From my bookshelf
Letters from prison-Captive Imaginations-Varavara Rao
Page number 12:
Wait for
me,, and I’ll come back,
Wait and
I’ll come.
Wait
through autumn’s yellow rains
And its
tedium
Steel your
heart and do not grieve,
Wait
through winter’s haze,
Wait
through wind and the raging strom,
Wait
through summer’s blaze.
Wait when
other’s wait no more,
When my
letter stop,
Wait with
hope that never wanes,
Wait and
don’t give up.
Wait for me
and I’ll come back;
Patience,
dear one, learn.
Turn away
from those who say
That I’ll
not return.
Let my son
and mother weep
Tears of
sorrow,
Let friends
insist that it’s time,
That you
must forget.
Do not
listen to their kind
Words of
sympathy,
Do not join
them if they drink
To my
memory.
Wait for
me! Let those who don’t-
Once I’m
back with you-
Let them
say that it was luck
That had
seen us through.
You and I
alone will know
That I
safely came
Spitting
every kind of death,
Through
that lethal flame,
Just
because you learned to wait
Staunchly,
stubbornly,
And like no
one else on earth,
Waited,love,
for me.
Page
number 20:
When
children play for long under trees, one often hears mothers affectionately
reprimanding them: ‘what treasure have you buried under the tree? Often, it is
said out of irritation if the girls are not helping with household chores. In
the case of boys, it is because they are not on time for their meals. As for
me, call it a fond illusion, but I seem to sense my mother’s living presence in
the trees outside my window, watching me from the open sky, the mango trees,
her outstretched arms.
Providing
new tastes again and again
My mother’s
hands are like honey.
Tiding me
her story time and again
My mother’s
voice is a melody.
Drawing me
close
Those hands
turn into the vision of spring-
The koel’s
song
The rasa’s
taste
The cool
shade
Page number 21:
In the
years of 1986 and ’87 in summer, I used to read mostly under the shade of those
trees. The mango tree outside my windows fell during the gale of 21 February
1988. Then I truly felt as if mother earth had lost one of her arms. Such a big
tree uprooted so easily! As the hailstones pelted down, as the strong wind blew
and the rain fell, the slender jamun plant bound to a bamboo moved restlessly,
but the string did not snap. The guava tree rocked back and forth wildly, as if
possessed. Only the stalk was left of the rose bud that would have bloomed in a
few days. The petals fell scattered around the plant.
As I said,
not all the trees in this courtyard were planted by human beings. Some of them
were planted by birds. What was strange was, that beside each tree that grew
thus because of birds, another kind of tree grew alongside. In jasmine bed
there was an almond growing, in another, a sopanut tree, a kaumaga, not to
speak of the rela. And in the rubbish heap in one corner, there grew a neem, a
jasmine, a tamarind and a rela.
Page number 22:
During
three summers that blazed down on us, tending the trees we had planted was like
caring for infants. With joy, I watched the green tip of the jackfruit grow
inch by inch, picked off the worm eaten leaves of the jamun, and looked at the
days of my imprisonment against them. Watering the plants on summer evenings,
talking to the birds that fearlessly join me and gracefully drink the water I
pour, a thought flashes through my mind brining a feeling of shyness in its
train: this love of plants I have learnt so late is one I must cherish
privately. A love which must never be shown in public except as the proverbial
three flowers that bear six fruits.
Page number
24:
One morning
a rose bush puts forth a bud. Remember when you planted that cutting, wiping
desire for a new life to take root? And whenever a heart is wounded and
stitched together again, a new dawn seems to be twittering to life.
As I write
of that experience it is if the pollen of those wounds bursts forth from my
fingertips. Whether in humiliation, or amidst felicitations, in suffering of in
joy, the spirit of these trees as I have understood it in these last three
years has infused my tastes and values.
Page number
26:
From bare
stalks haunted by
Memories of
fallen flowers
Fresh
shoots appear.
Hidden in
the leaves of the present
The invisible future
Koel-like,
ours forth
The
pain-drenched sweetness
Off the
past.
Page number
29:
Surely it
can’t be pleasant thing for birds, as symbols of freedom, to be in jail? And
yet how can I claim that they are not cheerful and contended? Whenever I see
pigeons inside the jail I wonder. .. And the sight of the these pigeons reminds
me , not of the people forgotten, but of bonds that must be forgotten; not of
past lives but of the past trapped in the present.
