The Stone Age is a story taken from a collection of stories (Half a Rupee: Stories) by Gulzar, and offered here as an independent read. It is from part four, which is about ordinary people, not only poor adults but middle class and children as well, living in times not quite as civilised as we would like to think we do. Part four deals with trying times, what with terrorism and attacks on women and bombings of lands to root out terrorists that affect normal people because bombs do not discriminate who they affect, and so on.
The Stone Age is about a poor family - although we do not know if they were poor always or were rendered so by destruction of their home and wherewithal - in Afghanistan affected by various outsiders raining bombs via helicopters and roaming about in jeeps with machine guns spraying bullets, and a small boy trying to survive even as his family disintegrates right before his eyes. His little sister is instantly dead when their home collapses and she is caught under the wall, or at least we would like to think she was, the alternative being a little girl under three still alive under the collapsed wall with her family fleeing rather than rescuing her.
The timeline given is of Russian occupation but it could just as well be now, or any time during the last few decades. People killed by bombs probably do not care if they came from north or west. And children merely ask if the foreigners of this other tribe that are trying to kill them - well, does not matter, they have little time to even live with the families, never mind what they can ask the elders. Escaping the house falling and the jeep roaming with foreigners spraying bullets takes priority over other questions.
Then it is refuge in a mosque, then fleeing the mosque when it is under siege, and then the boy finds himself in a heap of dead and mangled bodies and pieces when he returns to search for his father and is carried off in the truck he was hiding in, to be thrown on a mountain of the said dead bodies.
Last bit, he is hiding in a cave, trying to sharpen a stone with another, so he could deal with the eyes he sees in the dark cave - he is only four. Return to stone age it is.
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Gulzar to some extent and Sahir Ludhianavi to a far more committed extent were leftists - Sahir was about to be arrested for h in his chosen or default home in the other part of India as it was before independence, and had to escape to India as it is post independence, and yet he said it was lucky for Mumbai to have him, rather than admitting he was lucky he could get away and not be arrested to spend life in jail, rather than the respect and fame and prestige and satisfactory work he had during his life in India. Gulzar in that tradition sympathises with a suicide bomber who plans to blow up a prime minister, and writes a story and publishes it, apart from a film or more he made on the topic.
Wonder if they had courage enough to battle for Malala and her ilk. Easy to target a democracy, especially one that does not penalise you for being in minority politically.
Monday, March 31, 2014.
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