticed, with her straight soft hair and lightbulb skin. She did not look away, under the scrutiny, though her hands had started looking for something to do. The lines that framed her were startlingly clear- her shoulders a straight line against the bland room, the kurta and jeans in an unpretentious harmony. Blurred, vague answers would not do here, thought Joyita, feeling distantly the way you do when playing hide and seek, when the footsteps of the seeker stop so close you can hear their breath.
J: That’s a great question.
INTERVIEWER: Thank you.
Her shoulders said; I know.
J: I don’t view them as separate categories. Poems are not written with agendas. If they are, it’s not poetry. Poems are most relentlessly and ruthlessly after truth, so in simply being true to my craft I suppose I am inadvertently an activist.
INTERVIEWER: That’s so interesting. It almost sounds like this search for truth in itself becomes the agenda you claim to disavow.
Joyita was almost proud of her.
J: That’s one way to think about it. I suppose what I mean is that the experience is identical.
INTERVIEWER: Could you expand on that?
Joyita had once, years ago, in response to a critic said the words ‘irony is the death of a poet.’ Back then it had been said with the loftiness of the certain. Life, it seemed, had not taken her writing advice to heart.
J: Fear. They are both about fear.
It hadn’t always been easy to be afraid. On the other hand, it had certainly not always been difficult. For most of her life, fear was the boundary of her tribe. Or more precisely, the defiance of it. That is how she had always identified home- by fear sitting like an abandoned dog outside the front door. Never allowed in, never entirely out of sight.
Over the years it had become an exhilarating thing, a marker of being alive. It’s what kept her so closely bound with the others. Other 50 year olds did not have friends like this. Usually, zeal for friendship and cause and all that wears off, considered sneeringly to be a hobby of the youth. There are spouses to attend to, children to raise, money to earn. But the front and centre of her life had always been occupied by the bizarre bonds of solidarity, with an unerring dependence on community. Not that they had remained untouched by age. Cynicism had crept around them like an ambushing army, as more and more colleagues and friends ‘saw sense’, as it became increasingly obvious that the same rooms were screening the same documentaries and very little was different, except the colour of their hair.
The worst had been Debo. The night after the death of Gauri Lankesh, the four of them had found themselves in the same city, filled with the same rage, cowed by the same fear. They met at a restaurant, almost a dhaba, sitting by the road on red plastic chairs with a dirty red table between them. The street was unusually quiet, with only the occasional car passing by and the sounds of dinner being cooked in every house of the colony across the street. The day had been a flurry, the shock, the grief, the immediate exhaustion of mobilisation. Joyita hadn’t even known the other three were in Bangalore till the evening. It occurred to her how striking the similarity was to the first time they had sat around a table, all those years ago. Mira, a senior journalist now, editor of one of the most respected independent news journals of the country. Atif and Debo, both documentary filmmakers, who were now sometimes called by elite universities for seminars and workshops. And Joyita, with one poetry collection under her belt, and a second one on the way, though she was privately beginning to despair of ever writing anything but the same poem over and over and over again. Not that people noticed. Not that it mattered.
Mira, who had on several occasions worked with Gauri, spoke first.
“Should we order Dosa?”
Atif, his camera for once switched off, nodded.
“It could have been any of us.”
Trust Debo to name a silence.
“It could have been any of us, and we would be with different people, sitting around a different table, thinking the same thing. Nothing would be different.”
“It wasn’t though.”
“Not this time.”
The dosa arrived. For several moments there was a silence so tense it could have been a battlefield at dawn. The dosa was comically, ridiculously, improbably large. And then, suddenly, like an explosion, laughter. There were tears streaming down Mira’s face. Atif was clutching Debo like a drowning man with a life raft. And Joyita, the poet, suddenly both achingly close to them and aeons away thought with a fierce, sudden clarity
I may not believe in freedom, but I believe in this.
All of a sudden, a corner of the sky exploded in fireworks. The road roared to life as four speeding bikes shot past towards the fireworks, their saffron clad riders hollering at the top of their voices. Silence fell like an axe, in the same sick instance everyone realised what the celebration was.
Atif, his voice quiet and hoarse, said-
“We don’t stop till they stop.”
Under the barrage of white stars, all the threads connecting them became silver, and Atif pointed his camera to the sky.