Page number
30:
But then, I
don’t quite understand how these surroundings have grown so congenial ovr the
last two and a half years and why there are pigeons everywhere now. In the
trees, in courtyard in front of my cell, on the barrack ventilators, before the
staff kitchen, near the water, above the ledges of the barracks behind my cell-
they are everywhere, like blue-grey clouds that have come down from the sky.
The sounds- their rustling against the tin windows shades, pecking at each
other, the fluttering of wings-from a background to the silence of my solitary
existence. They have grown so familiar that I have stopped going to the back of
my cell fearing that I may disturb them when I walk briskly in the evening.
Sometimes I go there stepping softly, barefoot, to watch them. Even at night,
as I place inside my cell, I do so in perfect silence, for fear of disturbing
the pair of pigeons nesting in the ventilator.
My days and
night slip by, spent in these lovely pigeonholes, and as I drift into sleep.
Page number
33:
In a culture
of inequality, the value called love is always the first casualty. You don’t
change the system merely by shedding tears of sympathy. Nor do you change it by
patronizing, reacting or commenting. Isn’t that why Marx said that you cannot
change society unless you become part of the change?
Page number 36:
I have no
great fondness for cats, nor do I dislike them. But, as the curds in our mess
grew continuously less, I suspected that it must be because someone was adding
more water to the milk, or a smaller amount of milk was being set aside for
curds, or someone was drinking it up. We could not discover the exact cause and
carried out all kinds of inquiries. At last we discovered that one of the
detainees, out of sheer love for his adopted child, was keeping the cupboard
unbolted and allowing the cat to have its fill of curds. The man himself was
not particularly used to eating curds.
Page number
44:
Everything
that I read is absorbed instantly like water by dry earth. Throughout the day I
read newspapers and journals-front to back, without missing a single link. But
then, there is no one with whom I can share my opinions or discuss what I have
read. A full three years have passed since I have glanced through any magazine
of revolutionary nature. Magazines with such writing must have blossomed in
hundreds. What is the use of having eyes if one is not able to read them?
In the
newspapers I read, I find nothing about class struggle, or struggles for
democratic rights or civil liberties; nothing about tribal revolts, dalit and
women’s liberation movements or environmental movements. There is no word in
these newspapers of revolutionary organizations, their journals, and how these
organizations are reacting to caste and communal clashes, and a host of other issues.
Not a single ray of light penetrates the pervasive gloom.
Page number
57:
Censorship
of letters is not an inconvenience that is associated only with jails. I have
lived with it for the last 23 years. The heated debates about the postal bill
and the tapping of telephones, and the mutual recriminations between the
Congress and other parties, are amusing to a communist who has been used to
this from the very birth of his party. This discussion of an open secret seems
to me like Brahminical sophistry.
The
difference between letters being censored while in jail and while outside is
that, out there, you cannot claim they are being censored although you know the
truth. Besides, outside jail, we seal our letters and then post them. They are
delivered sealed (unless the one who reads then is too lazy to seal them
again). In jail, the letters are handed over without the pretence of sealing
them. Letters that arrive are torn open, censored, stamped with the jail seal
and signed by the concerned official, before being delivered to the addressee.
Our loves,
friendships, bonds, tenderness, ideas, innermost feelings, passions, dreams,
truths – the most private and secret chambers of our hearts are laid
mercilessly open by the surgeon’s knife. The gaze of strangers and aliens falls
on them and they are returned to us, unstitched. What stubborn hearts these,
that even in such conditions they continue to throb with feeling!
When I was
first arrested in 1973, the mere thought
that someone would read my letter would paralyse my pen.
Page number
62:
The people
to whom I write and who write back to me are all immersed either in public
service or in literary and cultural movements. I tend to forget what a bad
correspondent I used to be when I was outside, similarly preoccupied. Now that
I sit ready with my pen poised on paper, I am quick to fall victim to
impatience, misunderstanding or anxieties because those whom I write to don’t
write back. Even those whom I write to don’t write back. Even those who are not
busy expect letters from me, don’t reply. When they try to write, their hearts
but do not reply. When they try to write, their hearts weigh heavily on their
pens! And so they expect me to continue to write without hoping for a reply!
Page number
63:
Although in my political activity I never compromised or bowed before
anyone, for these letters, from the minute I expect them to arrive, I seem to
turn into beggar-hands stretched.
