A Thousand Cranes for India

Reclaiming Plurality Amid Hatred

Hola Global Jigsaw,

In 2019, I edited and curated a volume of essays, poems and short-stories that was titled, A Thousand Cranes for India. The idea was to use the Japanese paper crane as a metaphor to explore some of the deep fault lines that threaten India: gender, sexuality, caste, class, religion.

The book blurb summed it up like this: "In Japan there is a legend that anyone who folds one thousand paper cranes will have their wishes realized. But folding cranes, and the meditative, solemn care that it involves, has come to mean more than just an exercise in wish making. Origami cranes have become a symbol of renewal, atonement and warning. This anthology uses origami cranes as a way for some of India’s best-known writers and poets to form a shared civic space for a conversation about the fault lines in India at a difficult time in its history. The twenty-three pieces collected here encompass reportage, stories, poems, memoir and polemic—the kind of complex and enriching diversity that India demands and deserves. The paper crane becomes a motif of connection, beauty and reclamation in an otherwise degraded country, enabling those who fight with words to become the best army they can be."

As India’s months-long general election unfolds, the fault lines that A Thousand Cranes had sought to highlight, are more evident than ever. The India of the imagination for many people in Europe, where I live, has morphed from third-world backwater to the stuff of glossy business mags - with Prime Minister Modi as CEO.

My own assessment of Mr Modi and the direction India is taking under him, is available here. But I find myself more preoccupied with the people who vote for and support him, than the Prime Minister himself. We get the leaders we deserve. The really terrifying story is Mr Modi’s popularity.

Consequently, A Thousand Cranes for India, is an exploration of Indian society rather than a potshot at any individual. I am posting my introductory essay to the collection here, which explains how I conceived of the book. And also, why cranes.

Before you read any further could I ask you to become a paid subscriber? Us writers are being put out out of business by dictators and algorithms. But write we must, because writing is what we do. Subscriptions keep us in the coffee :-)

xxxxx

in folding paper
there are mountains and valleys . . .
cranes flying home

Kawaguchi Hitoshi

I, who have the amphibious duality of nature in me, whose food is in the West and breathe air in the East, do not find a place where I can build my nest. I suppose I shall have to be a migratory bird and cross and recross the sea, owning two nests, one on each shore.

 Rabindranath Tagore

I was on a family holiday in Hiroshima when I read, on my phone, about Asifa Banu. The eight-year-old’s kidnapping, protracted confinement in a temple, gangrape and murder was an item in the news digest that popped up in my email inbox every morning.

It’s a benumbed world. I was accustomed to digesting news of rapes along with breakfast toast; to imbibing images of death with my ginger and brown-sugar-sweetened coffee. But this time my body revolted. I'm not sure why. There were always so many atrocities in competition. If I could not be equally outraged by every brutality—and we seemed to have such a wellspring of these—was it fair to be outraged by any one?

 I was Indian. Every breath could, would I permit it to, give me cause for anger; pause for the searing injustices of the quotidian. I could be vexed that while my maid’s alcoholic husband beat her at night, my greatest problem was choosing which Netflix series to watch. I could take umbrage at the fact that a few hundred metres down from where my children rehearsed for their piano recital, there were babies sitting over open gutters, flies in their eyes and little but air in their bloated bellies. I might be incensed that a Muslim colleague couldn't find anyone willing to rent him an apartment, or that despite my ‘liberal’ ways I had no Dalit friends. In India, there was injustice in simply being alive, but to be alive to injustice was to be unable to live.

And yet, on the day that I read about how Asifa Banu was sedated, violated, bludgeoned and choked, my usual reaction to events like this—horror comfortingly underlain by an awareness of its own ephemerality—was supplanted by a dense weight that I feared would never lift. I was winded, emptied of words, stripped of succour.

Asifa had sparkling eyes. She had ponytails and an impish smile. On the day she was taken, she’d been out grazing her family’s horses in a meadow. She was wearing a purple dress. A man had beckoned her into a forest, and because she was a child and children tend to trust and obey adults, she followed him. She was then force-fed drugs, dragged to a nearby temple and locked in. Over the next several days, she was raped again and again by multiple men, including the temple priest and a number of police officers.[1] She was starved, beaten and eventually strangled.

