CRIME FICTION

Under the Scanner

Caligo memnon is a moth, a fascinating example of mimicry. On its folded wings are mimicked the eyes of an owl; dark round eyes with a glint of light reflected on its shiny surface. Around this the shadow like darkening defines a pseudo eye socket. Grey wavy lines for feathers complete the act. If an owl is not going to frighten you enough, looked at from another angle the serpent head appears; a nostril, a closed mouth, beady eyes as if eyeing its prey. Who am I? I am not the snake, nor the owl. They are my predators, I am a predator. I see my predators on my victim, in my victim.

Darwinists say mimicry is explained by the need to avoid being eaten. Vladimir Nabokov, ornithologist and writer says, ‘Natural selection’, in the Darwinian sense, could not explain the miraculous coincidence of imitative aspect and imitative behavior, nor could one appeal to the theory of the ‘the struggle for life’ when a protective device was carried to a point of mimetic subtlety, exuberance, and luxury far in excess of a predator’s power of appreciation. “I discovered in nature the non-utilitarian delights that I sought in art. Both were a form of magic, both were a game of intricate enchantment and deception”.

I needed to imitate the Caligo memnon, The dots that made up its pattern, had to mimic the quality of a newspaper image that had to conduct a dialogue with it. I therefore needed a scan of its A3 image printed on the textured surface of newsprint paper. “That is one of the ways to take away the traces of the computer”, Avinash, artist friend, had advised me to create a lineage of evolutions to the final print. So I was on the hunt for an establishment, which had an A3 scanner. In the first establishment the answers made me rather suspicious. They could only drum scan and were willing to do it even though they knew it was inappropriate for this job. But they did guide me to another establishment close by. There, they faked a scan by using an A3 sized Xerox machine to produce an image which fooled me quite well till I discovered the reason for the results being of such low quality. Next day Jayanna, the person who did my odd printing jobs at ‘Bodhi Graphics’, told me to try another set up not too far from them. I decided to head straight there. But it was shut.

‘Miracle Graphics’ remained shut for the second day as well. Frustrated I debated whether to squander another day waiting for this establishment to open its doors or to negotiate the notorious city traffic to try further away.

The next day it was front page news, ‘Fake note printing racket busted’.

“Your scan would certainly have been of good quality”, laughed Avinash when I told him about this gang of professionals, one of whom was awarded a medal for Printing technology. The more ‘real’ the imitation the more fraudulent the act.

A high degree of expertise is needed if one has to fake a bank note that does not look like a fake – its intricate play of lines and patterns, the water mark and not least the image of Gandhi, whose image on a Bank note is in itself a paradox. As much a paradox and shock of picking up a booklet on Gandhi from a lawyer’s desk expecting to find the now common quotes eulogizing us towards a more idealistic life but finding instead a highly manipulated and poisoned reading of Gandhi. An evolutionary process had taken place for history to be subverted to this degree.

I visited Bodhi the following day. Jayanna had read the news too. I wondered conversationally and with some mischief how professionals in this field were foolish enough to believe that they could print fake notes and get away with it. If it had to be ‘fake something’ how come they did not look for more modest jobs like fake degree certificates, stamps, etc? One slightly idle employee, thought about this seriously for a while and in a flash of enlightenment, as if reflecting the thinking of those who committed the fraud, said “if they were to print these then they would still have the job of marketing them, is it not? Why not print the money itself?!

Acts of fraud and other crimes are committed from such naivety as much as from deviousness. Crimes are also committed with cold calculation, passionate belief and with the fervor of ideology. Those who harm while doing a believed good get named differently depending on whether you are the victim, the predator, the predator’s predator or both. Freedom fighters, Martyrs, Militants, Terrorists...The list is controversial.

