Book Review: Apologising for the Past to Build an Empathetic Future

My friend, the late philosopher-teacher-writer Ramu Gandhi, used to rue the fact that no one –publicly or personally, individually or collectively, on this side of the border or that – has ever apologised for the Partition of the sub-continent, the loss of innocent lives and the mindless destruction of homes and businesses. A bit like the ritual of pind-daan or shraadh ceremony among Hindus to release the soul of the dear departed for its onward journey, he believed there should have been a collective mourning for all the dead not just across the newly-created boundaries of the nation states but also across boundaries of caste, creed and religion.

And a precursor for such a mass mourning, Ramu believed, was an apology. Someone, somewhere, in the years and decades that followed 1947, should have said, “We were wrong; we are ashamed and we resolve never to allow this to happen again.” In the absence of any such collective mourning, let alone apology, the wound festered, unlanced. What we are reaping today is the bitter harvest of that wound festering in our collective conscience, he believed, though he died long before many of the recent sharp othering, bigotry and hatred had unspooled from that one fateful, cataclysmic severance.

Ramu’s wise, compassionate, empathetic words ran like a refrain in my reading of Pallavi Aiyar’s excellent volume. Drawing its inspiration from the origami cranes, which have emerged as “a symbol of apology, healing, and resistance” for the Japanese people seeking to rebuild their lives after the terrible bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, A Thousand Cranes for India: Reclaiming Plurality Amid Hatred seeks to draw lessons from a people and a civilisation no less ancient or scarred than ours but who, through the gift of empathy and forgiveness, have taught themselves to seek – and find – absolution. Pummelled by disasters both natural and man-made, Japan has found the strength to bounce back from each of these horrors, breeding a culture of resilience and fortitude. But for that to happen, the Japanese people have had to first acknowledge the horrors, not bury them under mounds of forgetfulness and the debris of a pseudo-nationalism.

Anguished by the brutal rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl in Kathua in 2018, Aiyar set out in search of an image, a motif, a project that would seek to assuage the survivor’s guilt. Aiyar talks of another little girl, Sadoko Sasaki, who died of radiation-related leukaemia. “Lying sick in the hospital,” Aiyar writes, “Sadoko had desperately folded origami cranes in hopes of a reprieve, for according to 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.” Today, paper cranes flutter everywhere in Japan as a symbol 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”.

Using the origami crane as a “motif of connection and beauty”, Aiyar has commissioned the 23 pieces that form this slim volume. Comprising memoirs, short stories, poems, reportage and the occasional rhetoric by writers both seasoned and raw, A Thousand Cranes for India makes an eloquent plea for a country marked by many differences but united by an over-arching idea, an idea that has always celebrated diversity and multiplicity. Some writers have made a point of including the crane in their writing; others allude to its fragile beauty and in some instances the origami cranes pop up, seemingly randomly, in the narrative. Still others allude to the crane’s ability to travel vast distances, migrate across man-made boundaries and display inexhaustible strength in the face of extreme hardship all the way remaining graceful, elegant creatures.

Also read: It’s Foolish to Throw Stones at Pakistan When Modi’s India is Now a Communal Glass House

Two pieces stand out for their strength of writing and clarity of purpose. Interestingly, their writers could not be more dissimilar and yet both make an urgent plea for one singular quality, namely empathy. Young Gurmehar Kaur, the student-activist who first caught our attention with her posters for peace, now shows her mettle as a fine writer in a jewel-like story entitled ‘Paper Crane’.  Just as Ramu Gandhi had wanted someone, anyone, to say how sorry they were for a terrible act that they themselves had not even committed, Kaur’s protagonist too wants to apologise for the terrible communal attack on her friend. All it takes, Kaur seems to be saying, is compassion; it won’t make the hurt go away but it will make it tolerable.

The academic Jonathan Gill Harris, whose work on medieval firangis and Shakespearana has long entranced scholars and lay readers alike, now digs deep into the family trove of memories to reveal its best kept and most painful secret. Folded away, like an origami crane, in a carved Chinese chest is his mother’s secret: of being a Holocaust survivor when every member of her family perished. Struck by the similarities in the India he finds himself living in and the Europe of his Jewish mother’s girlhood, Harris speaks with a chilling clarity of the “storm troopers of hate” and the “everyday citizens who avert their gaze from the atrocities that have been daily unfolding” who are equally complicit in destroying a tapestry that has been woven over time. As he writes:

“There are many reasons why we fold in the face of traumatic violence. Folding origami cranes may allow us to dream of a better world in which such violence does not and must not and cannot happen. Which is to say, folding can make a statement against communal hatred. But it can also disavow its temptations and pleasures. That is why, from time to time, we…(need) to unwrap these secrets to see what we might otherwise want to unsee. Which is to say, we need to unfold our cranes too.”

Other fine contributions include Anjum Hasan’s story located in the Delhi metro, Annie Zaidi’s poem ‘Before the Flight’, Veena Venugopal’s acerbic ‘The Maid’ and Sudeep Chakravarty’s ‘The Art of War’. Taken together, all 23 pieces make compelling reading and leave one wishing that we in India too could devise an over-arching symbol of hope and redemption, one that would unite rather than divide us, teach us to love rather than hate, cause us to look forward with pleasure rather than look back in anger.

Rakhshanda Jalil is a Delhi-based writer, translator and researcher. Her recent book is But You Don’t Look Like a Muslim (Harper Collins, 2019).