If only this were the end. But when it came to Asifa the debasement was infinite. When the police arrested the accused, protests broke out in defence of the alleged rapists. Groups of lawyers and politicians tried to prevent the police from entering the court to file charges. 

As it turned out, Asifa’s rape and murder had not even primarily been about her. Her brutalization was incidental, a diverting means to an end. It was but a salvo in the attempt to terrorize the community she belonged to, a nomadic group of Muslim shepherds called Bakarwals, out of the area, so that it could remain pristinely Hindu. It was an evil concatenation of every ugliness: misogyny, religious bigotry, majoritarianism. It had happened in a temple. There were people who had celebrated it. It felt like a declaration of war, on the powerless, on India, on me. How was I to respond?

All morning, I didn’t speak of what I had learnt. I held it close to me, like a dirty secret in which I was complicit. It was not my hands that had choked the life out of the girl, nor my body that had penetrated her’s so violently as to rip her child’s uterus. And yet it had happened on my watch; in my country. I was alive. She was not.

That morning, with my husband and boys—ages six and nine—I visited the sprawling Peace Park memorial to the victims of the August 1945 nuclear bombing, the fulcrum of Hiroshima’s tourist itinerary. It was intended as a quick stop before departing for the more salubrious Torii gate-framed beauty of Miyajima Island. Truth be told, wallowing in memories of maimed atomic bomb victims was not high on my planned agenda.

Most estimates put the number of those who’d been killed instantaneously by the bombing at between 60,000–80,000. The heat generated was so intense that some people had simply vanished in the explosion. Tens of thousands more died of the long-term effects of radiation and the final death toll is currently calculated at 120,000-140,000.

 As we walked through and around the space, its hall of remembrance, bridges, ponds, cenotaph and gardens aflame with spring flowers, the statistics felt hollow. I was unable to shake off the feeling of Asifa Banu walking next to me. Her eyes were without accusation, only wide with curiosity, as she took in the artifacts on display.

 At the memorial museum we looked at ‘School Trousers’, a wretchedly tattered pair that belonged to Naoki Mikami, a young boy attending morning assembly in his schoolyard at the moment of the explosion. He died four hours after managing to stagger back home. Later we stood silently in front of a piece of ‘White Wall Stained by the Black Rain’. The ‘black rain’ was the radioactive dust and soot mixed with water vapour that fell on Hiroshima soon after the bomb was detonated. The heaviness I had felt since the morning was fed and fattened by the black-and-white portraits of the survivors and their testimonies.

But then we came upon two unadorned paper cranes, gentle and defiant. They seemed to acknowledge the horror, but refuse the ugliness. These were not the first origami cranes I had seen in Hiroshima. The city was festooned in skeins of them. They hung in front of okonomiyaki pancake restaurants and sat in gift-shop windows. From schoolchildren to world leaders, people from around the world folded and sent in millions of these birds to the city every year.

The reason for this global flight of paper cranes originated in a tragedy where the victim, like Asifa, was a little girl. Sadako Sasaki was two years old when she stared uncomprehendingly at the giant mushroom cloud rising up and blotting out the sky. She survived, but would not live long; she died a decade on, in great pain, of radiation-related leukaemia. While lying sick in the hospital, Sadoko had desperately folded origami cranes in hopes of a reprieve, for according to a Japanese legend, those who fold a thousand paper cranes will have their prayers answered. The young girl folded and shaped her birds, but her strength gave out and she died. Yet, her cranes took wing.

They have since emerged as a symbol of apology, healing and resistance. Of renewal in the face of devastation, atonement for the horrors inflicted by our own, and of warning that we must remember, so as not to repeat. They may have emerged out of Japan’s particular mythology and history, but they belong to no one nation. The crane is a migratory bird; it crosses borders and makes its home with scant regard to the blood-soaked lines that humans have drawn on maps.