The Kashmir Story

We, a group of practitioners and activists, were invited to a workshop on Kashmir by ‘Majlis’ an organization from Mumbai. It was a seminar I attended with a lot of trepidation. What do I have to say about or do with Kashmir? Miles of terrain separate me from it. News floats to me in cold black and white print or from a screen inhabited by men in army greens. I have responded to these, to the pathos of newspaper images, which reflected my own experiences and losses. Beyond that I could not comprehend the complexity of the issues that underlay the politics of it all. After years of struggle, deaths, militancy and army excesses, I wondered if anyone could explain the source, the path and a solution to it all with any conviction and clarity. I could never remember cold figures and facts, only the feelings that human stories evoked in me when I first registered them.

Soft spoken Safiya, a Kashmiri, working in an organization for orphaned children in Srinagar, made a presentation contextualizing a series of images, a selected set of photographs, taken by her grandfather Abdul Lone. He was not a professional photographer but he had a strong need, a compulsion to record his times. He had made it his duty to record the death of every youth, who died with unfailing regularity in and around the village he lived in. Safiya used the word ‘martyrs’. Whenever there was a death and the body arrived to be mourned and buried, Mr. Lone used his camera to photograph the body. He collected an object of the dead person, a photograph of the boy/man from his family to add to his growing record of names matched to faces and families of the deceased. He recorded the path the body traversed from the place of the funeral rites to the graveyard. He did so not by following each body being carried through the streets. He photographed the streets, the path at various points, on other days, when life did not seem disturbed from its normality, when children went to school, when men in long woolen coats went about their jobs with their ponies, through streets which inevitably foregrounded hills or snow capped mountains. This is the image of Kashmir that is commonplace. “If there is heaven on earth, it is here, it is here, it is here”. But these streets were not innocent. Through them the dead made their way to the graveyard, an elevated ground reached by a flight of semicircular stone steps, a rusty gate barring it for those already in. In these grounds, white apple flowers persistently bloomed every spring, on twigs and branches, which held nothing else while dark clouds loomed threatening behind. No promised paradise seemed to part the clouds to let in heavenly light.

The seeming banality of these photographs was the ground on which I could legitimately step on. I could be the tourist who has innocently wandered away from the beaten track on to these streets, to present the viewer a scenic view of Kashmir while memory walked alongside whispering another story; a story known to all those who lived by its side. The path, as a wedge into this history, could allow this ambiguity. The street could tolerate me, a person from the far south, an unseen person citing the unseen, sighting the scene unseen, citing the seen scene unseen.

When I began to work towards the Kashmir pictures I wrote to Safiya, asking for her permission and requesting her to make better scans of the postcard-sized archival images in her possession. It was the first time I was writing to someone in Kashmir. I was acutely aware of the act of trying to reach someone in a place, which had a mythical quality. Within days of this correspondence and exchange I encountered problems. Safiya till then very prompt and supportive suddenly failed to respond to my emails, to the insistent ringing of her mobile phone. I was worried and perplexed till the news report brought Kashmir back into my little TV room. The familiar image of seeing Kashmir in turmoil once again. The reporter said that the protests had the intensity and fervor of 1990.

I look again at what I have and have to make do with. At the small photos taken in other times with other intensions, in another culture, under the shadow of white snow capped mountains.

Catharsis can only be achieved if we see something that is both recognizable and distant Aristotle has said.

Erasing Data

On the 3rd of July the ‘Sangh Parivar’ called an ‘All India Bandh’ to protest the withdrawal of the grant of land by the Kashmir State Government to the Amarnath Board, the Hindu Pilgrimage in the Himalayas.

In Karnataka the Bandh call evoked a mixed response. Udaya TV telecast a news coverage of it. I viewed the familiar scenes of the Bandh, closed shops with groups of men enforcing it, streets free of the usual traffic and then the familiar ritual of the burning of an effigy, in this instance that of the Chief Minister of Kashmir.

Effigy burning has always been an interesting issue for me, the act of self gratification in enacting a violent act; a symbolic act that takes its inspiration from the tradition of burning a huge effigy of Ravana on the day of Dussehra. It is supposedly an act of vanquishing evil, the triumph of good over evil.

