On Witnessing

by Mandira Pattnaik

UX Gun/Unsplash

The full picture can never be understood. There are images, social media and narratives. It is not just about the women at the frontlines — two women in uniform were chosen to make the press briefing — but there are mothers and children and people left behind. A witness is unreliable in this context.

There is our present, our today, in which there is so little of everything. Scarcity stares at opulence. We have stopped caring to regather; we’ve quit asking. There is a camouflage of consent, and a smokescreen of choice, and then we wonder — what more will be gone in the event of another murderhood?

There is a picture painted by the media, like ‘all we need is war’— as though it will be a lesson for perennial permanence. There is almost a euphoria for what we are being prepared to witness. There’s a name for the operation that I cannot quite accept — why Sindoor? Sindoor is sacred, a marker worn by married Hindu women on the eastern side. It is not even worn pan-India. The official graphic: a Sindoor-case with vermilion spilling over. What is the red color against the black? Blood?

It is still early days. Gluttonous for information, we scan channels. Is it true what we see — or is this an image from Gaza or Afghanistan or Iraq? Who knows? There are lies and fakery. We ask no questions. We go to the greengrocer’s and to the fishmonger’s. We buy stuff and come back. No one is talking. Strangers don’t make the usual eye-contact and shopkeepers don’t engage in small talk that we are accustomed to. Neighbors exchange glances, or the most brief of salutations. We don’t know if we broach the topic of war, what will be the other’s view. If he disagrees to your idea of peace, maybe you’ll be labelled an ‘anti-national.’ If the nation goes to war, we all support it — remember? If the neighbor says peace, and you say what about revenge, maybe you’ll be seen as a warmonger, too violent to be his neighbor. Days pass, and we pretend like nothing is unusual. In the age of information technology, we dwell in secrecy; we eat and sleep and we wait.

I attend a Zoom meeting with other editors to make final decisions. One person is joining in from Israel. They say they avoided Zoom calls for a long while because the proceedings were unfailingly interrupted by sirens blaring. For a moment, everyone collapses unto themselves. We are all absorbing how something so serious becomes regular, becomes part of casual conversation. What is that feeling one cannot comprehend? Of hearing sirens while you are on your regular business? Must imply an air raid by the enemy, which, coming as an afterthought, seems so innocent of me. Does it punch you in the gut that by the time your Zoom call ends, and everyone leaves the ‘meeting room,’ you could be struck by a missile and be dead? I am stuck in the thought more than the others because I am closer to that than the others. It could be my reality soon. I have never heard sirens blaring. I ask my husband where would sirens originate from in our city in the event of war? Do we have towers around from where the civilian population will be alerted because I have never seen one? What are we supposed to do when we hear sirens going off?

My efforts at concentrating on editing a piece is negated when a friend calls in to point out that ‘war’ is trending on social media. A hashtag so unoriginal and predictable — I mutter to myself and smile at the irony of her calling up all excited. It doesn’t alarm or surprise me. Anything on social media is just that — about being trendy; everyone seems to want to live ‘in the moment’ and wants to be seen as cool. I am fearful of the real thing — the cold, physical, permanent thing. It won’t need a hashtag, it won’t be seen coming. Or going away as and when everyone pleases. It won’t be changeable.

Many are still denying it — war won’t happen, they assure me. We are more mature/logical/literate than that, they say. I am not buying that nonchalance, or that hard-nosed dismissiveness. For sure, ‘Demonetisation’ happened in 2016 — that was the litmus test. I think I’ll never recover from that shock: what I believed my country represented and what it actually revealed about itself. Back in 2016, one couldn’t withdraw their own money, or use the currency notes they possessed to buy stuff they needed. Yet millions of functional brains were unperturbed about it. People stood in queues in front of banks and ATMs for hours, for days. My father, a banker himself, praised the government’s efforts in eradicating corruption. I couldn’t quite believe what I was hearing or seeing back then. Sure, the black money was never found, nor corruption weeded out, nothing good came of the mammoth exercise. Wouldn’t make me trust the same people again as being mature/logical/literate.

Mistrust makes me a scavenger of woes. In anxiety, I recognize that, in fact, ‘war’ is a disgusting word — its semordnilap is ‘raw.’ Raw? I wonder. Couldn’t have been closer to its effect. If ever there was a word that should never have been, then it is war. In a radicalized society as it is now, today, perhaps that will be rebutted by others saying that then there should have been no words for ‘blood,’ no ‘murder,’ no ‘crime’ — not even ‘feud,’ no ‘borders,’ not ‘color’ nor ‘race.’ Maybe you are right. But I’ll stick with mine.

With circumstances as is now, I am mindful of every word, every sense. One cannot be innocent, one cannot be outside, one cannot not choose a side. But who brought me to this crossroad — in which I must choose a side? I did not walk in of my own volition. I am not here because I wanted to be. I am here because you wanted me to be. You wanted me to abandon my personal and familial concerns. You wanted me to be indifferent to my rights to a basic living. But I’ll have devices to put you in the cages of history — like poets and writers in every part of the world that has ever been pushed into this type of desensitized existence. Therefore, I am insistent to record how it stirs within — the irreplaceability of this day, the irreversibility of what happens today that rolls into our future, the future of my children. I imagine worse. I write.

But I cannot write what I cannot imagine. I cannot imagine the unthinkable. I cannot warn against what I cannot bring into my thinking. And there will be those — spiralling out, into and beyond.