Later that day I tried my hand at folding a paper crane for the first time. Asifa was still by my side, but the meditative, solemn care needed to make and unmake the creases eased something in me. It was as if I were folding in the depravities of the world and transforming them into a weightless being of beauty. I released my crane down a chute from the twelfth floor of the Orizu Tower, a building adjacent to the Peace Museum. It swirled down: light as a wish, strong as a pledge. And I was determined in that moment not to lose the war begat by Asifa’s murderers and others like them who killed and raped in the name of piety or purity. I would fight for my India using the only weapons I had: words and cranes.

Back in Tokyo, I began to post pictures of paper cranes on social media. I made a video asking people to fold cranes as a gesture of defiance, an act of reclamation. 

My India was a country held together not by geography, language or ethnicity but by an idea: an idea that asserted, even celebrated, multiplicity. I was a mongrel: a Delhite, an English speaker; half a Tamilian, half a UP-walli; a Hindu culturally; an atheist by choice; a Muslim by heritage. But the identity that threaded these multiplicities together was at once the most powerful and most amorphous: I was an Indian.

This India, my India, was besieged, still it lived. People responded to the appeal and sent me pictures of their cranes. I received images of mangled birds and perfectly articulated ones; cranes placed on top of kitchen counters and car dashboards. They flew into my inbox from Jakarta, Beijing, Tokyo, California, Mumbai, Bangalore, Pune, Hong Kong, Chennai, Delhi.

I began to brainstorm with my friend, literary agent and crane-folder, Jayapriya Vasudevan. These conversations birthed the idea for this book, for using the paper crane as a motif of connection and beauty in an otherwise degraded milieu; for enabling those of us who fought with words to reach out to each other and become the best army we could be. We could not bring Asifa back, but the collective beating of the wings of our cranes would be a gauntlet to those who would bludgeon our capacious civilization into the confines of their grotesquely narrow notion of India.

The twenty-three pieces in this book encompass reportage, stories, poems, memoir, and polemic: the kind of complex and enriching diversity that India demands and deserves. In some of them, the cranes are like Easter eggs, almost hidden from sight, their meaning in need of excavation. In Prajwal Parajuly’s essay, ‘The Tenant’, the fault lines of class and region are unpacked through the dynamic between Parajuly’s Sikkim-based parents and their Rajasthani migrant tenant, Deepak. A mobile of paper cranes dangles from the balcony ceiling of Deepak’s rented apartment, an attempt, futile and hopeful, to assert his ownership over the space.

In Anjum Hasan’s meditation on the possibilities and contradictions of womanhood, ‘Love on the Delhi Metro’, an unnamed narrator riding in the ladies’ compartment of the Indian capital’s metro muses about her determination to refuse the categories imposed by gender, only to be confounded by the sight of a child playing with a paper crane.

Veena Venugopal’s story, ‘The Maid’, skewers the hypocrisies and inequalities of the servant–mistress relationship with a social media twist: ‘My son learned to make origami cranes in school. Look at all our attempts. Of course, the best cranes are my maid, Mili’s.’

Cranes take centre stage in both essays written by Salil Tripathi and Swaminathan Aiyar, but not the origami varieties; in ‘The Siberian Crane Doesn’t Live Here Anymore,’ and ‘Requiem for the Siberian Crane’, the veteran journalists use the early twenty-first century disappearance of the migratory Siberian crane from north India’s plain’s as a metaphor for the increasing hostility of the Indian landscape to ‘outsiders.’ His essay ends with a vision of hope: ‘Look at the sky; drops of water are making our faces wet. Rain is falling. Cranes are flying’.

Aiyar’s conclusion is more sombre. Subverting the great poet Rabindranath Tagore, he writes of today’s India: ‘It is a place where the mind is full of fear and the head is held discreetly low; where knowledge is too dangerous to be shared freely; where the country has deliberately been broken into fragments by narrow domestic walls of religion; where words come out of the depths of opportunism; where tireless striving stretches its arms towards communalism; where the clear stream of reason has been told to go take a ‘sickular’ hike; into that cesspit of unfreedom, my father, has my country fallen’.