This particular effigy burning however made me sit up from my post lunch stupor. In the inner circle of a group of people the familiar scarecrow like figure of the effigy was the centre of the act, the body dressed in black over which was mounted a mud pot head with eyes and mouth drawn on it with chalk. Its arms and legs were rudimentarily present as stuffed protruding extremities. The effigies more or less look the same whether it is the Prime Minister, or the Chief Minister of any State ruled by whichever political party. While the torching was being attempted, a man, a little outside the inner circle, was conspicuous by his agitated movements. He was barely able to reach the effigy but he managed to reach across and smash the pot head with one blow of his bare hands. Not satisfied, he then caught hold of the protruding ‘arm’ and tried a twisting technique as if to hurt it. Next he darted out from behind the others and came centre stage. Grabbing the torch from the man trying, rather inadequately, to get the effigy to catch fire, he used the torch as a baronet to stab the effigy in its stomach, over and over again. I watched spellbound. The effigy attacked with such passion came ‘alive’ as a living person. The symbolic became a real moment with real people. I could not forget it.

The next day I went to the Udaya TV channel office to find out if I could get a clipping of this news coverage. I was expecting a refusal but was stunned when I was told that such news data which were ‘routine’ were never kept, even for a day. If we had to keep them we would need four more such buildings I was told. What about the cameras, don’t they have them still on their cassettes? No. The Manager was impatient. We only keep those that have repeat value, as time pass material.

The Gaze

A piece of wood or stone lies under the feet of the artist while it gets sculpted into the god figure. ‘Godness’ gets bestowed on it when the idol is subjected to a series of rituals which includes being submerged in water for several days, buried in varied materials; toughening measures to bear the gaze, lifelong, of so many worshippers. The final moment is the giving of sight to God. The first gaze of god is considered devastating. A mirror is placed to reflect it back to the one who can take it, God himself. A Banana plant in the path of the gaze is the symbolic ‘victim’ who gets hacked. The priest takes over and the artist/sculptor becomes the devotee but not without the caress of his gaze over the contours of the idol he has given form to, in his own human image.

“People do not worship a god with closed eyes” was a comment of a believer still left with remnants of skepticism over the latest ‘miracle’. God then either opened his one eye to see the world, or closed one with fatigue. This god’s attributes did not endow him a third eye so the world was saved from complete destruction. The ‘opened eye’ on the shiny white ceramic surface of a face devoid of colour but not of realistic detail, was a benign one or so the people surmised.

‘Miracles’ happen when a person in need wills it. In this case it was the need to save an eviction following a Notice issued to the ‘god’ owners for vacating the land that they had illegally occupied. ‘God’ seemed to have opened his eyes to their predicament.. “Either the artist who made the figure had initially made the figure with both eyes open and perhaps decided to close them later as if in meditation. Perhaps one of the eye patches fell off while being cleaned” was the comment of another unable to keep away. All over the world these miracles always happen on kitschy versions of the god figure, never on iconic masterpieces, which are rather difficult to access, Christoph, my husband commented.

The anonymous accomplice, the sculptor, must have heard of the miracle in his/her roadside shack.

Allegedly, no large scale religious sentiments of a particular community were hurt by the violation of the devotees’ faith. No Group of self appointed guardians of culture and religion barged into the premises of the ‘god owner’ and manhandled him. No tires were burnt, raising acrid smoke into the already polluted air. No passing public transport buses, bursting with people, were stoned. No innocent bystanders were killed in police firing. No holidays were declared for schools and colleges.

The Eviction

Rehmat, my assistant, a welder, has come to me with a serious issue. His little shack, his livelihood, had stood by the shade of the Peepal tree for 20 years. Two years ago a small Hindu idol was deliberately placed a few feet away from his shack and Kumkum and turmeric were being anointed on it. Rehmat’s attempts to build a more stable structure, with my financial help, was stopped by a gang of local youths.. Over the years the ‘no man’s land’, the ground he occupied has become prime property. Big timers would like to have it and if they desire, they will have it. And what better tool than religion as a sedative towards appropriation. Rehmat is perceptive enough to realize that this is not religious persecution but about money, greed; and he is not a hard stone to kick. In the presence of 150 goons as a threatening presence brought in from elsewhere, the local people watched, inactive, while a wall was raised around the ‘shrine’ enclosing Rehmat’s shack into its fold. The eviction is complete.