The next day, they all gave speeches, and that year, Debo quit documentary. She moved to Bombay, and after being in several writers’ rooms for several web series, finally wrote a dystopian sci fi script that found a famous and enthusiastic producer.
She is now one of Bollywood’s special reserves of cynical intellectuals. Her latest film, about dark technology taking over the world, did badly enough in the box office to increase her respect amongst her audience and decrease it amongst producers.
INTERVIEWER: Given your history, it is extremely poignant to me that you connect truth and fear. How would you say these two themes interact in your work, and how has that changed since the case?
The Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967, amended in 2019. UAPA, for short. A draconian anti-terrorist legislation that could, under the right government, be modified to a more or less anti-dissent law.
Relevant to the story because 10 months ago, sanction was granted to prosecute Atif Hussain and Joyita Das under it.
In these 10 months, two things had become exceedingly clear to her.
First, just because something was ridiculous, ironic to the point of farce, did not mean that it could not be at the very same time completely terrifying.
Second, and this one was infinitely worse, was the realisation that she wasn’t very brave. Courage, like a last name, was the thing she had built her life around, but it took very little insight to realise that she did not have very much of it. It had been a place to put her rage, true, it had been a ticket to a place of belonging, on occasion, it had even served as an adrenaline hit. But real courage, the bright unflinching thing that allowed people to wear their own skin as a shield- that was alien to her.
Over her career she had been involved in more protests and movements than she could count. Women’s rights, democratic reform, tribal demands, environmental legislation, anti caste demonstrations, workers’ agitations, poverty eradication policy…
Mira and Atif, if anything had a longer list.
There were threats, abuse, slander, yes. But it was an angry dog outside a firmly shut door. A chain reaction to which addiction was easy- a small enough danger to ignite a manageable enough fear to result in the right amount of exhilarating courage.
What slammed the door open was something so innocuous they had forgotten about it. The short film Atif had made after Gauri’s death, screened publicly a grand total of three times. 27 minutes long, and much more abstract, and dare she say poetic than his usual work, capturing the outpouring of grief and outrage in the following weeks, and the faint sliver of tenuous hope that flickered with it. It contained a 52 second clip of her speech from the next day.
Lying forgotten on some online platform, it had been discovered a full six years later. A case had been filed, alleging the sloganeering and and speeches involved ‘dangerous hate speech’ against India’s largest religious population, that it was made with an ‘intent to provoke violence’ and as such constituted a ‘threat to law and order and internal governance’.
A few of them had met that night, at a friend’s house. There was much sympathy, much outrage passed around. Only Atif seemed to find it as funny as her. When they went out for a cigarette and started laughing, neither of them were very sure what they were laughing at.
It stopped being funny after the MHA approval. It stopped being funny when her phone was confiscated. Well, not exactly. It didn’t stop being funny, if anything, some part of her recognised the brilliance of the script. Farce of the highest order, absurdism without the poetics.
But where did that leave her, anything without the poetics? It left her between two poems; the one she had been writing for two and a half books, and the one balking at the light, thus disqualifying itself from poetry. It left her between truth and fear- the flat white light of legal prose.
She thought suddenly that the only appropriate answer would be to engage in an honest conversation with this girl about how ludicrously hot this room is. The mechanics of a Delhi May. The only honesty would be to ask the question- how have you managed to keep your underarms from getting sweaty?
J: Could I have some water please?
INTERVIEWER: Of course ma’am! Sorry, one second. [sounds of getting up, water being poured]
INTERVIEWER: Not an easy answer clearly! [Both chuckle]
J: Well it’s difficult to answer in these abstractions, isn’t it? Poetry is about moments, we leave the analysis to the literary magazines of Delhi University! [Both laugh]
INTERVIEWER: We try our best! But if you were to try and analyse your own work…
J: How would you answer the question?
INTERVIEWER: Oh I don’t think our readers want to know about that.
J: No, but I do. And I imagine you have editors.
The girl looked at her. Joyita found herself disconcerted by the sharpness of her face, like a professor who knows the answer but insists on ‘discourse.’ Like a seeker waiting for you to turn around before yelling ‘dhappa!’