In Jonathan Gil Harris’ memoir, (Un)Folding Secrets: The Contents of My Mother’s Chinese Chest, folding becomes a powerful metaphor. ‘I too am folding here: folding, if not a crane, then a story out of bits of stray paper from the Chinese chest…. in the hope of connecting with a larger family I never knew, and in the hope of reconstituting something of what was shattered by the war.’

Harris’ essay shifts across time and geography from New Zealand to Warsaw, Central Asia, and Delhi, arguing that the act of unfolding the pain and secrets we fold away in our lifetimes is necessary to confront the venom of hatred.

Several of the other contributors range globally as well, even as they take India as their starting or end points. In ‘The Silence of the Crane’, Radhika Jha talks about the dangers of silence, referencing incidents both historical and personal, from the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire, to her own experiences in modern-day Goa.

Ranjit Hoskote’s, ‘Travelling in The Zone’, is a contemplation of photojournalists, ‘reaping the wages of destruction and the arrears of hope,’ across the world and through the decades. He concludes: ‘I picture many hands tearing these images of anguish from magazines and newspapers, and folding them into paper cranes. I picture a flight of paper cranes, thousands of them, gliding across lines of control and no-fly zones…’

Samrat’s piece, ‘Aziz from Pakistan’, returns this book to Hiroshima, a city he travels to with a Pakistani acquaintance who is wrought into a friend by the shared experiences and conversations of the journey. ‘Compassion and kindness are inherently human traits. The children from around the world who send a steady stream of origami cranes, millions of them, with their wishes of peace year after year, are just ordinary kids being kids,’ Samrat says. But what exactly does ‘peace’ mean? Is it just the absence of war? Samrat disagrees.

 Shovon Choudhury’s story, ‘The Magic Pants’, brings to this anthology a dose of comic wryness. In it a dour, frustrated group of right-wing RSS functionaries glimpse happiness by improving their dress sense and learning to flirt with women by teaching them how to fold paper cranes.

Conversely, Sudeep Chakravarti’s ‘Art of War’ is a sharp counterpoint in tone. He describes the clinical barbarity displayed by the State as it attempts to force those who disagree with it back to the so-called ‘democratic fold.’ ‘The Inuit have several descriptions for snow, I have a few for razor wire’, Chakravarti says.  The concentric circles of wire surrounding the base of the anti-Maoist operation in western Bengal that he reports from are like an installation, ‘you could easily place a string of white origami cranes on to juxtapose the reality of violence with a quixotic yearning for peace .

Writer and filmmaker Natasha Badhwar’s essay knits together the personal with the political as she chronicles her travels with Karwan e Mohabbat, a civil-society initiative that involves visiting and listening to the families of victims of hate crimes. Badhwar’s first-born daughter accompanies her on many of these journeys, watching silently.  At home, her middle daughter is left to deal with her anxieties about the world, while her youngest child folds tiny paper cranes with which to welcome the birth of a cousin. The baby is transformative, bringing with it the one commodity that has been in short supply: hope. Badhwar writes: ‘Acting as if we have hope gives us hope and eventually averts our own surrender to despair’.

Cranes weave in and out of every piece in this collection. But I will end this introduction by leaving the last words to some of our poets, as should be the case, always:

We know, don’t we, that a forest is being

truncheoned as we speak? That a girl in that forest

is being truncheoned too. A girl, or a hundred.

‘Why the Brazilian Butt Lift Won’t Save Us’,

Tishani Doshi

Only the smallest gesture and the gentlest act

Redeem our lives against the falling of the sand.

‘Folded Paper: A Ghazal’,

Tabish Khair

---

[1] On June 10, 2019, a special court convicted three of the eight charge-sheeted men to life imprisonment: Sanji Ram, the temple priest, Parvesh Kumar who is a friend of the priests’ nephew, and a police officer, Deepak Khajuria. Three other police officers were sentenced to five years’ imprisonment for destroying evidence. Sanji Ram’s son was acquitted; given ‘the benefit of the doubt’. At the time of publishing, the trial of the eighth accused, a nephew of Sanji Ram, is pending the process of determining whether or not he is a juvenile.

xxxxx

Thank for reading. Until next week,

Pallavi