Rescuing the Gods

My eyes are supposed to stay strictly on the road when I drive.

But the morning after a heavy shower, I noticed a row of neatly arranged framed photographs leaning against the walls of the Bangalore Palace grounds. They were mainly old popular prints of various gods and goddesses found in most households from generations after Raja Ravi Verma. They were soaked through. Noticing a pair of traffic police close by I quickly loaded these forlorn gods into my car and sped away. I was not stealing them from prospective overnight temple makers. These were evicted gods from houses which no longer needed them. Their worshippers were perhaps long dead and the inheritors perhaps prayed to more contemporary versions and did not want them anymore. But their fear of godly wrath made them arrange these pictures neatly by the roadside, abandoning them but yet not; giving it to nature in a way. Their conscience was clear.

From the hands of an artist, painted in another time, the images were now back to another. The circle was complete. I am not a devotee but certainly respectful of their art historical value, in the evolution of the iconic image.

I have rescued the gods once before. My mother feared my intervention. I told her that I am giving shelter to these god figures, how can I get punished for that?

The feudal Patriarch

The rooster is said to have a 300 degree panoramic vision. I am the focus of this panoramic view through the windows of my house. I am watched all the time. I am the object under observation.

These two roosters, I have held as small puffy chicks. Now they have grown into full sized adults. But their personalities were evident even as chicks. The now aggressive male, made its own decisions. The other, has always been slow, never took the initiative to find food, followed the flock. The aggressive one is master, ‘the elder brother with the rights of birth’ in this joint family, which has to be accommodated. It is the patriarch and as long as this is respected, the other male is invited to eat and live in its domain; in its lordly way the patriarch even invites the other male to eat when it finds food but the reverse does not happen. The younger has no such tradition nor scruples. Like the farmer, I am the hand that feeds, the hand that dips each morning into the sack full of chick feed that I buy if not grow. Being fed, they no longer know how to look and work for their own food. Despite being reared from ‘chickhood’ they still bite the hand that feeds them; the occupied domain, their social territory, is even harder to negotiate. An outside threat, a predator such as a cat, raises a joint crescendo chorused by the squirrels. It is the bugle sound of an enemy attack, enough to make me run to shoo away this predator even though I fear an attack from the one I am to defend.

The Encounter Killing

Encountering the dog in a closed room, the squirrel was killed instantly. The scene of the killing left a photographic image in my mind: Nayika (both dog and heroine over two languages - kannada and Sanskrit), our dog, the animal spirit, stood straining at its collar held tightly by Ishar, a child, my son’s friend. Its mouth was dripping with saliva, while it ogled at the body of the squirrel, its fur matted wet from the encounter and definitely dead. We disposed off the body. It was only the next day that I discovered the carefully made nest in a box of old toys in the attic. Two finger sized babies lay curled up in there which clung to my finger as I held them. They were yet to open their eyes; to have seen their mother or what the world looked like. The death of the little animal became a poignant tragedy that moment. Mothering them to the best of my ability, I placed them in a shallow box on a counter, away from the dog and hoped for their survival but only to discover 2 mornings later one of them dead on the stone floor, a meter down below, having crawled out of its nest seeking warmth. Its death was not an accident. It was not unavoidable. I was left with deep regret; I should have….

Case study

I wake up each day and traverse the labyrinth of ideas that would be the art works for the show titled ‘Crime Fiction’. A writ petition I have filed against the erection of the Mobile Transmission Tower has come up in the High Court this very month. The Tower stands, in the daily gaze of my day to day living, radiating a stench of greased palms and crookedness. I am up against devious minds and devious methods. I try hard to get into those minds, to anticipate the next devious move, to think of the next devious idea that they would use in their defense. I need to be one step ahead of them if I need to win.

I prepare to hurl a stone, I am the victim wearing the predator’s clothes, the aggressor. Perhaps my aggressive posture will be enough of an intimidation, it should be, because that is all I have at my disposal against minds that show me that creativity can come in handy even for the devious.

Sheela Gowda

August 2008