INTERVIEWER: I completely agree with you, poetry is about moments. Yours more than usual, if you’ll allow me to say so. You’re looking for the truth, and you are as afraid of it being there as you are of it not being there. But that’s normal enough, that’s not what’s unusual in your work. I think with you, fear and truth aren’t opposed at all, they form an alliance against time. All your poetry is a defiance of time.
Time up. The room was bright and white-hot and there were no more shadows to turn away from. Her phone buzzed, and she knew exactly what it was. They stared at each other in a silence suspended so bright it felt like a second sun. Her phone kept buzzing.
INTERVIEWER: Is everything ok?
J: Yes, let me just- so sorry I forgot to put it on silent–
It started ringing. Aaj bazaar mein pa ba jolan chalo…
Almost in a dream she registered that she should change the ringtone. Mira’s name was flashing. She silenced the call.
J: That’s a stunning analysis. There is no way I could have given you an answer like that!
INTERVIEWER: If you’d like to take that call, we can pause…
J: No, that’s alright, nothing important.
INTERVIEWER: Well I think we can move towards the final question…light…the way it…sense of solidarity…figures like Atif Husain…metaphors of resistance…
She found herself suddenly hearing the girl’s voice as if it was coming over a staticky radio. Caught blanks like lightning, flashes of light. A steel plate in the sun, the lens of twin cameras, the whiskey in her parents’ glasses catching the amber light as her mother said- talk to Vinod.
In the past month, arrest had begun to look inevitable. Her mother, a retired bureaucrat, told her finally to reach out to Vinod, a cabinet minister, and a friend’s son. Her father, a retired professor, looked away. Fear and truth…
The meeting with Vinod was straight out a script Debo could have written. She wanted to say ‘don’t talk to me about nationalism, I have sat with it under a furious white rain.’ She wanted to say ‘All I did was sprint towards the light.’ Instead she heard herself say ‘Tea? Coffee?’
Vinod was clear without words in a way she almost envied. It came down to this. Atif was going to jail, and that was something beyond his control. Legally, he could do nothing for her. But. All she had to do was claim the clip of her in the film was taken out of context, its meaning distorted by a filmmaker she had trusted. She had to distance herself publicly from him…then keep a low profile, go off grid for a while. As long as her name didn’t pop up in any new cases, he could guarantee that she would be safe. Sunita mausi was his mom’s best friend…they had been children together, family means something after all…but Atif, he was dangerous. He had to be publicly dismissed…not contacted at any cost…he was going to be nationally known as a terrorist before the month was out…he was sure she understood…not to worry, he would take care of it. Was she writing anything new? He would love to read…yes, she should give his mother a call, she worried, yes, yes, he had to leave, but he would take care of everything.
In the end, it was both horrifying and unsurprising how quick her decision was. A tweet, with trembling fingers, only yesterday. And now…
She opened her phone. The same headline, sent by at least a hundred people. “Atif Hussain Arrested Under Terrorism Charges…”
The girl had stopped talking. The room was buzzing. She was looking at her with that expression again, and Joyita found herself realising at once that she hated it. That there was a hint of resentment in the line of shoulders. She pressed stop on the phone recording. It hadn’t made any noise, but the silence in the room somehow doubled. The sun was as high in the sky as it gets before it starts climbing back down.
“We’re organising a student rally in support of Atif Husain this Friday.”
It was so quiet she almost missed it. It seemed an answer was no longer required of her.
J: Could you repeat your last question please?
INTERVIEWER: I think we only have time for a shorter one now. Our readers would love to know the title of your upcoming collection.
Atif, with all his colours, in jail. She, with a freedom exquisitely free of all poetics. Debo, in outer space. Mira left to collect the statistics of the collapse of a lifetime of something. This straight shouldered girl, beginning her march into the sun. The threads between them- invisible, bloody, the silver of solar eclipse.
Acknowledgements
Image credits: © Gerhard Kurt Müller. Demonstrantin (1988). Oil on plywood. Dimensions: 65 × 79 1⁄8 inches (165 × 201 cm)
Author | Vanya Singh
Vanya Singh is a writer, actor and theatremaker from Uttarakhand, India. Her first play, Birdflight premiered at Thespo 25. It is written, directed and performed by her and is produced by D for Drama. She has worked extensively as a poet and a translator, and enjoys exploring what is meant by ‘literature’ across media. She is currently working on a collection of short stories and a play.
